NO STAR WARS SPOILERS.In fact, I specifically chose a picture from The Last Jedi just so you don't have any photographic spoilers.
I figured it was finally time to write a post about Adam Driver, and I had a pretty good excuse, as the last four films I've watched (new and revisited) all feature Driver.
Three of those were, of course, Star Wars movies, as I revisited The Force Awakens (Saturday night) and The Last Jedi (Sunday night) in the lead-up to my midnight viewing of The Rise of Skywalker on Wednesday. Marriage Story was, as you know from my last two posts, the other film crammed in there on Tuesday night.
The only thing preventing this from being a complete Driver lovefest was hearing that he walked out of an interview with Terry Gross that had scarcely begun because a clip of himself singing from Marriage Story was going to be played as part of the package. Apparently, Adam Driver can't watch or even listen to himself perform, a quirk that sounds like false modesty until you back it up by storming out on one of America's most respected interviewers.
It's too bad, because I love watching and listening to Adam Driver perform.
It wasn't always this way. My first tastes of Driver were decidedly mixed. They were based on short experiences with him in Frances Ha, a film I really liked, though found his character a bit insufferable, and Girls, of which I only watched a handful of episodes. I recognized a kind of magnetism in his abilities, but got the impression of self-involvement, a kid of obnoxious sense of the privilege of the young Greenwich Village intellectual. That was surely the characters he was playing rather than the man himself, but if you play too many of that type of character, it becomes more difficult to distinguish the two.
I'm glad Driver wasn't pigeonholed, because he has gone on to impress me time and again throughout the rest of the decade. It probably all started halfway through the 2010s with The Force Awakens. When I first heard it, his casting struck me as odd, and then infinitely more so when I learned he was set to be The Big Bad. Actually seeing the film immediately convinced me that I had underestimated Driver -- vastly.
This isn't a spoiler for The Rise of Skywalker because you've surely seen enough images to know that he repairs his Kylo Ren mask in this film. J.J. Abrams liked that mask, and I kind of feel like its destruction was one of the "fuck you"s Rian Johnson gave him in The Last Jedi that rankled him the most.
But Johnson knew what he was doing, and I'll just say that Abrams acknowledges it in Rise of Skywalker as well. To have Adam Driver behind a mask is to not see Adam Driver act. And Adam Driver can act at a level few of his peers can achieve.
Even the still photo above contains more acting than certain performers in the prequel trilogy accomplished over the entire trilogy. Last night in talking to a friend, I characterized Driver as "Hayden Christensen, but good." By that I meant that both actors played young, emotionally immature, yet extremely powerful force users who were tempted by the dark side and confused by their negative thoughts. While Christensen received enough backlash for the petulance of his performance to have possibly poisoned the well for that character type in all future Star Wars movies, Driver made it immediately clear how that type of character is supposed to work, and thereby salvaged that character type. (Side note: I actually do think Christensen is frequently effective in those movies.)
Even if the mask is cool and the voice distortion is chilling, you don't get the real Ben Solo/Kylo Ren until he's unencumbered by the mask.
Driver carries the performance through to the finish line in Rise of Skywalker, which is all I'll say.
Then you have Marriage Story, one of two other Driver movies released in the past couple months, along with The Report, which I understand is kind of disappointing. If it is disappointing, I have no doubt it's not Driver's fault.
Driver has already received a Golden Globe nomination for Marriage Story, and an Oscar nomination is surely also forthcoming. In fact, I haven't handicapped the field, but it's possible he's even the favorite to take home the award.
And that's just. I may have some quibbles with the balance of the film between its two main characters, but I can understand Noah Baumbach being seduced by the notion of more screen time for this charismatic actor. (It helps, of course, that Driver is the Baumbach stand-in in the film.) His every instinct in this film is on point. He knows how to play someone who is generous, and he knows how to play someone who is shitty. He presents us with a character who has a continuum of selves, and in certain key emotional moments, he delivers the kind of performance you don't forget, which they use for Oscar clips. That's not a backhanded compliment in this case, because they are not staged as moments of Oscar bait. Driver would probably reject a moment that was staged like that, would find a way to use his peculiarities as a performer to render that moment utterly scaled and believable.
It ended up being a bit of an Adam Driver lovefest anyway.
If walking out on Terry Gross makes Driver a diva, then I guess that's something we can live with. Not everyone can be as ingratiating as Tom Hanks, and also be a really great actor. In fact, history is littered with actors who were absolute shitheads, but held the screen in a way you couldn't take your eyes off.
It's a bit bittersweet to know I (probably) won't be seeing Driver in any more Star Wars movies, but the timing of Marriage Story is a useful reminder that Kylo Ren was merely the breakout role for him.
And now that he's broken out, anything is possible.
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