When Adrien Brody won the Best Actor Oscar on Sunday night, the The Brutalist star settled in for a long haul. He ruminated on his career, he thanked many of the usual suspects, and he implored the orchestra swell designed to play him off to recede, promising he wouldn’t be “egregious” with the time. All in all, he meandered on for five minutes and forty seconds, and apparently broke an 80-year Oscar record in the process; the previous longest-ever speech was five and a half minutes for Greer Garson accepting her Best Actress prize for Mrs. Miniver back in 1943. (This was ten years before the Oscars began producing an annual telecast.) Brody behaved as a man who had waited a long time to get up on that stage.
Yet Brody was not a first-time winner. This was his second Best Actor statuette, 21 years after winning for The Pianist—another movie where he plays a Holocaust survivor. Granted, 21 years is a long interval; longer than Brando waited in between On the Waterfront and The Godfather, and the second-longest gap ever between a pair of leading-actor wins (the champion is Anthony Hopkins, for the 29 years between The Silence Of the Lambs and The Father). By speaking at great length, as if he never expected to have a public platform ever again, Brody was very much playing into the media narrative about his Brutalist performance: That he was finally reclaiming the great promise he showed in The Pianist after years in the career wilderness.
It’s true that Brody did not spend two decades on par with, say, the late Gene Hackman, who waited 21 years between a leading and a supporting Oscar, and in the meantime appeared in blockbusters, prestige pictures, and everything in between, with multiple additional nominations along the way, never leaving time to fall into a real slump. By contrast, there are a shocking number of Brody movies you’ve likely never even heard of, including a pair of barely-released thrillers for director Paul Solet (one of which he co-wrote!) and a sketch-comedy movie called InAPPropriate Comedy, where he plays a character called Flirty Harry – a tough cop who speaks in (get this) gay innuendos! While he was at it, why didn’t he simply spin off the SNL rasta character he did against everyone’s will?
Yet despite these seeming blotches – the likes of which he shares with countless former superstars and anyone who appeared in Movie 43 – Brody’s between-Oscar career hasn’t been quite as checkered as advertised. In fact, for a guy with enough charisma to be a leading man and enough quirks to be a character actor, it’s been appropriately pitched between those two poles.
First, let’s appreciate Brody’s surprising geek cred: He was the nerdy writer hero of Peter Jackson’s King Kong remake, which rules; he went back to a jungle environment for Predators, an underrated sequel; and he made a couple of impressively dark sci-fi thrillers with The Jacket and Splice, the latter of which includes him taking… certain risks, not so much in his performance style as his agreeing to play a scientist who does something pretty terrible with one of his experiments. It’s the kind of scene that turns audiences vocally against a movie, and Brody deserves a lot of credit for powering through.
Brody is also terrific in the underseen caper comedy The Brothers Bloom, from Rian Johnson (Knives Out). He and Mark Ruffalo play lifelong con men who look out for each other, even as Stephen (Ruffalo) sometimes rolls the more sensitive Bloom (Brody) into his schemes. Johnson, a master of genre riffs, hits just the right tone of whimsy with genuine emotion and danger underneath, and Brody’s romance with the vivacious but lonely Penelope (Rachel Weisz) is a perfect use of his hangdog charm.
But the shorthand for Brody’s career for much of the past two decades is that he’s mainly done crap, and bit parts for Wes Anderson – an oversimplification of how vital Brody has become to Anderson’s rep company (and, again, ignoring that Splice and Predators are really cool). Several of Brody’s roles for Anderson are indeed on the smaller side, though this undersells just how funny he is in The French Dispatch, where he gets several of the movie’s biggest laughs as an art dealer who attempts to step in and argue on behalf of an imprisoned (and potentially quite lucrative) artist during his parole hearing. (“Surely there oughta be a double standard for this sort of predicament.”) In Dispatch and in a similarly concise part in The Grand Budapest Hotel, he moves at the speed of screwball comedy, speaking to a range well outside the mournfulness he plays up in his Oscar parts.
There is mourning, too, in his real showcase Anderson role, for The Darjeeling Limited, where he plays Peter, one of three siblings taking a train trip across India (and one of the two who is doing so reluctantly). As in Brothers Bloom, he has real brotherly chemistry with his co-stars, here Anderson vets Owen Wilson and Jason Schwartzman, and though Anderson has been accused of flattening his various actors into the same deadpan deliverers of sad-eyed whimsy, the differences within this family are quickly discernible with hardly any immediate exposition. Brody might have been at a disadvantage, having never appeared in a previous Anderson movie nor (unlike his two co-stars) written one with the director, yet he anchors the film as a man who chafes at his controlling older brother Francis (Wilson) while also plainly running away from his impending fatherhood back home. Typical grown-up-coming-of-age stuff, but played with real precision. Late in the film, the brothers attempt to rescue some children who have fallen in a river, and the stunned heartbreak that crosses Brody’s face after he emerges from the water carrying one of their bodies – “I couldn’t save mine,” he says – is one of the most memorable moments of any Anderson picture. Acting for Anderson may seem like it’s all deadpan non-reactions, but his players obviously have to condense a lot of feeling and life into small gesture and short lines. Brody does that as well as anyone.
He’s great in The Brutalist, too, to be clear – better, for my money, than in the movie that got him that first Oscar. The narrative of a former wunderkind circling back around for redemption may be attractive, but it doesn’t really reflect the fullness of his career. That would be like trying to cram two decades of experience into a six-minute speech.
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Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.