Little did I know that not only had I already seen him elsewhere, in such places as Lady Macbeth and Persuasion, but I'd see him again on this very succession of flights, bookending my final two of those three legs in the Barry Levinson film The Alto Knights on the trip from Los Angeles to Atlanta.
And, the guy is not even Australian, making him the only one in Inside who isn't.
I might have just found my newest Vincent D'Onofrio, an honor I bestow to chameleons who can slip into any role.
And it was a good way to spend my time (not quite) in the cosmos, but close enough.
Chameleon? In both of the movies on these flights, he played criminals, but very different sorts of criminals -- a modern-day man accused of raping and murdering a girl when he was 13, and a would-be assassin who fails in the attempt to shoot one of the two characters played by Robert De Niro in 1950s New York. But in the two movies where I'd seen him previously, he played 19th century men, albeit of very different social classes.
Any time I think a regularly abled actor might actually be brain-damaged, that gives additional layers to his range.
See, in Inside, Jarvis speaks with a slur, the presumed result of multiple vicious beatings inside prison walls. See, prisoners hate rapists, though I suppose not as much as they hate pedophiles. And though the girl Jarvis' Mark Shepard killed was 13, so was he, at the time.
The slurring, maybe more of a lisp, is accompanied by the slouching of one side of his face. You can kind of get the idea of how it looks from the poster above, where he's over the left shoulder of the kid who's front and center. You probably would know he's not over the right shoulder, because if you don't recognize Guy Pearce by now, where have you been the last 30 years? But you do probably need to know he's over one of the shoulders and not the kid in the center.
It's a pretty incendiary performance, and the fact that I thought it might have been from a non-professional actor only makes it more so. That may not be clearly the case, because with a non-professional, you excuse the flaws in the craft due to the authenticity they bring. Jarvis' performance does not have those sorts of flaws, but I thought it was a performance that could only be given by a man who had been hit on the head too many times. That's pretty high praise.
In fact, the actual non-professional, or should I say the one without very much experience -- Vincent Miller, who is in the middle of that poster and has only two credits on IMDB, including this one -- is the one who held Inside back from being better than the 3.5 stars I gave it. Both Jarvis and Pearce are great, but Williams maybe could have looked a little longer for his lead actor, who is pretty blank.
Jarvis does not have nearly as significant a role in The Alto Knights. He's one of the first actors we see, as he tries to shoot one of De Niro's two characters in the movie's cold open -- does shoot him, but the bullet curves around the head and exits the other side without doing anything more than superficial damage, a thing I always heard about when I was younger but which never seemed like a real thing. Then we see him berated by the other De Niro, who put a hit on this De Niro, for not going in for a couple more shots to make sure the job was done.
Because the actor only pops up a few more times and it's only in the lighter context of him being a semi-competent henchmen, I can't say that I reserve the same high praise for this role, but only because there's so little exposure to it. However, it does round out my idea of what this actor is capable of.
The thing that deserves higher praise than I expected to give it is the movie itself. I must admit I watched The Alto Knights because I thought it was supposed to be one of those trainwrecks we had to see to believe. Having watched it, I now think the reason The Alto Knights had a bit of a moment in the zeitgeist was because it was incredibly expensive and is oddly out of sync with today's cinematic environment, where we just aren't looking for the next Goodfellas anymore. The performance De Niro gives here is -- or should I say, performances are -- very much in the manner of Goodfellas, though probably more if he were playing Joe Pesci's shorter tempered character in the more sinister of these two roles. Anyway, I'm not sure if I thought I'd see De Niro working in this register again, and Levinson has mounted a very credible version of one of these movies that had their heyday 30 years ago, though is ultimately hampered by feeling anachronistic.
Maybe the highest praise I can give The Alto Knights is that I was very entertained by it, never bored, which was crucial for the last stretch of a crushing three-leg journey that took effectively 24 hours, at which point I should have been ready to gouge my eyes out. Because of The Alto Knights, I wasn't.
We're not actually done with Jarvis in 2025, either. Some people would have already seen him in three movies this year, as the Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza co-scripted and co-directed film Warfare counts Jarvis among its soldiers.
I'll be watching that one when I'm on terra firma, as it's now streaming on Amazon.
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