Year in Review: Top 10 Performances of 2017

It still fascinates me, after years of writing for this site and even longer studying acting and cinema, how much of performance is communal. Great performances seem to come from the push and pull of great actors driving one another ever higher in the search for truth or meaning or whatever else they seek. Six of the below performances come from just three films, pairs of actors working in congress to bring to life worlds known and unknown to us. It is a wonderful thing to watch and the 10 performances below, plus six honorable mentions, are evidence of just how important it is to be part of a community experience.

Before we get to the list, six more performances I could not ignore: Allison Janney in I, Tonya; Diane Kruger in In the Fade; Jennifer Lawrence in Mother!; Laurie Metcalf in Lady Bird; Gary Oldman in Darkest Hour; and Michael Stuhlbarg in Call Me By Your Name.

Last Cinema Standing’s Top 10 Performances of 2017:

10. Sam Rockwell for Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri

We shouldn’t like Officer Dixon. In point of fact, we should hate Officer Dixon. He represents everything the hero of Martin McDonagh’s black-comic thriller is fighting against. He is uselessness, abuse, and ineptitude all rolled into one. To his credit, Rockwell does not try to make you like his character. That would not be appropriate for the film. However, through empathy and commitment, Rockwell forces the audience to understand the character. You don’t have to agree – really, you shouldn’t – but you are damn well going to know where he stands and why.

It is a near-impossible task in McDonagh’s magic trick of a movie. The audience believes all along, through action and implication, that Officer Dixon is the antagonist of this story, then the rug is pulled out from beneath that belief. Were it not for the performances Rockwell and his co-star (more about her farther down this list), viewers would be left adrift, wondering where to turn and what to think. However, because Rockwell has so perfectly played all facets of his character, the audience is quickly grounded in the new reality of McDonagh’s film, and what a marvelous reality it proves to be.

9. Willem Dafoe for The Florida Project

Dafoe is known for a lot of things, and in a career spanning decades, it makes sense he has brought to life a wide range of people from all walks of life and experiences. However, softness has never been a word much associated with Dafoe. He surely has a soft touch as an actor, delicately inhabiting the lives and worlds of his characters, but tenderness and vulnerability have rarely been the hallmarks of those performances. Well, leave it to the 62-year-old Dafoe to find a new side of himself to show us.

As Bobby, the exasperated but caring manager of a motel just outside Disney World, Dafoe strikes a balance between kind-heartedness and practicality that any businessman must have when operating on the margins of society. There is a moment in the film – featured heavily in the trailer – when a resident yells after him, “We love you, Bobby!” He turns, without breaking stride, and shouts back, “I love you, too!” And your heart breaks for the sense he wishes he could do more for these people but knows he cannot.

8. Brooklynn Prince for The Florida Project

Prince is 7 years old, but she is an old pro at this. Having been on the covers of magazines essentially since she could stand, it does not seem as though anything fazes her. In interviews, she is eloquent and unflappable. What once might have been referred to as star quality, she has it. But none of that is what makes Prince so impressive. All of that can be taught or learned or, in some cases, ingrained. What is so impressive is the way all of that disappears in her performance. All the sheen of a young starlet in the making washes away, and the audience is left with a single remarkable character.

Writer-director Sean Baker did not craft the children in his film to be wise beyond their years, to be too clever by half like so many kids in movies. He has crafted a film that is about the wonder of childhood but set against the backdrop of crushing poverty. Moonee, as portrayed by Prince, is the epitome of this dichotomy. She is precocious, joyous, and celebratory, diving into new adventures at the drop of a hat, without regard for her circumstance. But when the real world arrives to interrupt the idyll of her childhood, she breaks in a way few actors of any age could convey, and there is not a dry eye in the house.

7. Michael Shannon for The Shape of Water

This will sound negative, but I mean it as a compliment, so bear with me. I have lost the ability to be surprised by Shannon. His level of talent and skill has been so consistent over the years that I now expect greatness. I see his name and I settle in for something exciting and wonderful and that I have never seen before. He never disappoints, and of course, he sails past any expectation I might have anyway. So as Richard Strickland, the self-righteous embodiment of government oppression, Shannon once again delivers something wholly unique and, yes, surprising.

Shannon digs into Strickland with his usual ferociousness, but what makes it so compelling and remarkable is the way the actor gives shape and nuance to a character meant mostly as a fairy tale villain. There is never a question that Strickland is evil, but Shannon’s performance allows us to get at the root of that evil. He is what the society around him demands he be, but he is not oppressed by it. Rather, it enlivens him, empowers him. He revels in it. That is his madness, and that is what Shannon so well communicates.

6. Vicky Krieps for Phantom Thread

It takes something truly special to out-crazy a Daniel Day-Lewis performance in a Paul Thomas Anderson film, but witness Krieps’ pulsing, obsessive, rigidly mannered muse, Alma, and know she has pulled off that something special. Phantom Thread is Anderson’s strangest film, operating on a wavelength few films before ever have known. Krieps pitches her performance to that wavelength perfectly and never allows herself to drift into either self-seriousness or parody. It is a high-wire act of the highest magnitude and it is a thrill to watch.

The German actress will be mostly unknown to American audiences when she glides onto screen here, but the impression she leaves won’t soon be forgotten. Like so many great performances, this begins with Krieps’ eyes, so deep and still, communicating a thousand things at once with the flicker of an eyelash or a long, unbroken stare. Krieps takes Alma from passivity to control so subtly you might miss it, but when it hits you, it does so with the force of a truck. It sneaks up on you. It shocks you. It makes you yearn for more.

5. Barry Keoghan for The Killing of a Sacred Deer

I can promise you one thing: You have never seen spaghetti eaten like this before. Keoghan, who also appeared in this year’s Dunkirk in a wildly different role, tears into this part with the fire and intensity of a ravenous dog fighting for scraps. The character Martin is more than a villain, as Keoghan plays him. He is barely human. He is the harbinger of doom shrouded in a white cotton T-shirt. He is impenetrable, invulnerable, unstoppable, but Keoghan carries the weight of this as if it were a feather, embodying this other-worldliness as if it were only natural.

The wonderful Greek writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos always pitches his films a few degrees left of center, and you are either okay traveling there with him or you are not. More than travel there, Keoghan seems like that is where he has always been, where he was always meant to be. Lanthimos intends for The Killing of a Sacred Deer to be a play on classic Greek mythology, and Keoghan comfortably embraces the mythic nature of his character to cast a strangely hypnotic spell over the film.

4. Frances McDormand for Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri

Mildred Hayes is an instantly iconic character, and one it feels like only McDormand could have brought to life. The Academy Award-winning star of films such as Fargo, Almost Famous, and North Country, she has the experience, the wisdom, and the guts to portray the fiery sword of vengeance meant to pierce the heart of this film. Mildred comes off initially as a loaded weapon, full of righteous anger and ready to unleash hell on those in her path.

But McDormand – and, it must be said, McDonagh – is not interested in the tawdry revenge that provides the surface of Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri. She is after something deeper, exploring the soul of a grieving woman who somehow has not lost sympathy for a world that has none for her. She battles both the literal and figurative flames alone because if she did not, she cannot be sure where her grief would take her. McDormand finds the heart at the center of Mildred’s anger, and once she makes us see it, we wonder how we ever could have missed it.

3. Timothée Chalamet for Call Me By Your Name

Two things must be said right off: First, what a year for the 22-year-old Chalamet with his breakout role in this film, his wonderful turn in Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, and his smaller but no less impressive work in Scott Cooper’s Hostiles. On the basis of these three performances – all as different as colors in the rainbow – Chalamet should have a long, impressive career ahead of him. Second, I do not think Call Me By Your Name is a good film. I happily exist in the minority with this opinion, and over the next two months, I will likely find myself writing about this film often as a major Oscar contender.

The saving grace in a film that is otherwise vapid, empty, self-indulgent, and tone deaf is its cast. Armie Hammer, Stuhlbarg, and in particular Chalamet take this frothy curio and make it, if not worth watching, at least less of a waste. Chalamet takes the clichéd, boring role he is given and infuses it with vulnerability and longing that exists nowhere in the text of the film. Chalamet somehow pieces together a banquet of life from the table scraps of character director Luca Guadagnino’s film provides. It is a miracle of performance that tests the young actor’s every skill. He deserves better in the future than to have to rescue a mess of a film like this.

2. Sally Hawkins for The Shape of Water

There is nothing easy about portraying Elisa, the deaf-mute heroine at the center of writer-director Guillermo del Toro’s fairy tale romance. By taking away voice, you have taken away 50 percent of an actor’s toolbox. Hawkins then must rely only on her physicality, her ability to wordlessly express the world of emotion swirling around in Elisa’s head as she embarks on a journey she could never have predicted. Hamstrung by the lack of a voice, she must then convince the audience to come along with her in falling in love with an amphibious humanoid creature in the film’s central romance.

So, the degree of difficulty is off the charts. Hawkins’ performance, however, stands out for how effortless she makes it all seem. From her first moments on screen, Elisa feels like a fully lived-in character, with a rich inner life she simply has trouble expressing to most of the world. But we see it because Hawkins allows us in, brings us with her to see the passionate, intelligent, strong person her disability has hidden too long. She is no ordinary fairy tale heroine, and Hawkins does not play her as such. In fact, there is nothing about this performance that is ordinary.

1. Margot Robbie for I, Tonya

There are few actors working now who can match the fearless bravado of Robbie. She burst onto the scene for most in 2013 with her scene-stealing work in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street. She proved to be one of the only good things to come out of the dreadful anti-hero comic film Suicide Squad, so much so the studio was essentially forced to center a film around her character. Now, with I, Tonya, Robbie finally gets a leading role worthy of the energy, ferocity, and brilliance she has displayed in everything else she has done.

Robbie’s greatest accomplishment is to take someone we all think we know – Tonya Harding – and transform her from the caricature she became in the media back into the person she was and is at heart. Robbie embraces all the twists and turns, contradictions and convolutions of Tonya’s life and rediscovers the humanity of the person standing at the center of the storm. She walks along the knife edge of insanity, and every time she appears ready to fall into hysterics or histrionics, she ascends, taking the audience to another level understanding and empathy. It is what screen performance, at its highest level, was always meant to be.

Check back tomorrow for Last Cinema Standing’s Top 10 Quotes of 2017 and all week for more Year in Review.