What a Character: Ben Mendelsohn

This post is my contribution to the What a Character! blogathon as organised by ONCE UPON A SCREEN, Paula of PAULA’S CINEMA CLUB and yours truly, Kellee of OUTSPOKEN & FRECKLED which celebrates supporting performers in film. I have gone with a contemporary actor who has stolen the show in almost everything I've seen him in, Mr Ben Mendelsohn (aka the baddie from Rogue One).

I first noticed the actor before having watched him in anything, and it was seeing his name on the Starred Up poster (a film, lamentably, I still haven't seen, although it's high up on my to-see list for the trifecta of reasons that it's from the director of Hell or High Water, and it stars Ben and Skin's Jack O'Connell, easily the best actor to emerge from that show).

The reason Ben Mendelsohn's name struck with me is because there is a composer of the same name (albeit with two 's's, Mendelssohn), who composed the famous Wedding March from A Midsummer Night's Dream. It's funny how the mind makes irrelevant cognitive connections like that, but with a memorable surname like that, I was curious to watch his acting performances.

He had a short-but-memorable appearance in The Dark Knight Rises in a suitably shouty, sweaty cameo, but the film that gave him an outlet to truly show his acting range was in The Place Beyond the Pines, a three-act story which follows the intersecting fates of a bank robber Luke (Ryan Gosling) and the cop, Avery, who pursues him (Bradley Cooper).

In The Place Beyond the Pines Mendelsohn plays Luke's only friend and co-conspirator who helps him commit the bank robberies (a nice counterpart to the role he played in The Dark Knight Rises). The two men, both outcasts, share a tentative, wordless bond, and the chemistry between Gosling and Mendelsohn is excellent, deftly portraying how the latter can pre-empt the former's actions before he's even done them. In the final act, when we see Mendelsohn's character again, and in his inarticulate way, he shows how much he cared for Luke, hinting that there may well be honour among thieves.

Ryan Gosling enjoyed working with Ben Mendelsohn so much on The Place Beyond the Pines that he cast him in his directorial debut, the critically panned misfire Lost River. Almost everything about that film sucked, bar Saoirse Ronan (who is amazing in everything), and Ben Mendelsohn, as a smarmy bank manager Dave who will do anything to get his way with struggling single mother Billy (Christina Hendricks).

Throughout the film, Dave repeatedly tries it on with Billy, only for his brusque courtship to be knocked back every time. However, as one of the patrons of a local burlesque studio, and her financially precarious situation, Billy has little choice but to play right into his hands by first working there, and then agreeing to partake in an after-hours 'shell game' for more money. In this bizarre ritual, a woman is locked in a transparent case and the payer can do what ever they want... to the shell. In theory, the woman should be safe as the shell is looked, but that doesn't render the whole experience any less terrifying.

Naturally, Dave seizes his opportunity, and such has been his unsettling demeanour that you have no idea what form of depravity he will unleash onto the shell. As a matter of fact, he dances in front of it!

The lousiness of Ben Mendelsohn's dancing in this scene, accentuated by the neon backdrop and the electro-score playing in the background, that the whole sequence is incredibly discombobulating. The way he looks at Billy whilst doing so, too, tells you that this is his idea of asserting his raw masculinity, a kind of recompense towards the woman who has had the temerity to turn him down.

As a very amusing stray piece of trivia, Ryan Gosling revealed that the music Mendelsohn had during this scene was 'Bad Bitches' by Kendrick Lamar, which would explain a threatening line of dialogue he barks at Hendrick's character whilst dancing at her. At the time I thought it was his character being crude, but now I see he was just quoting the song.

Ben Mendelsohn has plied his trade as an actor playing villains, of which Director Orson Krennic in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, an appropriately evil performance, will add to his litany of baddies. One such villainous turn from him that I particularly liked was as Payne in Slow West, a character who teases with an (almost ingratiatingly) amiable veneer, but deep down, you wouldn't trust them as far as you would throw them. Mendelsohn uses his whole face when acting (a quick sly look sideways, a twitch of the lips, a twist of the jaw) to convey thorny characters who occasionally let their masks slip.

Ben Mendelsohn didn't rise to prominence until relatively late in life (he's 47 now), but he has such a characteristic look about him, that once you see the Aussie in one role, you won't forget him. His acting style is distinctive but never distractingly mannered. As I've always said, I tend to identify more with villainous characters in movies, so it was only natural that I would gravitate towards Mendelsohn, who's ability to mould sinister antagonists in films is prenaturally good.

I'm delighted at how well things have gone for him (he is a massive Star Wars fanboy so getting to play the main antagonist in the film must have been a special moment) and eagerly await whatever film roles he takes next.

When Film Posters Lie: Crimes Against Billing Orders.

Today, I watched The Place Beyond the Pines, Derek Cianfrance's ambitious morality tale of how an encounter between bank robber (Ryan Gosling) and rookie cop (Bradley Cooper) affects their lives long after the meeting. I wasn't exactly sold on it; the three acts in the movie deteriorated monotonically, with the most gripping set pieces all being at the start of the film. The final act of the film focuses on the interaction between the two characters' sons, and the scenes between Emory Cohen and Dane DeHaan felt like a blasted mumbling contest.

Overall, I was mightily disappointed with The Place Beyond the Pines; there were some good elements: Bradley Cooper was as nuanced and as convincing as I've seen him (I usually can't take him seriously because he's appeared in some godawful Jennifer Lawrence collaborations and both of them bring out the worst in each other, especially when David O. Russell is involved), and the scenes between Ben Mendelsohn and Gosling were nicely done. Based on their chemistry together, I can see why Ryan Gosling chose to cast the Australian in his own movie, Lost River, 2 years later. You even get a tiny glimpse of Mendelsohn's terribad dancing, one of the few redeeming features of Lost River, in this movie.

But another gripe that I had with The Place Beyond the Pines that was no real fault of the filmmakers themselves was the sheer inaccuracy of the billing of Ray Liotta in the film poster. The way Liotta is credited here gives the (misleading) impression that he's the fourth main character in the film. He ain't. Gosling and Cooper are the co-leads, then Eva Mendes, then Dane DeHaan and then Emory Cohen. Ben Mendelsohn features in the first and third acts, so he would take sixth precedence. Being generous (and it would be being very generous), Ray Liotta is the seventh main character in the film. At best.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I can see why they did it. Although DeHaan and Emory Cohen are now gaining status and their acting technique has definitely improved (Cohen put his mumbling Brando impression to far better use as an adorable suitor of Saoirse Ronan in 2015's Brooklyn and you know he was good because I don't even begrudge him stealing Domhnall Gleeson's thunder), they weren't that well known in 2013, when the film was released. Whereas Ray Liotta is properly famous, not least for his iconic performance as Henry Hill in Goodfellas. So they were riding on the fame of his name. Fair enough, given the calibre the star they had on their castlist (Liotta's combination of charisma, screen presence and intense-eyed gaze renders him one of my favourite actors).

An even more brazen case of erroneous billing of an actor immortalised by a Martin Scorsese picture would be the combination of the name order and the appearance of a photo of Jonah Hill in the Hail, Caesar! poster. The fact that he's one of the five pictured could let you think he's one of the five main characters. He ain't. His role in Hail, Caesar! is genuinely that of a cameo, lasting less than a minute. As a huge Jonah Hill fan who's two main draws to this picture were the Coen brothers and him, I felt mightily short-changed.

As with Emory Cohen and Dane DeHaan getting trampled over in the Place Beyond the Pines poster, the biggest loser here is Alden Ehrenreich, who stole the show in Hail, Caesar! and if there were any justice in the world, would be in the running for a Best Supporting Actor nomination for what was a warm performance as a rodeo-come-actor who struggles with his lines of on point comic timing. Ehrenreich's role was the size that I had thought Jonah would be getting. Boy was I wrong about that, but it seems bizarre that the best thing about the film doesn't even get his picture on the poster.

Obviously, worse things have happened, and the world will keep spinning. And I can't begrudge Hollywood studios for trotting out their big names ahead of the lesser-known chaps, even if they had more prominence in the film. Money does talk, after all. And in both Ray Liotta and Jonah Hill's case, they succeeded at tricking me. By misrepresenting the magnitude of the actors' screen time in their respective movies on the film posters, the films' distributors lured me into watching the film under false pretences. I'm just too much of a Marty Scorsese fangirl for my own good, goddamnit!

But I'm not in the mood to be fooled for a third time this year by film posters. All I'm saying is, if Jonah Hill isn't actually the lead when I see War Dogs, I won't be best pleased.