An Appreciation of Ryan Gosling: He's Always Been So Much More Than A Pretty Face

 

 

Leading up to Oscar Night, one of the most anticipated moments was the performance of 'I'm Just Ken’ from Barbie. I think it may have been the most anticipated performance of an Oscar-nominated song since ‘In the Shallows’ from A Star is Born in 2019.

It started the same way with the singer of the song Ryan Gosling starting to sing in the audience and Gosling walked up to the stage. But whereas Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga’s performance was ultimately toned down (and just as in 2019 Cooper was in the audience when the performance began) Gosling exploded. It is not the first time he has performed an Oscar-nominated song on live television (he famously did for ‘City of Stars’ in 2017 when it seemed like La La Land’s night) but his entire performance was part rock concert, part Broadway show stopped and the entire audience responded.

Gosling is so handsome that it is astonishing when you consider he has been in the industry for nearly thirty years. He spent his career as a child actor appearing as a regular in two Canadian series including Young Hercules. He did not break on to the scene until The Notebook and he hasn’t left since. He is one of the great movie stars and sex symbols of Hollywood, and it’s not like he’s lacking for recognition. But appreciation, that may very well be another story.

Because while Ryan Gosling is a sex symbol and a movie star, he is also one of the great dramatic actors of our time. Indeed, I know I will court controversy by saying this but I wanted Gosling to get nominated for Barbie more than I wanted Greta Gerwig or Margot Robie. Gerwig and Robie, as we all know have gotten more than share of recognition from the Oscars over their careers. But the Supporting Actor nomination Gosling got was only the third Oscar nomination in his entire career and when you consider that he has been part of so many films that have been part of the Oscar conversation in the last decade, it really does seem like we’ve refused to acknowledge he’s more than just a pretty face. Because there are four films that received major Oscar nominations over his long career – and at least two more that were major contenders during that period – that he was somehow not nominated for.

Gosling’s career, from 2001 to 2010 at least, is far closer to that of being the star of the independent film industry rather than the heartthrob we know him as. Indeed, The Notebook is something of an aberration compared to all of the films he was doing that decade. Indeed his range was clear in his first leading role in the controversial The Believer. Gosling played Danny, a young Jewish man who begins to develop an anti-Semitic philosophy. (This story is in fact based on a member of the Klan in the 1960s who was later revealed to be Jewish.). The first feature of Henry Bean, the film was nominated for four Independent Spirit Awards and Gosling a nomination for Best Male Lead. The Chicago Film Critics nominated him as “Most Promising Newcomer’ a recognition that was more prescient than many of them are.

One sees a parallel between Gosling and Leonardo DiCaprio in this respect. Both men began their careers as child actors working mostly in TV. DiCaprio worked more consistently in the early years but much of his career pre Titanic fit his desire to be a character actor rather than a movie star. His films were by and large more in the independent film industry that box office studios from What’s Eating Gilber Grape to This Boy’s Life and Marvin’s Room. After the success of Titanic, Di Caprio did little work for the next four years and when he did return to movies he tended to work with great directors, not merely becoming Scorsese’s most frequent collaborator in this century (a decision that paid great dividends for both men) but also working with craftsmen such as Edward Zwick in Blood Diamond and Spielberg in Catch Me if You Can.

Similarly Gosling’s   follow-up  movies to The Notebook were not rom-coms or action films but keeping within the independent film industry. His follow-up was Stay a film written by David Benioff (before he became the co-showrunner of Game of Thrones.) But during the next four years he made three brilliant movies that launched him to the top tier of great actors, yet for which he only received recognition from the Oscars once.

Gosling got his first Oscar nomination for Half Nelson. In it he played Dan Donne, an inner city junior high school teacher with a drug problem who forms a relationship with one of his students, played by Shareeka Epps. He also coaches the girls basketball team and bucks the curriculum of historical facts, choosing to discuss concepts such as dialectics.

While a solid teacher, his life is a mess. He barely gets along with his family and treats most women poorly. Drey is in both his class and basketball teams and has a similar messy life. Her parents are divorced and both barely pay attention to her. Her older brother Mike is in prison for selling drugs for a local dealer (played by Anthony Mackie) Mike took the fall for the dealer and he now protects Drey whether she wants it or not. One day Drey catches Dan high on crack in the girl’s locker room. They formed a friendship that most see as inappropriate. Both know they can not fix their own lives but they believe that they can help the other.

If you’d only seen Gosling in The Notebook it must have been a shock to see him practically out of control and not really that likeable. But it was yet another example of how Gosling is far more than just a pretty face. While Gosling’s nomination was the only one the film received, he and Shareeka Epps won many awards from other critics organizations. At the Independent Spirit Awards, Half Nelson was one of the most nominated films, receiving six nominations. Gosling took the trophy for Best Male Lead and Epps for Best Female Lead. (The rest of the major awards were won by Little Miss Sunshine.

Lars and the Real Girl, Gosling’s next major movie is technically a romantic comedy but if anything it’s more of a departure than Half Nelson was.  Craig Gillespie and Emily Oliver worked together to write a screenplay that under no realistic circumstances should have worked and as a result produced one of my favorite films.

Gosling plays Lars, a man who is suffering from some kind of emotional disturbance. Extremely introverted, he lives with his sister (played superbly by Emily Mortimer) and her husband. They are expected a child and both are concerned about Lars. Then one day Lars tells them that he has a new girlfriend. Both are cautiously optimistic – until they see that is an anatomically correct doll that he has named Bianca.

Gus (Paul Schneider) reacts horribly to this but Karin is more patient. Both go to see his therapist Dagmar (Patricia Clarkson) who has a visit with Lars. And then under the advice of Dagmar, they decide not to break the bubble. Because Lars is admired throughout the small town they live in, everyone treats Bianca seriously as if she is a real person. Lars has her in a wheelchair, says she is mute and explains patiently why she doesn’t eat.

Just summarizing the film, anyone can see that this movie should not have worked at all – and I can only imagine how much work Oliver had to get the script optioned much less filmed. The reason I love it so much is because at no time in the movie, other than Gus’ initial reaction, which is understandable, does anyway dismiss Lars’ delusions. Everyone in the film treats this perfectly matter-of-factly. No one ever tries to puncture the bubble.

And none of this works without Gosling who, after seeing this movie, I knew was one of the great actors of our time. How many actors would look at this script and say it was ridiculous? Had Gosling made a single step wrong in his performance, the movie would have been ridiculed and his career very well could have ended. But he never steps wrong once, never tries to make a joke of it, and because of it while this is a funny movie, we never laugh at Lars once. The situation is ridiculous but Lars isn’t.

I think the reason for the recognition is because we also suffer from loneliness and the inability to connect. There is not even an implication that Lars is using the doll for sex, what it is built for, but to try and find a way to make a human connection. In the midst of the movie he actually does start to make a connection with someone he likes and he begins to realize how he can move forward. By the end of the film, one of the townspeople tells Karin that she’s come to like Bianca and the odd part is, so has the viewer.

Throughout 2007 Gosling was considered a likely contender for a Best Actor nomination. He was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical and also received a SAG nomination. The movie itself did very well with critics groups as well, with Mortimer and Nancy Oliver receiving both nominations and awards. But when the nominations came out, the only nomination the film received was for Best Screenplay. All five of the nominations were solid ones – Viggo Mortensen’s nomination for Eastern Promises is one of the better ones – but many of the showier performances prevailed over Gosling’s nuances.

Gosling did not make another movie for three years and when he return to awards consideration he returned to an even more difficult romantic movie – something you might call a romantic tragedy.

Blue Valentine was one of the more undervalued films of 2010. Entertainment Weekly wanted it considered for Best Picture and in a lesser year (which 2010 wasn’t) it could have been. The film tells two parallel stories of Dean (Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams). We see them falling in love at age 26 and then six years later they are married with a child and the love has clearly fallen away. The film was a tour de force before Gosling and Williams and I think it helped immensely that both performer started out as child actors.  When one knows about young love we also know how easily it can fall apart.

One of the scenes in the film has gone down in history. It’s not long after Dean and Cindy first met and they are on a kind of date. Dean wants to try and serenade her, but he says he’s not very good at it so he tells her he has to sing kind of goofy. Gosling, maybe for the first time onscreen, demonstrates his musical abilities when he sings badly that old standard: “You Always Hurt The One You Love’. The performance is somewhat silly but when it was played not only in the trailer of the film, but seen in the movie, it is one of the most heartbreaking moments you’ll ever seen. In the midst of it Cindy is childishly dancing and there’s all the aspect of young love, of two people who are discovering something, who think they have all the time in the world.

This is contrast with the scenes in the present. They have a daughter but it’s clear to Cindy (but not yet to Dean) that their marriage is over. Dean doesn’t believe this so that night he tries to romance Cindy by taking her to a motel that is ‘erotic’.

The scene that follows nearly got Blue Valentine labeled with an NC-17 rating and actually led to it being released in an ‘unrated’ version on DVD. The thing is, while there is nudity and sex in it, it is one of the least erotic – and saddest – sex scenes I’ve ever seen onscreen. The way the two of them act around each other, it’s as if they seem to have forgotten how this works. Much of what happens seems to be based on muscle memory than anything resemblance love or even the joy of sex. It actually gives lie to the famous statement that the worst sex you ever had is better than anything else because by the time its over it has confirmed to both of them that not only is the last time, but that this time has proved they shouldn’t be together any more.

Williams is one of the most gifted performers of my generation and she is long overdue an Academy Award. She has always had the ability to plays wives and mothers who are burdened down by some great secrets and this is no exception. You get the feeling watching her that’s she had to be the grownup in this relationship for far too long. Gosling’s role is harder to play because while he is at least good looking in the earlier scenes, he doesn’t resemble Ryan Gosling and by the end of the movie, he looks as if he aged fifteen years in the last six. It’s a dark performance for him.

Just as with Lars and the Real Girl Gosling was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actor as Williams was for Best Actress. Both Gosling, Williams and the film received many nominations from Critics. (Cianfrance was nominated for Best Director at Sundance at Cannes. Gosling was again a favorite for a Best Actor nomination, but when they came out Blue Valentine only received one nomination – for Williams. It’s harder to justify Gosling’s exclusion this time, especially considering that one of the actors nominated ahead of him was Javier Bardem for the overrated Biutiful. Once again the Academy ignored subtlety in favor of showiness.

But the next year Gosling finally broke through as a great performer, striking gold in three films. The movie that officially put him on the map was, of course, Crazy Stupid Love. And let’s not kid ourselves, that’s one of the greatest romantic comedies in history

I love this movie even more than Lars, but honestly all of us do. It’s not just because of Gosling, obviously, Steve Carell plays one of the best performances in his career and begins to show the range that will allow him to crossover into dramas not much later. Julianne Moore gives one of the most hysterical comedic performances that makes you wonder why she doesn’t do comedy more often. And none of us will forget the wonderful three scenes that Marisa Tomei does in the film, honestly, she should have won a second Oscar for the parent-teacher conference.

But the real reason we love this film is Ryan Gosling, though if we’re being honest it’s because of Gosling and Emma Stone. As we saw last night, the two of them seem to joined at the hip when it comes to receiving recognition (though when it comes to Oscars, Stone has a bigger advantage.) I had already fallen in love with Stone in Easy A which officially put her on the map. Crazy Stupid Love assured she would never leave it again.

Are there a more wonderful sequence of events when Hannah learns she is not being proposed to, drinks an entire glass of gin clearly hating it, and then walks out of the restaurant into the bar where Jacob is and goes: “You!” At this point, remember, Jacob has been the alpha male the entire film, seeming cool, calm and utterly serene. When Hannah propels herself into his arm and kisses him, he is left at a loss for words for the first time in the movie.

The scene that follows, as we have learned later, was improvised almost entirely by Stone and Gosling which is shocking because it seems so perfectly written. How many people watched Jacob take his shirt off and did not have Hannah’s immediate reaction because it was, frankly, what you can imagine any woman doing when they first see Gosling shirtless. The entire scene is both hysterical and adorable (“No! I am sexy!) and I think everybody in America who saw the movie started to ship the possibility that Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling would get married for real. I imagine the fact that both are happily married to other people has done nothing to diminish that hope.

Gosling was, just as he had been the year before, nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Comedy. He was also nominated for Best Actor in a Drama, and in all honesty, he could have gotten it for another film.

The Ides of March has a bad reputation because it was clearly an Oscar bait movie. George Clooney wrote, directed and starred in it, the other leads including such great talent as Paul Giamatti. Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jeffrey Wright, Evan Rachel Wood and Marisa Tomei again. An adaptation of a play about a Presidential campaign, Gosling has the lead role as an idealistic staffer who believes in the front-runner for President (Clooney) and gets caught in a web of deception between the rival campaigns who are manipulating him. It was even based on a play by Beau Willimon who not long after would become the showrunner of House of Cards. No movie could live up to the hype and I imagine many thought that it dominated the Golden Globe nominations was a sign Hollywood had. (The film did receive a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.)

For all the flaws in the movie, Gosling’s performance is not one of them. He starts with a kind of idealism that has not yet been beaten down, then as he becomes a pawn between the two campaigns he gets more cynical. By the end of the film he has realized what has happened and the scene at the end between him and Clooney is genuinely riveting. There’s something very frightening in Gosling’s performance as he tells Clooney with a very strict tone what he is going to do next and how things are going to go from here. At the final scene there’s a poker face to his expression as he takes his media interview that is actually kind of unnerving from where he started the film.

Just as impressive was his work in Drive, Nicolas Wending Refn’s superb thriller where he plays a character only known as Driver. This was the first movie where we got the sense that Gosling could do darker, more frightening roles, the kind of performances we got in Blade Runner 2049. Playing a stuntman we know nothing about, we watch as he goes deeper into the underworld and finds himself prepared for it. I don’t entirely blame the Oscars for not considering him, the dominating performance in this movie belongs to Albert Brooks, who arguably gives the greatest performance in his career (He’s the one the Oscars stiffed.) But the fact that Gosling made all three of these brilliant movies in the same year, movies which show a range that few actors do in a longer period – and got nothing from the Oscars was one of their greatest injustices. (Though if I’m being fair, they did nominate Gary Oldman for Tinker Tailor Solider Spy and Damian Bichir for A New Life and realistically neither performer was considered a remote possibility going into the nominations. So maybe it balances out.)

If there is a trend in Gosling’s work as a performer, it is that many of his best performances come at the hands of independent filmmakers. It may not be a coincidence that the two most recent films he’s gotten nominated for Oscars for are prominent figures were independent filmmakers: Damian Chazelle’s Whiplash was a major contender at the Spirits before Gosling gave performances for him in both La La Land and First Man and of course Greta Gerwig was a fixture in the independent film industry for years. We may also be undervaluing him because for all the ability he has shown in the films I’ve listed it doesn’t seem like he’s acting in many of them. One is reminded of Jeff Bridges, who was for decades underappreciated by Hollywood because his acting was so natural that no one thought to give him credit. I can only hope it doesn’t take Gosling the more the nearly forty years it took to give Bridges his first Oscar – but then again, he’s already been acting for nearly thirty years.

One hopes that, just as with so many other great matinee idols including Clooney, the rest of Hollywood finally gets to realize that Gosling is more than just a pretty face. He demonstrated it a big way in last night’s Oscar performance, and perhaps eventually we will see him do so in another kind of dramatic film. Gosling is one of the most versatile and underrecognized actors of my generation, and I hope that eventually we get to see him on Oscar night accepting an award instead of just applauding his co-stars or delivering show-stopping musical numbers.