The Tragedy of Underrated Performances--specifically, Jason Butler Harner in Changeling

Helen Mirren rightfully won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in The Queen. However, there was another performance in that movie that was COMPLETELY overlooked: that of Michael Sheen as Tony Blair. This will undeniably happen again (as Sheen himself has ironically commented) in Frost/Nixon, where Frank Langella has the zanier part of the two, but where it was Sheen who completely transfixed my attention when I saw the show on the London stage.

It just goes to show you what a freakin’ marketing machine the nominations process is. If the studios don’t think you have a chance, they don’t invest in you, and thus NO ONE notices how excellent your performance is. Because, I mean, it’s one thing for Sheen not to have been nominated, but to not even get any buzz in town for it???

This is an extremely roundabout way of getting to my main point, which is that Jason Butler Harner totally ROCKED Changeling. I mean, it’s a tour-de-force performance. TOUR DE FORCE. (One which made me peg him immediately as having come from New York theater, so I looked it up and—ka-ching!—yep: NY theater actor. HA HA! I can totally call these things, just as I totally called Eddie Redmayne (from The Yellow Handkerchief) as having been trained in England, because American actors his age are just not that good. On another note, it looks like I actually must have seen Harner in The Cherry Orchard a couple of years ago, but I only vaguely remember him. Clearly not as memorable a performance.) It’s the kind of performance from an unknown that makes you go, “Who IS that???” (As everyone did for Hilary Swank in Boys Don’t Cry.)

However, which actor from that movie is the one getting the Oscar buzz?? Fucking Angelina Jolie. Not that she isn’t good in it—she is (although I agree with the New Yorker that “Angelina Jolie stays perfectly in character (too perfectly—her performance is dull))—but he’s the one with the UNBELIEVABLE performance. So why isn’t he getting any attention, in spite of adulation from the critics? According to Ebert, “The film's most riveting performance is by Jason Butler Harner as the murderous Gordon Northcott. The character could not be adequately described on the page. Harner's mesmerizing performance brings him to sinister life as a self-pitying weasel specializing in smarmy phony charm. He doesn't play a sick killer. He embodies one.”

Meanwhile, film.com doesn’t breathe a word about him as a Best Supporting Actor contender. Instead, they mention James fucking Franco. Not that he didn’t do a decent job, but he practically had NOTHING to do!! He doesn’t stand a chance. Even the far too comprehensive list at InContention.com leaves Harner off. Not that these sites are definitive oracles of the Oscars (I’d never even heard of them prior to looking this up), but I think they are actually a good barometer of who’s getting buzz and who isn’t: they validate my sense that no one in town is talking about him.

And I think that’s tragic. Just like it was tragic when Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead was completely overlooked for ANY nomination, when I—and anyone who’s seen it—found it one of the most ingenius movies I’d ever seen and in a just world would have at LEAST been nominated for best screenplay. I’m not saying that the Academy Awards are the end-all and be-all of determining what a good performance is, but it’s nice when a brilliant performance gets exactly as much attention and acclaim as it deserves. Who knows, maybe in these last few weeks, Harner will pull ahead in the ridiculous horse race that is Oscar season, although surely, Heath Ledger will be the one to attain the laurel for his own portrayal of a murderous psychopath. But you can’t help that. I just don’t get why he’s not even in the running.