Steve’s place has been updated with the Muriels for Performances of the decade, which can be found here.
Here were my votes for those keeping score at home:
Male Performance of the Decade:
1. Paul Giamatti, American Splendor
2. Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood
3. Jack Nicholson, About Schmidt
4. Philip Seymour Hoffman, Almost Famous
5. Daniel Craig, Casino Royale
Female Performance of the Decade:
1. Naomi Watts, Muholland Drive
2. Laura Dern, Inland Empire
3. Kate Winslet, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
4. Sally Hawkins, Happy-Go-Lucky
5. Anne Reid, The Mother
I tend to miss certain awards subtleties, but I was pretty confident that Daniel Day had the Male Performance in the bag – it is one of those gonzo, once-in-a-career method kinds of performances that have a way of defining a person’s movie memory. I re-watched a number of the pictures in my lists, and the thing I found about Lewis is that his work here is almost a parody of method acting – he’s bringing “method” methods into the 21st century by adding a dash of irony though, somehow, without compromising the emotion of what is, deep down, a very sentimental story. (PTA, we should all know by now, has daddy issues.) And please don’t misconstrue my description of There Will Be Blood as “sentimental” as dismissal, as I, unlike many uncomfortable snobs, don’t see that as an automatically suspect quality.
That said, Lewis was my number 2, because stunt high-wire performances, while impressive, aren’t usually as valuable to me as those that actually capture the day-to-day whatever of a life-size human being who has to force himself up in the morning before chugging cheap coffee and hurrying to work; a human being who daydreams of not being quite so damn lonely and disgusting to himself.
Giamatti, so funny as to be in constant danger of being underrated, gave us two such performances in this last decade: American Splendor and Sideways, both of which are masterpieces, both of which made my top ten of the Aughties. I had originally given Giamatti the Number 1 slot with his roles in both pictures listed side by side as a tie. Informed that that was a departure from the rules, I went with Splendor, because that character, and the picture in general, manages to make some sense of our baggage and turmoil without compromising an essential sadness that most movies cheapen or ignore outright. Both pictures also feature heroes with pronounced economic limitations – a relief from Hollywood’s typical portrayal of jobs as clubhouses where money is scarcely mentioned. Giamatti reminds us that an everyman needn’t be soggy with pathos; he has a right to being prickly and weird, to being alive.
I loved About Schmidt in the theatre at the age of 22 or so, and the picture still has its moments but doesn’t quite hold out (Payne has a sitcom tendency unusual for a filmmaker of his considerable talent), but Nicholson is still glorious in a late inning variation of his classic work in pictures such as Easy Rider or Five Easy Pieces. Superstars playing down, in this case way down, as an old man coming to grips with the essential pointlessness of his life, doesn’t usually wash, but Nicholson goes all the way: that caged, nervous, sexual energy of his is almost totally (jarringly) smothered here. This performance is in league with anything Nicholson has ever done; and considering that he’s, at best, one of the greatest of all American actors, that is saying something.
For this tally of ours to be even remotely complete, Philip Seymour Hoffman had to be represented somehow, somewhere in the decade where he went from amazing character actor to eccentric/raw leading man. Hoffman has a humorlessness that troubles me; I hope it doesn’t swallow him up, so I went with his supporting work in the otherwise-doesn’t-hold-up Almost Famous. This is a beautiful, generous performance that taps Hoffman’s funny, commanding teddy bear side (see also the 1990s’ Talented Mr. Ripley – his best work – and the Aughties’ otherwise skip-able Along Came Polly).
Daniel Craig is another character actor who turned mainstream leading man this decade, and his Bond, is, yes, in league with Connery. Casino Royale is one of the best Bond pictures in general, but not the best, it has an occasionally lame TV movie current in its weakest scenes that tries too hard to move you. I wanted one macho man to round out the actors, to represent the action picture at its best, as something that can be revealing and personal while still honoring more conventional expectations. Craig, particularly in that card game and in that killer ending, more than fits the bill. And bonus points for being quite good in Roger Michell’s shockingly honest The Mother too.
A problematic tendency with a number of attractive, very well respected actresses somewhere in the neighborhood of forty is that they appear to be so intent on proving the “no roles for women over forty” cliché wrong they only reaffirm it. Jennifer Connelly, Julianne Moore, Charlize Theron, Joan Allen, Nicole Kidman are all actresses who, at one point or another, gave promising or more than promising performances, but they all made the mistake of associating prestige misery with “maturity”, if you watch only these actresses’ last decade of pictures, you would assume that the American woman of 40 is pre-suicidal. I’ve gotten to a point where I almost can’t watch Moore or Connelly at all, I pick my battles, and even when they deign to do a “low art” picture (a term I loathe) such as The Day the Earth Stood Still remake, He’s Just Not That into You, or Evolution, they are painfully self-conscious and mannered. I would say give the ladies an Oscar so they can be free to act again, but that would probably only make things worse.
The actresses of the decade proved this lifeless, dull, repetitive, self-consciously unglamorous syndrome to be the malarkey that many of us suspected it to be. The actress of the Aughties, Naomi Watts (for Mulholland Drive), went on to do a number of “below the skin of a happy housewife is a coward” projects that elitist filmmakers love so much, but, even in these, she projected a vulnerability that went above the call of duty. Can you imagine how painful the beyond-humorless Julianne Moore would be juggling for a giant ape?
David Lynch has gotten his fair critical due, but it might be surprising to some that he would orchestrate the two most vivid female performances of the last several years. It surprises me to an extent: his is a male world, with male preoccupations and obsessions and views towards the opposite sex, but Lynch is also a director who values a certain amount of floating around to find any given scene – he is sensitive to all the variables on set, and he’s open to how his projections of women are limiting him. This is why Inland Empire plays as such a purposeful ordeal: it’s a consciously scattered sketchbook/workshop of a movie that continually justifies itself with scenes that go further into a woman’s anxiety and self-loathing than virtually any movie I can recall. The same can be said of Mulholland Drive – though it’s playing by more conventional terms.
I don’t want it to sound as if I’m giving Lynch all the credit for the best female performances: the word “fearless” is often used lazily because it sounds neat and gets critics’ names on billboards, but Watts and Dern are fearless in these roles – you feel them achieving what may be one Lynch’s primary drives: to break down the taken-for-granted barriers between the sexes, to get at that bleeding, shapeless thing underneath that has us all secretly scared shitless. Masturbating is too often used in movies as an easy exhibit of loneliness and melancholy, but Watts’ furious masturbating near the end of MD is brilliant for how far she is willing to take it: so far beyond stylized stunt acting that it goes around the bend to accessible again – again vulnerable. The scenes of Dern walking the streets of Inland Empire – lost, pleading, furious – have a power that stems from the realization that this actress (and character) is willing to put everything aside to find something else. Bonus points: Dern and Watts together in the well-acted but dull We Don’t Live Here Anymore.
Anne Reid, # 5 for The Mother, takes us into similar territories of longing without Lynch’s symbols and supernatural portentousness. As a woman in her 60s, saggy, gray, looking not a day over 75, who finds herself in an inexplicable affair with her daughter’s hunky handyman boyfriend (Craig), Reid frees old-age of the sentimentality and condescension that mars so many movies, she acknowledges the selfishness that can come from loneliness – yet she isn’t a villain, this is a role with – gasp – contradiction. When Reid says “I never thought I’d be touched like that again”, you get it.
Kate Winslet was perhaps the most consistent actress of the decade, and her body of work is extraordinary, particularly when her age is taken into account. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind could be seen as the one honest hipster movie where we see people hunting for fashionably different things to prove to themselves that they are, in fact, different. Winslet may not be American, but she painted one of the fullest portraits of an American woman of a certain age that I’ve seen.
Sally Hawkins in Happy-Go-Lucky is the antidote to the darkness of Watts and Dern, the determined “make the best of it” trooper. The part could’ve been cloying, easy, stupid, but Hawkins and the terrific director Mike Leigh turn Poppy into a woman of considerable grace and courage.
The difference between these women and the actresses I’ve criticized earlier in the post is that you sense Kidman or Moore or Connelly polishing their mantels, even if they aren’t. These women of the decade go for it. If you watch all of these performances, men and women, you get a full spectrum of human experience, which as at least two of the reasons why we should go to the movies.
The Muriel for Director of the Decade can be found 
