Best of buster keaton movies full#
In the book The Look of Buster Keaton, French film critic Robert Benayoun offers a series of insightful essays alongside strikingly rendered images of Keaton's face, in which his solemnity is on full display. That stare undeniably shares heritage with Keaton. There is barely a glimmer of grief, just a stony stare into the middle distance as Isaac's big brown eyes concentrate on the road ahead, but still betray the sadness within. Down the road and more deeply exasperated, Llewyn reveals that he's a solo act "now" because his partner Mike "threw himself off the George Washington Bridge". But there is a perceptible smirk, a lick of the lips and a glance out the window that says: "this guy is unbelievable".
When he discovers that Llewyn is a Welsh name, and launches into a long and uninteresting story, Isaac's face remains placid. Upon snoring himself awake he begins to prod Llewyn with both questions and cane. Llewyn rides up front with beat poet and valet Johnny Five (Garret Hedlund) and Goodman's cocky, cane-toting jazz musician reclines in the backseat. There is one scene in Inside Llewyn Davis during which Isaac's sardonic melancholia feels particularly Keatonesque – although the entire sequence where he carries a cat onto the subway, his face glazed in faint irritation, before having to lurch after said feline on a crowded carriage, could be a silent comedy – and that's the car ride with John Goodman's Roland Turner. As both Keaton and Isaac convey, a limited palette can still paint many colours.
And so Isaac subtracted smiling from his arsenal of expressions to birth a character who is frustrated with the world and everyone in it.īut stillness isn't blankness. "I thought that was a great inspiration for me", says Isaac, who wanted to tap into what he calls a "comedy of resilience" and to adopt a facial expression that "doesn't really change but has a melancholy to it". Speaking to Scott Feinberg on the Awards Chatter podcast, Isaac reveals that the starting point for his singer-songwriter character Llewyn in The Coen Brothers' folk music odyssey was indeed Buster Keaton. That calmness or stoicism, despite deep inner turmoil, is something that can also be located in Oscar Isaac's critically-acclaimed performance in Inside Llewyn Davis (2013). He is a picture of enraptured calm amid the clamour. As an excited crowd gathers, yelling and gesticulating, to celebrate and capture the marriage of two famous individuals, Buster is caught in the melee and squashed against the woman who will claim his heart. Stevens cites Keaton's "self-contained stillness" as his "secret weapon", and we can see its weaponisation in the opening sequence of The Cameraman (1928) in which Buster aspires to be a newsreel cameraman in order to impress a girl. His type of minimalism, stoicism and lyricism transcended the 20th Century, and can be seen on-screen now perhaps more than ever. It is exactly this prescience and timelessness that makes Buster Keaton a figure ripe for reference in contemporary performance.
Best of buster keaton movies movie#
As Slate's movie critic and author Dana Stevens points out in Camera Man, a new biography-meets-cultural-history about Buster Keaton and the birth of the 20th Century, " was ahead of his time in many ways".
Nowadays we applaud performances that exhibit this level of restraint, wowed by microscopic gestures that hint at subtext, but refuse to spell it out. His unrelenting imperturbability was misinterpreted as a lack of emotional expression, or perhaps acting skill. Film historian Peter Kramer, in his essay The Makings of a Comic Star, contends that Keaton's "deadpan performance was seen as a highly inappropriate response to the task of creating characters which were rounded and believable". The silent-film star launched himself between rooftops, battled storms and sand dunes, boarded moving vehicles – and frequently trailed behind them, perfectly horizontal and as suspended as our disbelief – all in the name of comedy, and all while seeming unfazed. Buster Keaton was something of an enigma to his own era.
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