Chalamet, with Dune on the horizon
Brief looks at CMBYN; Little Women; The King; and A Rainy Day in New York
With the opening this Friday of Dune, Timothée Chalamet, heading a large, seasoned ensemble, will elevate his career and inevitably bring renewed scrutiny to his acting. And there’ll be even more of him to see before year’s end. The French Dispatch also opens this Friday, and in December he’ll appear in the all-star Don’t Look Up.
Like most people, I first saw Chalamet in 2017 in Call Me By Your Name. The Andre Aciman novel the movie was based on had deeply affected me, as gay friends had warned me it would. Uncannily, Aciman’s enraptured writing conjured some timeworn passions of my own.
Leaving the movie, I asked myself why this young actor seemed so fresh and unforeseen, and, in the movie’s final third, how he’d portrayed heartbreak so piercingly. Many reviewers said they hadn’t encountered an actor quite like him before. I felt the same way, and since then I’ve kept trying to estimate Chalamet’s impact on audiences.
I think that four of Chalamet’s movies give us clues about the pull he exerts and show the acting breadth he’s demonstrated with a variety of directors. Maybe they also hint at what’s ahead.
Call Me By Your Name (2017)
Elio and Oliver (Armie Hammer) form a bond that deepens into a rapt cherishing
The teenaged Elio, summer vacationing in 1983 with his parents at their lush northern Italian villa, is uncertain about why he’s so taken with the handsome, self-confident Oliver (Armie Hammer), a visiting graduate student who’s come to work with Elio’s professor father.
Elio warily circles the cheerfully vain Oliver, who’s apparently so used to being pursued that in his relationships he always runs the show. When Oliver eventually scrawls a note to Elio, it’s no surprise that it’s a command: Grow up. See you at midnight. The comedy and pathos of the movie is that Oliver never courts Elio. He perceptively waits for Elio to discover for himself just how in thrall he wants to be.
The movie’s director, Luca Guadagnino, similarly guides and watches over, without much apparent prompting, Chalamet’s take on a lusty youth chasing he knows not what. Elio’s traversal from boy to man is speeded up over the course of the summer, but still not quite complete by movie’s end. The “growing up” Oliver urges will have only begun.
Chalamet’s triumph in the role is that he never lets it seem as though Elio is being manipulated. Elio may be awkward or coltishly brazen. But the randy 17-year-old also attempts a slick countermove by gamboling with lovely, patient Marzia (Esther Garrel), while dallying with, then falling hard for, Oliver. For the audience it’s both pleasurable and slowly disquieting to watch Chalamet overload Elio’s senses, with dreamy, resplendent Italy agitating him on.
Oliver succumbs to Elio, too, yet until nearly the end of their summer he’s either a bemused observer, or, gradually, a highly interested shepherd, of Elio’s racing hormones. Early on we’ve realized that Elio is the one we’ll need to fear for. Tenderness and sex, both given and received, entangle and inflame him. The affair hasn’t even remotely cooled at summer’s sudden end, when Oliver boards a train, headed for the U.S.
In that station platform moment, Chalamet makes the departure not just sad, but agonizingly transitional. The shaken boy, still not a man, has to begin pulling himself together. For the rest of the movie Elio weighs joy against disillusionment, growing up against crushing loss. Brought off when Chalamet was aged 20, this cunning, headlong performance startled not just critics but an industry. His Best Actor Oscar nomination was no surprise.
Little Women (2019)
Opposite Saoirse Ronan’s Jo, Chalamet and his director keep Laurie accessible, never wild
I get the impression, without, of course, knowing for sure, that Chalamet is at his most easygoing in his partnership with the director Greta Gerwig. They seem to work together on tranquil terms and perhaps in the future they could become a refuge for one another, a source of mutual support. Under her direction he appears to be at his most relaxed, breathing easily under her gaze, the pair collaborating like gleeful co-conspirators to charm the audience.
Here her camera teasingly fixes him within tableaux, where elements and other actors set him off like a prized objet. It can sometimes feel as though she’s turning him this way and that, the better for the camera to behold him. But what’s most important here is that Gerwig fully comprehends what she’s got hold of: Chalamet’s paradoxical ability to let a scene build around him without commandeering it.
He plays self-absorbed men in both Lady Bird (2017) and Little Women, but working with Gerwig, as an actor he seems happily ego-less. This adaptation of Alcott’s 1869 novel frets over the drifting, forlorn Laurie, inviting us to cluck and worry over him as the March sisters do. We don’t, because this privileged young man seems a lucky fellow, well-liked everywhere he goes.
His momentary dip into decadence in Europe doesn’t deeply wound him. Chalamet’s sunny accessibility leaves not a whiff of regret for Laurie. With the director this tenaciously in his corner, the actor glides through the picture without a ruffle.
Gerwig with Little Women attempts a movie on a scale that few women directors have had a chance to do. She succeeds handsomely. So stately yet fluid is she behind the camera, that a New England fable worthy of Hawthorne feels right on the edge of many frames here. What a stirring adaptation of The Scarlet Letter she might make.
The King (2019)
As Henry V, Chalamet re-sizes a historical figure to fit the seriousness he’s able to bring
Here Chalamet plays a reluctant warrior-monarch. The real Henry V was hardly averse to waging savage war, so to win the audience to the King’s side, this script co-opts Shakespeare, turning Prince Hal into something of a peacenik. Of course, the titans Olivier and Branagh have played Shakespeare’s Henry V onscreen, and that would give any actor or producer pause.
So, in The King we see the lay-about heir to the throne dragooned into the role of a nation’s commanding general. And once the young King uncovers a plot that has lured him into war, he brutally dispatches the perpetrator. All of this seems intended to make a youthful looking Chalamet appear tragically corrupted by power. The ploy mostly works, since Chalamet can mimic Machiavellian solemnity, and he convincingly models the 15th-century costumes.
But he only comes into full gallantry late in the story when Henry confronts his promised bride, Catherine, played with cool poise by Lily Rose-Depp. It’s here Chalamet most seems to be playing opposite an actor he’s fully in tune with. Rose-Depp isn’t the star, but her unhurried gravitas matches his in their scene together, which has more tactile tension than the battle panoramas. For a moment, Director David Michod makes rapt eyes mightier than swords.
It’s Chalamet’s most heavily costumed role, and he moves through it elegantly, even stalwartly in the battle sequences. In comely robes and gleaming armor, he hints at a nascent nobility, and the script’s attempts at verse sit lightly enough on his tongue. It’s a verbal and physical stretch for Chalamet, and suggests the bearing he’ll need to summon in Dune.
A Rainy Day in New York (2019)
Chalamet takes Woody Allen’s lockstep direction easily in stride, with no questions asked
Chalamet’s most unusual draw may be the way he can, without guile, gain an audience’s complicity. Has a young American movie actor ever seemed less vain on camera? He can sometimes perform almost completely from within his own stillness, under a brokered pact with his director – co-creating, without necessarily sharing the director’s aims or quirks.
His most tightly directed performance is in Woody Allen’s A Rainy Day in New York. It’s an understatement to say that Allen’s scripts are dialogue-driven. Far more often than they show, his characters relentlessly tell – tell on, tell off, tell their side of the story, tell lies, tell jokes, tell someone precisely where to go, tell someone else to stifle.
These talk fests weary some viewers. Not me. Fidgety anxiety is built into the modern urban condition as Allen sees it, and I don’t dispute that claim. What’s surprising and enjoyable about Chalamet in this movie is that he rises to the Allen challenge – as the shifty characters’ gripes and grievances zip by – with finesse. He’s more than adept, and luckily here he never needs to bother about being “moving”.
The privileged contrarian Gatsby Welles is yet another clone of Allen’s own bristling fixated personality, and actors cast in many an Allen movie understand that not only line readings but New York survivor’s rhythms are going to carom off one another. Keeping score, your head above water and your cool are cardinal codes. It’s a closed sensibility, and Chalamet craftily gives himself over to it.
As Gatsby is jostled from one set up to another, whether a comical dispute with his brother about the latter’s marriage, the impossible tracking of his girlfriend’s journalistic shenanigans, or trying to throw his mother off about who his girlfriend actually is, Chalamet lets the script be his guide, gives each moment the finely-gauged Manhattan pushiness it needs, and doesn’t ever try to put his own stamp on top of Allen’s.
Who else is in the room?
Currently other distinctive young actors shine, some with a bit more mileage than Chalamet (aged 25). Lucas Hedges (aged 24), Ansel Elgort (aged 27, and musically experienced, which the upcoming West Side Story may draw on) and the British Daniel Kaluuya (aged 32) stand out. Also, apart from his fantasy and sci fi work, British-Nigerian John Boyega (aged 29) gives a catapulting dramatic lead performance in the Small Axe episode Red, White and Blue.
Other arrivals across the Atlantic are promising. Among them: the British Josh O’Connor (aged 31, God’s Own Country, The Crown, Romeo and Juliet, and the upcoming Mothering Sunday and Aisha), the Irish Paul Mescal (aged 25, Normal People, this year’s The Lost Daughter, and the upcoming Foe, opposite Saoirse Ronan) and the British George MacKay (aged 29), 1917, and, coming up, Wolf, opposite Lily Rose-Depp, and the thriller I Came By.
Chalamet surely belongs on this list of probing young actors. But I don’t think anyone at this point would argue that he heads it. Still, in a range of roles he’s fashioned distinctive moments and well-wrought scenes. He hasn’t repeated himself. One can make too much of Chalamet’s meteoric career so far, and in any case it’s way too soon to try to classify him. No one needs to. His raw-boned earnestness should keep audiences wondering what he might do next.