Rust and Bone, and Beasts of the Southern Wild

Things are looking up - I hit upon not one, but two good movies.

I watched Rust and Bone in French without the benefit of subtitles - and it's a testament to the acting that I didn't need them. In fact, I found myself wishing that the music soundtrack was in French as well. Marion Cotillard is enthralling. She seems to come away clean from every role she plays, and goes into each new performance bare and believable. This time she's an aquarium performer who loses both legs in a horrible accident involving a killer whale. A chance meeting at a nightclub (a boxer moonlighting as a bouncer, before the accident) is the slim thread upon which she hangs her future because there was nothing and no-one else. After the accident, she fell out of her circle of aquarium friends as into a black hole and her former boyfriend was nowhere in evidence. The bouncer saves her from suicidal despair, and helps her navigate her recovery even as he gets bruised and bloodied for money in illegal fight clubs, and continues to seek random outlets for his almost angry sexual energy. When he comes to her physically he is considerably broken in, and when he comes to her emotionally in the wake of his son's near drowning, he's just plain broken... and finally open.

Beasts of the Southern Wild was gritty, gory, and in the end, glorious. A father and his six year old daughter (Wink and Hushpuppy) barely eke out an existence in the squalor of the Louisiana 'Bathtub' district. She is a sassy yet sensitive child terrorized by her father's mercurial moonshine moods, and his mysterious illness. A storm puts the Bathtub under water, but the Bayou people refuse to evacuate. Knowing that her father is near death, Hushpuppy searches for her mother who left shortly after giving birth to her. She cremates Wink when he passes away from his illness, and soldiers on with her adoptive community. The young actress who plays Hushpuppy (then 6- and now 9-year-old Quvenzhane Wallis) manages a miraculous transformation within about three seconds of screen time - her face takes on resolve and wisdom seemingly without any physical tricks (jaw-setting or teeth gritting). Those few seconds were magical. Hers were some of the most memorable line in the movies so far: "When it all goes quiet behind my eyes, I see everything that made me. I'm a little piece of a big big universe and that makes things right."

It seems that unknown actors have the greatest power and potential to stun us with their performances.
Increasingly, movies are created as vehicles for big name actors, leaving big movie performances in the domain of the relatively unknown actors. Of course there are exceptions, so I'm hopeful that I'll find a few more Marion Cotillards before this year's Oscar odyssey is over.