Method Winner
Contender: Robert De Niro as Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull: Photo: MGM
The last great scene in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull is also its most culturally significant. There’s Robert De Niro’s Jake LaMotta, paunchy and punch-drunk, sitting in front of a mirror, readying himself for his celebrity nightclub gig reciting the works of some of the greatest American playwrights and screenwriters of the post-war era. Running through Marlon Brando’s “Coulda been a contender” speech from On the Waterfront, LaMotta’s stumbling delivery suggests the club audience is in for a rough night. But what’s genius about the scene is the way De Niro’s affectless, monotone delivery exposes the former middleweight champion of the world’s delusional, self-pitying narcissism.
LaMotta’s journey as a scrappy pugilist with ties to the mob may parallel the backstory of Brando’s Terry Malloy, but the retired prizefighter has neither the self-awareness nor the empathy to connect with Bud Schulberg’s dialogue or the anguished naturalism of Brando’s performance. The lines land with a dull thud, their poetry one more opponent to be pummelled into submission.
It’s a great piece of anti-acting from De Niro. Having spent the entire movie immersing us in the ugly world of a man who’s all id—a man whose rawness is almost too much too take—here he is suddenly making us aware of the nature of performance by playing someone incapable of acting, a one-two punch that also literally and figuratively allowed De Niro to supplant Brando in the public imagination as America’s greatest actor.
The latter point is brilliantly made in Isaac Butler’s recent book, The Method: How the 20th Century Learned to Act, a lively and incisive history of the origins and proliferation of the titular acting style that also slyly traces how our understanding (or perhaps misunderstanding) of method acting’s significance has distorted our ability to recognise and appreciate a good performance. With its roots in Russian theatre, method acting evolved from director Konstantin Stanislavski’s radical desire to create a system that would enable actors to consistently deliver more truthful performances, moving away from what we now think of as classical acting (all gestural and presentational) to a style that was more lived in and experiential.
As this system travelled to the US, guru-like teachers such as Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler and Sanford Meisner adapted and modified it, developing conflicting approaches that nevertheless pushed their famous students to inhabit their roles so completely that the distance between the page, the stage and the audience was almost eradicated. The purpose of method acting was to make you feel what the character was feeling as they were feeling it. By internalising the process, the method actor made the scaffolding surrounding their performance all but invisible.
Except that’s no longer what we think of when the M-word is bandied around. Now it’s usually short-hand for the ridiculous research or bodily transformations undertaken by some two-bit talent or Oscar hopeful desperate to prove they mean it, man. That, or it’s a polite euphemism filmmakers use to talk about stars who turn out to be insecure, overcompensating assholes on set. Either way, this distortion of the term is also why a showy performance in a wretched movie can be anointed an Academy Award frontrunner before anyone’s even had a chance to see to it — and why faux naturalism has become the default benchmark for judging good acting in movies, even though cinema is a wide-ranging and expressive art form that sometimes requires skills that are harder to pin down than an actor’s intensity level.
Ironically, De Niro’s performance in Raging Bull is probably to blame for this. The meticulous research, training, weight gain and prosthetics that helped him disappear into the role quickly became an integral part of the film’s lore and, even though they were just as quickly mocked (“De Niro wears scar tissue and a big, bent nose that deform his face. It’s a miracle that he didn’t grow them—he grew everything else,” quipped Pauline Kael in her review from the time), in the years since, an entire awards industry and attendant PR-media machine has grown up obsessed with promoting the mechanics of performance. Whatever method acting once represented, the invisibility of the process is no longer it.
Mirror image: Sydney Sweeney in Reality. Photo: Vertigo
And yet I couldn’t help thinking about the legacy of what De Niro pulled off at the end of Raging Bull while watching Tina Satter’s remarkable new film Reality. Presented as a verbatim account of the 2017 FBI interrogation of suspected NSA whistleblower Reality Winner, the film takes an extreme approach to dramatising the incident by going out of its way not to dramatise it. Instead, all the dialogue comes from the official transcript of the incident, and Satter’s actors — Sydney Sweeney as Reality; Josh Hamilton and Marchánt Davis as the FBI agents trying to figure out what she knows about a recent security breach — commit themselves so thoroughly to the banality of the principal players’ unscripted exchange that every cough, pause and awkward non-sequitur has been incorporated.
It should be tedious to watch; but it grips like a vice, partly because it’s stripped free of all the predictable dramatic signifiers you’d expect to find in a whistleblower thriller, but also because it disrupts our expectations of how a movie like this should operate in order to make a larger point about how unnerving and destabilising it is to live in a world where wall-to-wall fake news makes us constantly doubt what’s happening before our eyes. Like De Niro doing LaMotta doing Brando doing Terry Malloy, Reality’s mimetic form of anti-acting makes us acutely aware of the nature of performance — and just how much of it is done in bad faith.