This the second entry in an ongoing column by Shonni Enelow, author, critic, and Professor of English at Fordham University. In Indirect Address, Enelow takes a closer look at the style, technique, and meaning of contemporary screen acting.
Open and Shut:
Acting and Attachment in Good One
By Shonni Enelow
A few weeks ago, I ran into an old friend from acting school who has had substantial roles in major movies and told him about some of my recent writing about film acting and visual art. I mentioned the art history terms absorption and theatricality, both coined by Michael Fried to describe a transformation of painting sometime in the 18th century, as artists started to get anxious about over-performing for their viewers (about theatricality) and instead began to paint works that projected their self-enclosure and disinterest in their audiences (often images in which figures are absorbed in their represented activities). Hearing this, he started talking about attachment theory, which traces adult neuroses to the child’s secure or insecure attachment to their parents. The film actor, he told me, must not project insecure attachment. You cannot be needy. The audience will be repelled. You also cannot be avoidant. The audience will get bored. Instead, you need to project a security that the audience will come to you––even if you don’t actually feel it. That’s what good film acting is.
I thought about this conversation when watching India Donaldson’s Good One (2024), which follows a teenager, Sam (Lily Collias), and her relationship with her recognizably and even banally narcissistic parent, Chris (James Le Gros), on an upstate camping trip. Sam is what psychologists call a parentified child: in the first few minutes, we watch her move fluidly between reactions appropriate for a kid (petulance when her dad asks her to move into the back seat of the car) and adult relational management, offering to take over dealing with the son of her dad’s friend, Matt (Danny McCarthy), who refuses to come: “do you want me to try?” Often in conversations with Chris and Matt, Sam is passive and withholding. She doesn’t expect them to pay attention to her feelings or consider her needs or experience. But Collias, the actor, is thrillingly open and non-defensive: watching her, we feel we’re being trusted to examine her closely, to attend to her in the way her character is not attended to, to notice her. In this way Donaldson’s film offers the opportunity to consider what kinds of real relationships film acting depends on, and how they relate to the relationships presented in realist cinema.
There are at least two real relationships captured by film: the relationship between the actor and the audience––first a relationship between the actor and the internal audience of the director and crew––and the relationships of the actors with each other. These second relationships are merged, though not completely, with the diegetic relationships between the characters: most of the time, in realist acting, that boundary is invisible to us, unless or until we become aware of a dissonance between the characters’ relationship and the actors’—when, for instance, we don’t believe that two characters are close because the actors are obviously uncomfortable with each other. The most resonant realist acting (the “good film acting” described by my friend) is acting in which the security of those real relationships (the actor’s security in her relationship with the audience and with the other actors) enables her absorption in the complexity of the diegetic relationship. She doesn’t have to withhold the emotion of that fictional relationship if she trusts her fellow actors to receive it, and she doesn’t have to “push” the complexity of the fictional relationship––doesn’t have to theatricalize it, in Fried’s term––if she trusts the audience will lean in, wanting to understand her feelings.
In the choice to make Matt an actor––a failed actor, who now works training salespeople––Donaldson sets up an allegory of acting inside the film. Matt’s bombast, both gross and uncomfortably captivating, is the foil for Sam’s subtlety and sensitivity. He yells, he tosses off insults; she laughs once, under her breath. The extended campfire scene, which ends with his just-past-the-border-of-ambiguous proposition, begins as a storytelling session in which Sam critiques her dad’s performance. Matt is a better storyteller, pulling focus toward himself, and when he goes for self-mythology, McCarthy speaks quietly, allowing the self-pity of the narrative to do the work. Mostly he keeps his focus down, at the fire or the ground, highlighting the self-involvement that would enable an adult to proposition their friend’s kid and also showing us a layer of subconscious self-awareness––on some level, he’s ashamed. Sam glances back and forth, at Matt, at the fire, at the tent where her dad is sleeping. Donaldson keeps the camera close to Collias throughout the scene so that we see her unimpeded, but after Matt’s suggestion that she come in his tent, we see her face partially obscured by his head in the foreground of the frame, pulling focus to her eyes and the tension, even fear, caused by his incursion.
I was reminded of another campfire scene with a startlingly naturalistic performance by a young actor, the one between River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves in Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho. Collias’s performance owes something to Phoenix’s, with its melancholy attentiveness, knowing but guileless. His character is unmoored in literal ways; Sam is materially comfortable, a middle-class college-bound kid, but also unprotected. In Van Sant’s film the drama derives from self-exposure (Phoenix’s character confesses his love to his friend) while Donaldson gives us almost the inverse: Sam begins the scene relatively relaxed and open, even showing some aggression as she describes her dad’s life, but ends it with the recognition of her vulnerability. Her confession––often a test of an actor’s skill: the moment where the character has to reveal something that scares them––comes the next day, when, alone for a minute with her dad, she tells him Matt was “weird to me.”
This scene also underscores the contrast between Sam’s presentation to her dad and Collias’s performance for the audience. Sam is agitated and tense as she tries to articulate what happened, playing down its emotional meaning. Collias, though, shows us exactly the emotional effect of Matt’s infringement. She makes an expression unlike any we have seen her make in the rest of the film: she furrows her brow so intensely it makes a mountain range on her forehead. And she holds it there throughout the scene, keeping us in that frozen moment of disbelief that her dad’s instinct in the face of such a violation would be to protect himself from it. It’s shocking that her dad doesn’t see the effort that it takes for her to speak.
This is what differentiates Collias’s performance from that of the young actors I described in a 2016 Film Comment essay as “recessive,” a style I read alongside the narrative content of abandoned children. Kristen Stewart, for instance, who often plays characters who hold back their emotions––characters who themselves have insecure attachments––always seems to me to be playing that withholding on both levels, as the character and as the actor. Her acting often reads to me as that of someone critical of her fame and suspicious of the audience (I don’t mean this as a criticism; it’s compelling). Collias’s performance in Good One instead offers the audience an open window, even as her character closes it. At the end of the film, when Sam stages a small but decisive rebellion from her dad and Matt, we sense that secure attachment––to us, the viewers of the film––enables it. “You don’t need them,” we think, and we mean it.