As I've been revisiting these movies I have previously crowned with my top yearly honors, I've also been reminded of the full size of the casts, some larger than others. You don't get a lot of other actors in, say, 127 Hours, but Michael Almereyda's adaptation of Hamlet with its all-star cast provides plenty of familiar faces -- and chances to see who might appear in multiple films I've named #1. That's another obsession of mine, each year trying to figure out who I can add to the two-timers list. My longest term obsession is seeing if the same director will score two different #1s, but that hasn't happened yet.
Hamlet has two actors I already knew of who had appeared in another top film for me, those being Bill Murray, who also appears in Lost in Translation, and Ethan Hawke, who also appears in First Reformed. Last night I added a third, and for him, it's also a third #1 -- even if you can only barely count what he does here as "appearing in" the film.
You probably recognize Casey Affleck from the photo above, "playing" Fortinbras, the Prince of Norway in the original play, who has his sights set on vengeance for the death of his own father, which gives him something in common with the title character. In the play, if memory serves, he only barely appears at the end, never having factored into the drama before then except as an everpresent looming threat.
Well, he doesn't appear on screen at all in Almereyda's film, but he does appear in this photo on this news telecast, the last shot of the film, and possibly one other at the beginning, though I didn't recognize it as Affleck if he did. (By the way, that's Robert MacNeil of The MacNeil-Lehrer Report.)
The reason this is significant is that just last year Affleck punched his card into this exclusive fraternity with his second #1, as Our Friend added to A Ghost Story to accomplish the rarefied feat. This "appearance" in Hamlet means he's at three, which, if I remember correctly, ties him with only one other person, that being Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I'm Thinking of Ending Things).
Is it a bit cheeky to count this? Sure. Affleck probably didn't even need to be on set. He only needed to give them permission to use a photo of him. It seems strange that they even used him, since he was only 24 and not yet widely known -- though his credits before this do include Good Will Hunting, To Die For and 200 Cigarettes among others. Tellingly, though, his role in American Pie the year before was uncredited, and only three years earlier in Chasing Amy he's billed as "Little Kid." Must have been a specific reason they used him, some connection in the cast, but a quick search of the internet did not yield it. (Though that search did remind me that Fortinbras appears in a few other photos, on a magazine cover and in a newspaper article I think -- I must have not been paying attention or thought it looked like him.)
One final note about Fortinbras: It's an avatar I have sometimes used, because it is roughly the Latin version of my own last name, Armstrong.
Another behind-the-camera two-timer
There are doubtless collaborators who don't appear on the screen -- at all -- who worked on more than one of my #1s. Was the key grip on The Wrestler also the key grip on Moon? Undoubtedly.
The only ones of those in the past I've noticed are for screenwriting (the aforementioned Kaufman) and cinematography (Emmanuel Lubezki, who shot both Children of Men and Birdman, my #1s of 2006 and 2014). These are the sorts of core behind-the-scenes contributors who achieve renown for the way their art transcends the anonymity of most of the names that appear in the credits. They're the kind of people who become known among casual cinephiles, whose work becomes a factor in getting you pumped up for a particular project.
Well, you can add the music department to that.
As I was watching the closing credits of Hamlet -- more on them in a moment -- I noticed that Carter Burwell did the music. If you're the sort of casual cinephile who doesn't recognize that name, Burwell has worked on most of the Coens' projects -- most significantly, in my mind, having composed the delightful bluegrass theme "Way Out There" from my beloved Raising Arizona, my favorite movie of all time. You know, the one with the hillbilly yodeling.
He hasn't made it to my #1 spot working with the Coens -- they've never had a #1, though in retrospect Fargo would be my #1 of 1996, the first year I started doing this, instead of Looking for Richard, another Shakespeare movie. But he did get there through another movie: Adaptation.
I didn't realize this until I went hunting through IMDB, sure that he would have scored some other #1 of mine but not being sure which one it was. There you go.
Speaking of music ...
The lingering impression of the closing credits music
In 2000, I remember really liking Hamlet as I was watching it ... and then being taken to another place by the music over the closing credits.
The song is called "Greentone" by Accelera Deck, and because I can, I thought I'd include the song here so you can get a sense of the apocalyptic vibe that had such an impact on me:
No comments:
Post a Comment