Underutilized

I seem to have, in my head, a growing list of actors and actresses who I believe have been ill-served by Hollywood. Not only Hollywood, really, but the American film industry as a whole. These are actors who get stuck playing one kind of role, or are stuck playing sidekicks or girlfriends to leads who aren't fit to buy them lunch. Most film lovers probably have a list like this, and when you're young you learn to take these people for granted. You know they'll pop up as the lead cop's partner who, two-thirds of the way into the film, is on his way to buy his handicapped daughter the video-game music-toy she's been asking for, and for which he's been saving, when all of a sudden a slumming John Malkovich shows up and pushes him off a cliff. And you learn not to care. And then you see that same guy who got pushed off a cliff in a movie about a guy who only wants justice, or is dying, or he wants justice before he dies, and he's great, and you think, "Well shit. I had no idea."

At the top of my own list is probably Jeff Daniels, so dead-on-the-money in The Squid and the Whale and The Purple Rose of Cairo (and the only interesting thing about 2 Days in the Valley, a film in which he played the main cop's partner, and a film which at least found an original way to write him out of the action, even while crippling itself in the process). I'd also include Jeff Goldblum and Delroy Lindo. Catherine Keener, as well, even though she does land some pretty decent roles from time to time. But the fact that Hollywood still casts her as the Wife or the Girlfriend just kills me.

Anyway. The point of all this is that recently I rewatched Gus Van Sant's hypnotic take on the Columbine massacre, Elephant. I hadn't seen the film in a long time, but one thing that always stuck with me was, as I used to think of him, That Guy Who Played that One Kid's Dad. You Know, the Drunk Guy. Turns out, it was Timothy Bottoms.

He technically has two scenes, but the second one is right near the end, and consists mainly of him walking on screen and asking his son a question. He nails that scene, mind you, and I'm not being sarcastic, but it's the first scene, where he's drunk at about eight in the morning and driving his son to school, that made me say the first time I saw the film, and again last weekend when I saw the film for a second time, "Well shit. I had no idea."

I didn't know it was Timothy Bottoms. I am not, I admit, that familiar with his body of work. But I knew his name, and watching him in that first scene, seeing how quietly he plays shame and humiliation and guilt as his son (a very good John McFarland) is forced to take control of the situation, I realized that Timothy Bottoms is a freaking damn good actor. He gets all the torment and denial of the character across while also giving one of the most genuine drunk performances I've ever seen. Drunk acting must be one of the toughest things for any actor to do, and I say that as a non-actor who can only assume that's the case because I almost never see an actor playing drunk who doesn't botch it, or at least overdo it to the point where you can see his wheels turning. Bottoms gets it absolutely right. That, and everything else I've mentioned, in just a couple of minutes of screen time.

Check out the film, if you haven't already seen it, because the whole thing is quite good, but at least rent it for Bottoms. He does brilliant work here, and attention should be paid.