Toby Jones, and Thoughts on Presidential Films

We've had some discussion of the actor Toby Jones at my private web-group. I had written:

So in 2006, Toby Jones plays Truman Capote in Infamous, to considerable acclaim, but, of course, Philip Seymour Hoffman had recently claimed that role and won an Oscar for it. Bad timing.

So now in 2012, Toby Jones is playing Alfred Hitchcock in The Girl, a film about the making of The Birds and Marnie - and wouldn't you know, goddamn Anthony Hopkins is playing the title role in Hitchcock, about the making of Psycho!

If Toby Jones walks past you and seems to be muttering darkly under his breath, don't take it at all amiss. It is understandable.

He came up again yesterday, and I wrote:

As it happens, I've recently seen Jones in two films about U.S. Presidents, but in both his role is rather small. In Frost/Nixon, he briefly appears as Nixon's agent Swifty Lazar. In Oliver Stone's W., he checks in as Karl Rove, but the part is not as developed as you might expect. He has one or two good scenes. and provokes Jeffrey Wright's Colin Powell to some barbs: "What is this guy doing in the room while we're discussing national security issues?"

W. is a rather strange film that mainly left me feeling, Why? What was the point of making it? Not enough time had passed (like, none) for anyone to have much perspective on the Bush years. Stone can't seem to decide whether he is being serious or satiric, which exposes a number of his performers, including Josh Brolin as Bush and Thandie Newton as Condoleezza Rice, to real difficulties in figuring out what their acting tone is supposed to be - you can practically see them puzzling over it.

Surprisingly, therefore, some of the actors come through strongly. James Cromwell does nicely by Bush Senior (although I feel that Ellen Burstyn is miscast as Barbara Bush, not the right type at all). Colin Hanks - you know, I really like Colin Hanks - makes a strong impression in just a few minutes as a staff speechwriter. Best of all are three wily, seasoned actors as Bush's main advisers - Richard Dreyfuss as Dick Cheney, Jeffrey Wright as Colin Powell, and Scott Glenn as the supremely spacey Donald Rumsfeld. It's worth watching just for them. Dreyfuss and Wright get to square off powerfully against each other, and when these two formidable characters/actors go at it, George W. Bush is reduced to a bit of insignificant chaff in the corner of the room.

Frost/Nixon, though, is an altogether superior picture. Crackling good fun that reminds me of a phrase that Louis Menand used in an essay about Pauline Kael, when he spoke about movies as "entertainment for smart people." Of course they can be more than that, too, but that is nothing to sneeze at. Ron Howard does not get enough credit for being a modern director in the dependable Howard Hawks mold - and as it happens, his next movie, Rush, is an auto racing drama, which is totally Hawksian. (One of Hawks's last movies is the personal and fascinating auto drama Red Line 7000, a real feast for auteurists.)

Howard is awfully good with actors. He had the good sense to keep Frank Langella and Michael Sheen as holdover leads from the stage version of Frost/Nixon, which they had played in London and New York, and they are predictably excellent. But he also surrounded them with a wonderful ensemble of Sam Rockwell, Oliver Platt, Matthew Macfadyen, Kevin Bacon, and Rebecca Hall, who made me laugh out loud by saying in the making-of featurette that she tried to play her role "like a Bond girl for political geeks." (What a terrific young actress she is, the daughter of theatrical royalty in the persons of director Peter Hall and opera singer Maria Ewing. I like her in everything she does.)

There is a scene late in the film when Sheen's David Frost has sent Sam Rockwell's James Reston, Jr., on a research mission before the final Nixon taping. Rockwell arrives at Sheen's hotel suite and enters to Sheen's question "And...?" Just as the door is shutting between us and them we see Rockwell flash a small, split-second smile. It is an exquisitely timed moment (I can only guess how many takes it took to get right) and already one of my favorite visuals in any movie of the Oughties. The auteurist theory insisted that we look for those moments in the outputs of easily dismissed commercial directors, and we now apply that insight regularly to the past, but tend NOT to do so in the present. But in the best work of commercial directors like Howard, Spielberg, Peter Weir, and Ridley Scott - Gary Ross and Ben Affleck are good younger examples - the moments are there to be found.