In Praise of Subtle Performance

How much can a single expression convey?

Steven Yeun is one of my favorite actors working right now, and one of my favorite performances from him is his restrained, ambiguous work as Ben in Lee Chong-Deng's Burning.

Jong-Soo.

I'm not going to spoil the movies I talk about in this video, but here's some context for this one.

Jeong-su has randomly reconnected with a friend from school, Hye-mi, who he has an unexpressed crush on.

Meanwhile, Hye-mi, while she's off on a trip abroad, becomes friends with wealthy and mysterious Ben, who she's interested in.

It's classic love triangle stuff, but there's another layer here.

There's this scene where they all go to dinner with some of Ben's rich friends, and Haemi, at Ben's encouragement, is demonstrating a dance she learned while she was traveling.

Jeongsu is watching her and then looks over at Ben and catches him yawning, and then Ben gives him this look.

There's so much in this brief moment, a feeling that he doesn't really care, a kind of contempt that she's just a plaything to him, but there's also this element of bringing Jeong-su into that feeling.

There's a you-know sort of aspect to the look that feels like it's trying to make Jeong-su complicit in Ben's behavior.

something that is found only in Steven Yeun's performance that alludes to a whole world of subtext that eventually becomes very important to the film.

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When people talk about best performances in film, a lot of stuff comes up, and a lot of it is this kind of thing.

The big evocative roles, the roles that require the actor to transform themselves into a character completely in some way.

For the Oscars, it's even better if that transformation requires some kind of challenging element like

weight loss, prosthetic makeup, or an accent.

Like so much of the rest of the Oscars, it can sometimes feel like the awards go to most acting and not necessarily best acting.

I think one of the reasons the Joker has become such an enduring screen character isn't necessarily because he's just a more compelling villain, but because he's become a character that is a playground for bold expression

that the regular boundaries of performance may not allow.

And actors enjoy lining up and taking their swing at the role almost as much as audiences enjoy watching those swings.

And this video is not about how these kinds of performances are bad.

I love and I'm a bad

moment as much as anybody.

In fact, my favorite actor, Tilda Swinton, while she definitely can play subtle roles, often doesn't.

One of the reasons I love her work is in part because she's willing to go way overboard and transform herself into all manner of absurd character for even small supporting roles.

So I'm not here to bash that kind of acting.

I think it's great.

But in all the praise for this kind of showy and transformational acting, I think some of the best performances or moments of performance can get overlooked.

So I want to showcase an aspect of performance that I think is less recognized but no less impressive.

These moments are not ones where the actors transform themselves, but ones where they seem to disappear into a character, where you can no longer see the actor on screen performing and instead just see their character feeling the emotion of the drama.

Often what sets these kind of performances apart is the subtlety with which these actors can convey deep, rich, and complex emotion with their faces and their bodies.

They've embodied the character to the point where they communicate what they want to communicate through the character, not just with line delivery, but with even the tiniest of expressions.

Sometimes these subtler reactions and expressions can play a very important role within the story itself.

Besides the Steven Yeun character in Burning, Daniel Kaluuya in Get Out is another great example of this.

Kaluuya plays the big emotions in this movie well, but even more importantly, his reactions to the world around him gives the film's subtext a lot of weight and helps guide the audience into the absurdity of the experience.

Such a privilege to be able to experience another person's culture.

Like the way this look right here telegraphs, yeah, I know what you really mean.

The exact subtext of a lot of Daniel Kaluuya's reactions in the first part of this movie are just as important as any of the lines the other characters are saying.

Another recent performance I think is really great is Florence Pugh in Midsommar.

She nails the big outpouring of emotion necessary for certain scenes, but I think almost more impressive is her command of subtler, smaller moments.

The film opens with the death of her family, and look at this moment where a friend brings it up.

Also, I never had the chance to tell you, but I was so very sorry to hear about your loss.

Oh.

What happened, I mean, I...

The way her expression sort of melts into a subtle grief, it's the kind of thing that looks like it could only really be an automatic reaction to a sudden memory or realization.

There's a similar moment from a bit part in the Darjeeling Limited that always gets me.

The three brothers show up at their father's mechanic to pick up his car on the way to his funeral, and the way the mechanic subtly responds to finding out the father died

You'll have to wait another week.

I left a message.

Yeah, he didn't get the message.

Mr. Whitman is dead.

You understand?

Jimmy Whitman?

Yeah.

It's for some reason, to me, one of the saddest things in the film.

Continuing on this theme of grief, Rooney Mara conveys it powerfully in David Lowery's A Ghost Story.

Sometimes grief can leave you frozen in shock.

And that seems like it should be easy to pull off for an actor.

You just don't move.

But there's a tension and involuntary element to what looks like genuine shock that is different from just not moving.

And here, there's the smallest involuntary twitch.

That somehow sells this moment as more authentic.

One of the reasons I think I'm drawn to these kind of subtle moments is that I think they often convey a kind of complexity of emotion that isn't necessarily there in bigger outbursts.

Pulling off the big outbursts in a way that feels authentic is certainly a challenge, but what about the nuance of expressing repressed emotion?

What about when you want the audience to perceive that the character is feeling an emotion and also perceive that the character is trying to hold that emotion back?

Amy Adams does it here in Spike Jonze's Her in this moment where her character wants to cry but is also obviously trying not to.

Charles and I split up.

What?

Yeah.

Really?

Or what about the complexity of multiple emotions arising at once?

Oscar Isaac nails this in HBO's remake of scenes from a marriage.

In this scene, he and his wife, played by Jessica Chastain, decide to keep an accidental pregnancy.

Ava will be thrilled.

Yeah.

And your parents.

Oh, God.

Yeah.

And this little moment of expression...

is amazing.

The amount of fear, hope, and trepidatious joy that are all somehow fighting to come out at once even while he attempts to hold them back is incredible to me.

I find this kind of thing compelling because in my experience I think this is what a lot of

real life emotion is actually like.

Sure, there are the big yelling and punching the wall moments for some people sometimes, but I think far more frequently, there's emotion that people are trying to conceal or that is a tangled mix of different emotions instead of just one big one.

Riz Ahmed has this great moment in Sound of Metal where he asks his mentor and sobriety sponsor for money.

I was wondering, Joe, I don't know if it's possible, but, uh,

And the way grief and shame seem to bubble to the surface while he fights it back hits me every time watching this.

People talk a lot about range in acting as the ability to play different types of characters, but I think there's also a kind of range in terms of intensity.

We all know Joe Pesci for the sinister intensity that he has in Goodfellas.

Funny how?

I mean, what's funny about it?

Tommy, no, you got it all wrong.

Oh, Anthony.

He's a big boy.

He knows what he said.

What'd you say?

Funny how?

This guy is right on the edge.

You don't want to mess with him.

He feels like he could snap at any moment, and he's genuinely terrifying.

Tell me.

Tell me what's funny.

So it's impressive to me that in The Irishman, his character is no less sinister and threatening.

There's been a change.

Instead of going up right away, we're going to hang around tomorrow morning and then go up and drive home.

No, but I told Jimmy that we were going to be up in the morning.

I told you.

I told Jimmy we were going to be up in the morning.

Oh, I know.

I know.

Even though the intensity of the performance is dialed way back until it almost disappears.

We got to go there.

I mean, I got to go.

I told him I'd be there.

Frankie, we did all we could for the man.

The fact that he can convey something so similar through completely different levels of intensity is why he's one of the greats.

When I talk about these kinds of subtle expressions, I think rarely are they a very conscious choice by the actor.

I don't think Rooney Mara is...

Acting that scene thinking my neck is going to twitch and that's gonna make it feel more real Rather this kind of subtlety is the result of the actors finding a way to actually experience or feel the emotions They're trying to convey and the subtle micro expressions are the result of that But one of the reasons I've never talked about acting despite the fact that I've made over a hundred videos about film and television now is because the craft is

is kind of a mystery to me.

When I listen to actors talking about their craft, there's not a consistent approach that wins out and seems to be the best.

And when actors talk about how they accomplish these kinds of performances, it's often very esoteric and it's all about arriving at a point of authenticity and sometimes completely differing techniques can get you there.

Sometimes they refine things through extensive rehearsal and sometimes actors find that in the spontaneity of a first take.

It's kind of impossible to reverse engineer a performance just by looking at the screen and trying to figure out what the actor did to get there.

And so I think talking about technically what makes for good acting is a pretty difficult feat.

All I can really do is look at these performances and assess how authentic or unforced it feels to me.

I think a lot of these techniques are just finding a way to access genuine emotion and then this very realistic expression comes out of that.

That said, if there are performers out there who have this kind of conscious control of minute micro expressions in a way that feels involuntary, I mean, that's almost more impressive.

There are so many fantastic examples of this kind of performance out there, and this isn't meant to be a definitive list or a list of the best examples of this.

These are just specific examples that have stuck with me because they impacted me in a certain way.

And as I was looking through all these examples and trying to understand what quality it is that allows this kind of subtle expression to come through in these performances, I noticed that a lot of these performances have a quality that I would call screen presence.

I think screen presence is an interesting idea, and it's one I wanted to explore a little more thoroughly, so I made a companion video all about that that is available exclusively on Nebula.

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