will add to this run<\/a> when nominations are announced early next year. Some of this speaks to DiCaprio\u2019s stature in the industry: He is one of the last remaining movie stars, the kind of actor who can instantly get a Big Important Movie green-lit with a Big Important Budget. That\u2019s one reason why heavy-hitter auteurs like Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, and Martin Scorsese like to work with him (aside from the primary reason, which is that he\u2019s an amazing actor). But there\u2019s something else here, too, something about the way that DiCaprio\u2019s style has changed over the years. Somehow, over the past decade or so, he\u2019s become one of our finest comic performers.<\/p>\nWhich is itself funny, because it has coincided with the death of theatrical comedies in the U.S. marketplace. Of all the movies DiCaprio has made over this more recent period, only Adam McKay\u2019s Don\u2019t Look Up could be called a true comedy (it\u2019s also, of course, an ambitious and topical satire), and that was a Netflix release. One Battle After Another, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and The Wolf of Wall Street all have broadly funny elements, but they\u2019re not really titles that would have wound up in the \u201ccomedy\u201d section of the video store back in the days when we had video stores. Still, Leo\u2019s hilarious performance is the glue that holds these movies together.<\/p>\n
One Battle After Another is an ideal example of this. In some ways, the film could almost be an anthology, consisting of different sections that foreground other characters, be it Teyana Taylor\u2019s gun-toting, alpha revolutionary in the first section or Benicio Del Toro\u2019s coolheaded and resourceful Sensei Sergio St. Carlos in the second. DiCaprio\u2019s \u201cBob Ferguson\u201d is the nominal protagonist of the film, but he\u2019s also often a bystander. In his early years as a member of the underground group French 75 (back when he was called \u201cPat\u201d), he\u2019s an explosives expert, but he also seems just happy to be along for the ride. There\u2019s a ridiculousness to his revolutionary fervor that DiCaprio plays up in cute little ways: Watch the quick, giddy shuffle he does with his feet before he gets into a getaway car, right after screaming out, \u201cViva la revoluci\u00f3n!\u201d This guy is a dork, and DiCaprio plays him as such. And in the film\u2019s present, he\u2019s a full-on klutz, albeit adorably so, his brain fried from years of drugs and alcohol and TV and paranoid parenting.<\/p>\n
There was always an odd, lanky goofiness to DiCaprio\u2019s physical presence even at the start of his career, but it was overwhelmed by his rapid rise to heartthrob status in films like Romeo + Juliet and Titanic. Now that he\u2019s fully entered middle age, he can finally use his gawky frame to great comic effect. It served him well in The Wolf of Wall Street\u2019s sequences of drugged-out and demonic bacchanalia, as well as that film\u2019s now-iconic scene of him attempting to drag his quaalude-paralyzed ass to his Lamborghini. It\u2019s that same awkwardness we see when DiCaprio throws himself to the floor and crawls around throughout One Battle After Another, the same body that\u2019s eager to roll with Sensei Sergio\u2019s little platoon of skateboarding punks but has to lumber along the rooftops until he finally plummets to the ground and winds up getting tased. (That Anderson and DiCaprio are able to play this moment as both shocking and hilarious speaks to the fine tonal balance of the film.)<\/p>\n
One of the things that makes DiCaprio such an interesting actor is how big he can get with the right part. He can be subtle, too, but that\u2019s not where his real strengths lie. Not unlike Tom Cruise, there has always been a boyish, try-hard quality to his persona, and it hasn\u2019t entirely gone away. If anything, he\u2019s embraced it. DiCaprio\u2019s characters take up space and energy and volume; when they yell, their voices attain a high, reedy insistence that speaks to us of entitlement and selfishness. That turns out to be the perfect foil to the actions of other characters in One Battle After Another: In what might be the film\u2019s most bravura sequence, we see Sensei Sergio running around calmly and compassionately herding the dozens of undocumented immigrants hiding in his building into tunnels to evade the police; all the while, Bob spends his time trying to charge his phone and struggling to remember decades-old passwords, always with a deeply aggravated and highly recognizable \u201cLet me speak to your manager\u201d defiance. (Spoiler: He does finally speak to the manager, and he gets what he wants, and he is just as cocky as you might expect about it.)<\/p>\n
What\u2019s crept into DiCaprio\u2019s work over the past decade-plus is a healthy sense of irony. Now that he no longer has to play heartthrobs, dashing romantics, and straight-faced heroes, he\u2019s able to modulate his performances and juxtapose them with the others around him. He can be slick, sniveling, and monstrous in Django Unchained as a caricature of antebellum wealth. He can be bellowing and simian in The Wolf of Wall Street, a ridiculous tribal warlord egging on his troglodytic underlings. He can be a self-obsessed star in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, a man whose bloviating egomania can turn into neurotic desperation at the drop of a hat. DiCaprio is very good at playing characters for whom no one else really exists. One of the charms of One Battle After Another is how, amid all that chaos, that energy is directed toward finding his missing daughter; this time, his solipsism is hilarious, but it\u2019s also highly relatable. We laugh at him, but we also realize that we could easily be him.<\/p>\n
My colleague Alison Willmore described Bob Ferguson as \u201canother fine contribution to the loser era DiCaprio has dedicated himself to lately,\u201d and others have echoed the sentiment. DiCaprio\u2019s loser period and his comic period understandably overlap, but it\u2019s worth noting when it hasn\u2019t. In Killers of the Flower Moon, his Ernest Burkhart starts off as a mopey, weak-minded World War One veteran, eager to do anything for his godfather uncle (Robert De Niro), but there\u2019s still a certain likability to his dim-bulb submissiveness. DiCaprio actually is quite funny early on in the film, but his performance loses steam in the back half, as his broad gestures and facial contortions can\u2019t quite match the grim subtlety of Scorsese\u2019s direction of the later scenes. The flip side to this is Don\u2019t Look Up, in which his pudgy, nervous, mild-mannered astronomer Dr. Randall Mindy is often the straight man to all that\u2019s swirling around him. DiCaprio is fine in the movie, and gets a couple of choice scenes, but it\u2019s hard not to feel like his comedic talents are being underutilized in that particular picture.<\/p>\n
Last year, the screenwriter Drew Pearce offered to me this take on modern leading men: \u201cThe moment they become truly great is the moment they become truly goofy,\u201d he said. That\u2019s when the actor stops needing to be cool and simply basks in the confidence that he is \u2014 which in turn frees him up to be weirder and funnier, to, in Pearce\u2019s words, \u201cundercut and test\u201d his stardom. Pearce was talking about Ryan Gosling in films like The Nice Guys, but he also offered up the example of Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The theory applies to DiCaprio as well, even though it took him a while. He was a great actor in many great films, and he occasionally poked fun at his status (see: Celebrity), but his persona gained an extra dimension as he entered middle age and began letting himself look strange and funny and vulnerable.<\/p>\n
That prompts us to ask what the actor will do next. Hopefully, there will be more Scorsese films, and there are rumors of him circling Michael Mann\u2019s Heat 2. And anybody with an ambitious movie that requires a real budget is presumably already breaking down his door. But it would also be fascinating to see him try his hand at a straight comedy; he could probably singlehandedly save that moribund genre. Once upon a time, DiCaprio would probably have thought doing so was beneath his level, and he\u2019d have been right. But really, he\u2019d be perfect for it. Besides, as One Battle After Another proves, the absurdity of our times calls for nothing less.<\/p>\n
\n See All<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"DiCaprio\u2019s hilarious performance is the glue that holds One Battle After Another together \u2014 as it does so…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":99889,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[268],"tags":[63462,434,18,117,19,17,1340,32886,327,23509,1341,46440,16007,16008],"class_list":{"0":"post-99888","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-viva-la-revolucion","9":"tag-celebrities","10":"tag-eire","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-ie","13":"tag-ireland","14":"tag-leonardo-dicaprio","15":"tag-martin-scorsese","16":"tag-movies","17":"tag-one-battle-after-another","18":"tag-paul-thomas-anderson","19":"tag-the-wolf-of-wall-street","20":"tag-vulture-homepage-lede","21":"tag-vulture-section-lede"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99888"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99888\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/99889"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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