Cinematical

A little over a year ago, I was assigned a "Cinematical Seven" on the most overrated actors in Hollywood. I stand by five of my choices, but things have changed for two of the others. Heath Ledger (#4) was one, and his amazing performances in both I'm Not There and The Dark Knight proved me wrong, not to mention that he's no longer alive to be overrated, underrated or any kind of rated. The other was Ben Kingsley (#1). For some reason I have seen five Ben Kingsley movies in the past three months. Seeing such a wide range of performance in such a short time has caused me to re-think my opinion on him. The first Kingsley film I saw this year was The Wackness (31 screens), as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival. I didn't much like the film; I found it to be a rather bland, tame coming-of-age picture disguised as a daring snapshot-of-an-era movie. And Kingsley's performance as a pot-smoking shrink struck me as yet another piece of overacting, with lots of weird pauses and run-on sentences in his dialogue.

His turn as the villain in War, Inc. (20 screens) didn't fare much better. I liked the film, but strapped to a wheelchair, his immobile body only increased his tendency to overdo it in his line readings. The third movie, Transsiberian (opening this week on 2 screens), proved somewhat more interesting. He played a Russian narcotics detective, complete with an accent, but somehow his performance perfectly clicked with that sturdy suspense film. The fourth film, The Love Guru (over 400 screens), was by far the worst of the lot but also proved the most revealing.

In it, he plays a cross-eyed Indian guru who trains the hero in the ways of spiritual guidance. It was hard not to think of Kingsley's Oscar-winning breakthrough role in Gandhi (1982); was he spoofing himself? That's a possibility, but when we consider that he said "yes" to a Mike Myers film in the first place -- and presumably actually read the script -- we have to conclude that, perhaps Mr. Kingsley has a sense of humor about himself after all. The fifth movie, Elegy, opens in August. I was treated to a very early screening, and I can say two things: Penelope Cruz deserves an Oscar nomination, and Kingsley matches her with an uncharacteristically soft, heartfelt performance.

I think my hostility toward Kingsley originated when I saw and reviewed House of Sand and Fog in 2003. Based on an acclaimed novel, the film was packaged as a year-end award contender, and of course, most people bought into this presentation. I found the film intolerable. As the director busied himself making grand, bold strokes, he forgot simple things like characters or suspense, and Kingsley seemed to eagerly follow this plan. His performance as an Iranian colonel was so insufferably pompous that the actor's ego practically strangled the character, preventing him from ever springing to life. Moreover, Kingsley did a PA tour to support the film, and though I declined to interview him, my colleagues reported that he was just as pompous in life as he appeared to be in the film (he insisted upon being addressed as "Sir Ben").

Now, I maintain that Kingsley's take on the colonel was wrong; he should have been projecting stubborn pride, not cartoonish arrogance. But I suspect now that we can blame the first-time director Vadim Perelman, whose second film The Life Before Her Eyes was panned and ignored earlier this year. I think we can also blame Kingsley's PA tour behavior on nothing more than enthusiasm. Some actors carry with them residual effects of an intense performance for some time after shooting (which is what some people suspect happened to Heath Ledger, who had trouble coming down from his forceful Joker performance). When I interviewed Johnny Depp in 1999, he was clearly still carrying around bits and pieces of Hunter S. Thompson from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Looking over the rest of Kingsley's filmography, I'm reminded of a rather remarkable list of films. Many of them are genre films, including a surprising number of science fiction films, crime pictures, gangster films and thrillers, which suggests that he's not merely an Oscar-hunter. I had forgotten that he was in William Friedkin's crackerjack Rules of Engagement (2000) and that he had worked with Roman Polanski twice. Kingsley certainly rolled the dice on a few of these films, such as Uwe Boll's Bloodrayne or the massive turkey A Sound of Thunder. (And, yes, he has a Razzie nomination to match his various Oscar nominations.) It's hard not to love his other Oscar nominated performances as the slippery Meyer Lansky in Bugsy or the seductive, nasty Don Logan in Sexy Beast. I was also a fan of his alcoholic hitman in last year's You Kill Me. But his timid, heartbreaking accountant Itzhak Stern in Schindler's List may be his finest hour.

The key to Kingsley is that he's not much different from many other English actors; he was trained to act as a trade, like a blacksmith or a baker. From what I've learned over the years, these guys tend to think of films as jobs rather than as stepping stones in a larger career arc. Even if you're successful, you maintain your work ethic and, if someone thinks enough of you to offer you a job, you take it. Consider Kingsley: he started doing lots of random stuff for BBC TV before he landed the Gandhi job. Then because the Academy thinks the way it does, it was the absolute perfect candidate for a Best Picture and Best Actor award. That's quite a thrust into the limelight, followed by his knighting in 2001. I guess no one can blame him if he went a little nuts. As of now, however, he has improved to the point that he has overcome his "overrated" status. Let's hope he continues.