This isn’t in response to any recent movie. No, in fact this is from his second ever movie appearance according to IMDB. Something I came across tonight, a movie of my childhood- Renaissance Man.
The film itself I won’t talk of too much, other than the fact that it stars Danny Devito as a man who works in advertising who is forced to teach hard-to-learn kids in a military school. It’s a very used format, it’s a format what rarely fails too. It is a film upon watching that I wished I left in my childhood as memory, rather than trying to reclaim some nostalgia by revisiting it. In other words, it wasn't great.
Carrying on.... Mark Wahlberg happens to star in this film and something shocked me to my core. Mark Wahlberg can actually act! It’s infamous for taking a bunch of his friends to Hollywood for making a name for him-self; it’s what the TV show the Entourage is all about. But what really shook me, is that I was always under the impression that he was just an actor who slept with the directors (I’m sure there are guy directors more than happily to go bi for him) to get by.
I remember him hazily in a way in Boogie Nights as an unknown actor, then the next I really remember him in is Max Payne. And my personal favourite appearance was in I (heart) Huckabees. Even though he has been a credible actor in a lot of films, A Perfect Storm, Three Kings, Lovely Bones, The Departed, and his latest film The Fighter.
Now on to my point- You never really notice Mark Wahlberg. Often his characters on screen are variations of the plastic 2D cut-outs of a personified self. He is an actor who plays a version of himself in every film. Even the movies in which he’s ‘acting’ it feels as though he’s just acting on a variation of himself. And those variations seem to be limited to a stern-faced, angst-ridden man often being performed in a very wooden way.
What brought about this thought was when I saw him in Renaissance Man. The few scenes that he is in seem to scream with raw acting talent, I was shocked and surprised to see Mark Walhberg with acting chops, and not beef jerky chops(aka stale). My theory behind this is that he’s gradually got more and more comfortable over time and has accepted that people only really want to see Mark Wahlberg rather than the characters he is meant to portray.
Yes you can argue that his acting talent is in the silence of his roles. It’s what he doesn’t do, it’s in his body language. And yes, you can say that and you may be right. What I am trying to grasp at is that he can go beyond this silent archetype character he’s made for himself. And if he doesn’t well, he’ll just be playing cardboard role upon cardboard role until the homeless complain they're running out of mattresses.
Ben Doran
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