The Atlas of Cinema: In Praise of Adam Driver

In Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis,” Adam Driver gives a one-for-the-ages performance. He plays Cesar Catilina, the inventor of Megalon, a bio-adaptive building material that he believes can change the course of human history, which he wants to use to create the title city, a modern utopia, despite opposition from reactionary mayor Frank Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito). It’s the kind of role that a filmmaker wants and perhaps needs Adam Driver to play. He’s become a specialist in playing colorful, difficult (and sometimes baroque or outright loathsome) roles in films by auteur directors with very strong stylistic signatures and a unique storytelling energy that actors sometimes have trouble flowing with. Call it the Adam Driver part. 

In degree of difficulty, the role of Cesar is about as difficult an assignment as one could imagine, in part because it’s as much of a rhetorical device and symbol as it is a person. On a superficial level, the character is pretty obviously a stand-in for Coppola, a visionary artist who constantly struggled to make his own films his own way within the Hollywood system. (Most protagonists of movies have certain qualities in common with their directors, although Coppola has traditionally made this identification more transparent, especially in the “Godfather” trilogy and “Tucker: The Man and His Dream.”) Cesar is a discursive, argumentative fellow, more inclined to monologues and needling than conversations where the give-and-take is equal. Driver captures the blazing intelligence of the character but also the monumental arrogance (Cesar would likely consider it self-assurance and be annoyed by anybody who considered it a dealbreaker). He carries on in the manner of a premium cable antihero who’s irritating as all hell yet at the same time magnetic and undeniably intelligent.

He’s also funny even when he’s being a jerk. Despite drawing small audiences and getting wildly mixed reviews, “Megalopolis” is distinctive enough to have already generated popular memes, especially the bit where Cesar puts a saucy spin on the phrase “go back to the club.”  This very brief clip is a great little summation of what Driver is up against in playing this character. Almost every line is what you’d consider a laughably florid clunker if almost anyone else had to say it (“And you think one year of medical school entitles you to plow through the riches of my Emersonian mind?”), but Driver leans into it and gives it a hard shove that lands it somewhere between a “Play of Ideas” and camp. 

It’s hard to come up with a modern-day actor besides Driver who can be expected to make sense of a role like Cesar. It’s a bit like the sorts of roles that Marlon Brando sometimes played, in films as diverse as “One-Eyed Jacks,” “The Fugitive Kind,” “Last Tango in Paris” and “The Missouri Breaks,” where the characters seemed to be listening to voices in their own heads that didn’t speak the same language as the rest of us. Maybe you sort of didn’t believe the character at first because he just was so absurd on paper, but then you got used to the unrealness, and he eventually started to seem as real as any character that was written in a more “naturalistic” style, because of the sheer imagination Brando had put into the performance, and the determination to just go full speed ahead and not look back. 

Driver has given a lot of performances in that peculiar, nettlesome, “Can he pull this off?” range. There were two great ones for Ridley Scott: In “House of Gucci,” he was the implacably driven Maurizio Gucci, one of the presumptive heirs to the Gucci fortune, and in “The Last Duel” he played a squire challenged to a duel by the man whose wife he stalked and sexually assaulted. The second one not only asked him to be a monster with pathetic qualities but to end the story as a naked corpse lying in mud. For Michael Mann, he played the title character of “Ferrari,” struggling to balance the obsession with his business and public lives against the demands of a wife and mistress and grief over the loss of a child. He’s done multiple roles for Noah Baumbach (“While We’re Young,” “The Meyerowitz Stories,” “Marriage Story”) where he’s knee-deep in Baumbach’s characteristic mix of self-laceration, toxic narcissism and wit. 

As Kylo Ren, the grandson of Darth Vader who’s determined to head a new version of the Empire in the “Star Wars” sequels, he gave what is probably the second most sophisticated (especially for “Star Wars”) performance in the entire franchise, exceeded only by Ian McDiarmid as Emperor Palpatine. The characters have a similar texture. Kylo is conceived—but even more so, played—as a future of Shakespearean force, merging elements of Macbeth, Hamlet, and Richard III. The scripts never gave him as much as he gave the scripts. 

He was brilliant as a doomed Jesuit in Japan in Martin Scorsese’s “Silence,” as Jewish Det. Philip “Flip” Zimmerman, who infiltrates a neo-Nazi group in Spike Lee’s “BlackKklansman,” and as the deputy in Jim Jarmusch’s zombie comedy “The Dead Don’t Die” who’s a little too eager to use his machete to cut heads off and has to be warned to be sure to check to make sure they’re dead before taking a swing. In Jarmusch’s “Paterson,” Driver was light years removed from the darkness that often enfolds his characters, playing a bus driver in Paterson, New Jersey who wrote poetry and loved his girlfriend and was in every way a happy person. (Playing a nice guy is harder than playing a villain or antihero; there are no obvious signifiers of complexity to latch onto.) 

I loved him as the brother of Channing Tatum’s character in the heist comedy “Logan Lucky,” which deserves a much wider audience than it currently has. He’s got that Coen Brothers actor quality where he can go right up to the edge of caricature and even cross over, but you still accept him as a person who could exist. As Henry McHenry, the performance artist in Leox Carax’s sung-through showbiz psychodrama “Annette,” Driver plays a character who is accused of murdering his wife (because it’s Driver, you can’t assume he’s not guilty) and who in general taxes the audience’s ability to be sympathetic towards a self-centered artist hero. “Annette,” perhaps more than any other Driver performance, seems to encapsulate why notable directors want to work with him: he has the ability to make any situation emotionally credible, whether he’s doting on a “daughter” who’s a hideous doll/puppet or having sex with his wife Ann (Mario Cotillard) while they’re both nude and continuously singing. 

I can’t think of a single performance Driver has given where I didn’t feel that he’d exceeded whatever expectations the filmmakers might have had. I’m guessing that’s why he’s become an A-list actor despite his name not actually guaranteeing box office. (Does anybody’s name guarantee box office these days?) He just recently turned 40 and if he got hit by a truck tomorrow (look both ways while crossing the street, Adam Driver) he’d go down as one of the great leading men, somebody who helped get movies made for directors who were out of favor at the time (like Spike Lee), and made franchise product more interesting than it might otherwise have been (“Star Wars”), and helped some of the venerable giants of cinema get one or two more dream projects onto screens in the years they had left. And you always believe him, somehow. He’s an Atlas of acting who can hold the world on his shoulders, no matter who created it.

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