Last week, I sensed a small backlash brewing over Joaquin Phoenix’s acting. There are those who believe that he’s now replicating the same performance over and over in every movie that he’s in.
Paul Schrader was one of the figures who came out against Phoenix, saying that he just didn’t “get” the actor. There’s been a variety of opinions that have popped up online ever since.
If you look at some of the “Napoleon” reviews, you can sense a growing pushback on Phoenix: The Washington Post (“stiff”), Consequence (“one-note”), Chicago Tribune (“muttering”), Variety (“mumbling”), NY Post (“looney tunes”).
Now comes the biggest smack down yet on Phoenix’s acting, courtesy of Owen Gleiberman’s Variety piece titled “Joaquin Phoenix’s One-Man Cult of Depressive Method-Acting Vanity.” Here are a few key passages:
Joaquin Pheonix’s character in I’m Still Here is an actor who replaces performance with the actorly exhibitionism of mental illness. And that, in a way, has become the story of Joaquin Phoenix as an actor.
Whether he’s taking on the role of one more morose everyman dweeb, a Batman villain, or Napoleon, he plays severely damaged people, but what he’s really doing is projecting the dramatic image of himself as an actor reaching into the lower depths.
As films like Napoleon and Beau Is Afraid reveal all too clearly, Joaquin Phoenix has become an actor who needs to be rescued from his worst impulses. Too often, he sinks into his own torpor, steamrolling his movies with the depressive wacked song of himself.
Phoenix’s performance in “Napoleon” is the opposite of stiff. Instead of leaning into conventional biopic tropes, the actor manages to bring something different in his work here. The heroic, and historic, emperor-general has been reduced to a mumbling, bumbling and eccentric Phoenix. I’m not complaining. His performance has to be seen to be believed. It feels fresh and uniquely its own. Historians need not take part.
Phoenix was once, in his early days of acting, a down-to-earth and “normal” actor, but, as Gleiberman points out, something inside Phoenix snapped, around 2008/2008, with the “I’m Still Here” doc — that’s when the strange behavior, and acting, began, including a memorably weird appearance on the David Letterman show in 2009.
The vulnerability and unpredictable nature of this new Joaquin ended up, surprisingly, transforming him into a better actor.
I find Phoenix to be one of the great performers of the 21st century. His performances have been A-caliber, in films as wide-ranging as “The Master,” “Her,” “Joker,” “Two Lovers,” “Inherent Vice,” and “Beau is Afraid.”