Character Performance

Character Performance Over Character Goals



Character Performance Over Character Goals

Introduction

Character-driven movies offer the audience a chance to absorb, understand and reflect on the various elements of life. They give the viewers an opportunity to explore and relate their own experiences with that of the characters in a film. Character-driven films are more concerned with studying people, as opposed to the development of an elaborate plot. Smoke (1995, directed by Wayne Wang and Paul Auster) and Adaptation (2002, directed by Spike Jonze) are examples of two successful films where character performance is the key element in the execution of the plot.

In the film Smoke, the intertwined lives of a handful of characters are brought together under one roof. This place is a cigar shop in Brooklyn run by Auggie Wren. Every day a few old, along with a few new characters visit the shop, and their life stories are interweaved by the director through the common issue of fractured family relationships. The film revolves around the idea of being able to notice how every day, something in people's lives changes. Although these changes may be subtle, but when one slows down and stops to observe their daily routine, he or she realizes the giant leaps that have taken place over the course of time.

On the other hand, Adaptation focuses on the development of a diverse range of characters that have the responsibility of living up to the real-life experiences of the film's scriptwriter Charlie Kaufman. The film's specialty is the lead character's ability to play off dual roles with perfection. This forces the audience to believe that the lead actor actually has a twin brother. The film encompasses three different time periods showing a nursery owner stealing endangered species of plants, an author writing a novel about it and the lead character trying to adapt the novel into a screenplay.

One of the key untheorised areas in film studies is the importance of performance in the film. The mark of a good actor is the ability to create and communicate a personality throughout the performance of a given character. It is through the character performance that the audience's emotional responses are elicited, and there is a creation of love or hatred for the people in the story. Also, the character performance becomes a judging factor in declaring the success or failure of a film.

Discussion

The characters in a film should be treated like a complicated network of myths or discourse that are never complete and cannot be explored or examined fully. The key is to create such characters even in films that follow the stereotypical setting of characters. This means that actions taken by the character during the course of the film can have multiple reasons and interpretations in order to let the audience enjoy the uncertainty and denial of stereotypes. There are three ways of looking at how a character can be dealt with. Firstly, the character can be a process which means the state of ...