You're the Top: The Five Best Over-the-Top Performances

Whenever I watch a movie and observe actors at work, I am always tuned into the little moments of a performance. In my opinion, 99.9% of the time the key to a decent performance lies in the subtlety and restraint an actor brings to a role. Walking the line between the genuinely powerful and the ridiculously melodramatic can be a tricky one; indeed, it's a line that even the most gifted of actors cross at least once.

Yet there are exceptions to the "nuance = great acting" theory. There are some roles that require an over-the-top portrayal in order to present the extreme realities and natures of the character and/or the story being told. Watching an actor totally devour the scenery and catapult through the roof, when it's done right, can be a damn entertaining experience.

Here are my picks for The Five Best Over-the-Top Performances. These choices are by no means bad performances (four out of the five were nominated for Oscars). They are human explosives detonating before our eyes to best serve their characters and the films in which those characters play. And they're also a hell of a lot of fun.

5. Peter Finch, "Network" (1976). Peter Finch was one of the greatest actors who ever lived (if you doubt me, rent "Sunday Bloody Sunday"). But it is his role as the slowly-crumbling newscaster Howard Beale in "Network" that will forever be his trademark performance. Finch, who won a posthumous Best Actor Oscar for his work here, has so many terrific scenes; his Howard is a whacked-out time-bomb lamenting corporate greed, American ignorance, and the soulless crap factory called television. It's an important performance that Finch fuels with a frightening bravado. He's mad as hell and isn't going to take it anymore -- but, thankfully, he takes us along for this wild ride to bedlam...and, in many ways, to truth.




4. Robert DeNiro, "Cape Fear" (1991). When it comes to nut-job psychopaths, no one can compete with Robert DeNiro's Max Cady. Just released from prison, Cady exacts a sadistic, menacing, and gory revenge on the lawyer (and the family of the lawyer) whom he felt was responsible for his imprisonment. It's such a riveting over-the-top performance, perfectly in keeping with Cady's psychotic gravitas, that it's next to impossible to take your eyes off him. It's not easy to be the standout in a luminous cast of acting heavyweights -- DeNiro shares the screen with Nick Nolte, Jessica Lange, and Juliette Lewis -- but his overboard (and I mean that quite literally) Max Cady is a crap-in-your-pants bogeyman that often had me saying, "Oh, there are other actors in this movie?".




3. Faye Dunaway, "Mommie Dearest" (1981). Let's face it: the only reason "Mommie Dearest" remains so memorable and such an important pillar of popular culture is because of Faye Dunaway's iconic performance as Joan Crawford. What's so unsettling and entertaining about this portrayal is that it's more than likely pretty close to how the real Joan behaved (at least if daughter Christina is to be believed). Even today, it's easy to laugh at Dunaway's extremes in this role, and it's hard to tell whether or not she approached the character with this campy intent. Legend has it that before the film was released, the buzz was that Dunaway had given a powerful and serious dramatic performance. The end result, regardless of it's original intent, was nothing serious or dramatic, but it sure as hell was powerful. Dunaway chews the scenery with such ferocity that it's amazing there were any sets still standing on the studio lot after filming wrapped. And where, I ask you, where we would we be without lines like: "NO. WIRE. HANGERS!"; "Tina! Bring me the ax!"; and, my personal favorite, "I am not one of your FANS!"? Hell, the drag queens alone owe a huge debt to Faye Dunaway's brilliantly insane performance. Note: the clip below is a "best-of" collection of Faye/Joan's crazier moments. Look for another of my favorite Christina lines: "Jesus Christ". Classic.




2. Diane Ladd, "Wild at Heart" (1990). Filmmaker David Lynch has given the world a variety of over-the-top performances by a variety of actors. You might even say that an over-the-top performance is a prerequisite for any actor in a David Lynch film. Among the best, Grace Zabriskie in "Inland Empire", Dennis Hopper in "Blue Velvet", and Catherine E. Coulson (in a fantastically hammy performance as the well-remembered Log Lady) in "Twin Peaks". But towering above all of them is Diane Ladd and her stellar grenade of a performance in "Wild at Heart". Ladd plays Marietta Fortune, an obsessed and unbalanced mother doing everything she can to get her beloved daughter (played by Ladd's real-life daughter Laura Dern) back from the likes of smarmy Nicholas Cage (and really, who can blame her?). This performance is absolutely delicious: Ladd's choices for her character are by turns strange, terrifying, brave, disturbing, perverse -- and consistently effective. She doesn't so much chew the scenery as she does swallow it whole and throw it all back up (see clip below). Oh, and she likes lipstick. A lot.




1. Gloria Swanson, "Sunset Blvd." (1950). Norma Desmond could easily rank as one of the greatest characters in the history of film. And that is only so because of Gloria Swanson's unforgettable performance. Desmond, once a superstar of silent film, has grown weird and reclusive in her Hollywood mansion, with just her dead chimp and an ex-husband-turned-personal-servant for companionship. But when struggling writer Joe Gillis (the awesome William Holden) enters her life, Desmond's entire existence is transformed into something that is simultaneously hopeful and tragic. It bears mentioning that Swanson herself was a bit of a waning star in those days, which just adds to the bravery and intensity of her performance. Her work here is about as far from realism as one can get: Swanson's Norma is all singsong voice, buggy eyes, and grand sweeping gestures. But this is precisely what makes the performance so flawless. Silent film actors had to do everything big and exaggerated in order to successfully pull off a role, and Norma Desmond, so lost and delusional, is still trapped in that soundless era of her youthful fame.