RSS
 

Nightingale

11 Jan

Nightingale – directed by Elliott Lester. Tragedy [HBO]. 83 minutes Color 2015.

★★★★★

The Story: A young man videotapes his life because he has no one else to speak to.

~

When you saw the movie Moonlight you were struck by the fact that the story could have been about any race, religion, nationality. It was African-American, yes, but simply a human problem. This led to a close intimacy between audience and movie. The same holds true of Nightingale.

The film and the actor David Oyelowo, were nominated for many awards. Oyelowo won The Black Reel Award For the Best Actor in a TV series and The Critics’ Choice Television Award for The Best Actor in A Movie.

It is no wonder.

For Oyelowo as an actor can present a character of such self-awareness, passion, and intelligence that he becomes quite mysterious to one. This person is disturbed. But just how deep is this disturbance, and what is its etiology? And, well, maybe he isn’t disturbed at all. Maybe he’s right in the head. Maybe the things he seems to have done he didn’t really do. Or maybe he was right to do them.

Oyelowo is the sole actor in the piece. And I watch him as I must watch any actor perfectly suited to his craft. We have before us, that is to say, a body which tells us a lot; it can itself be watched for story. We have a face which is so flexible in its registration that I understand not only what is relevant to the moment, but to the thousand years of human life his ancestors brought into being in this one actor, simultaneously what is relevant and not, vital to and incidental to, God and decoration. And I hear a voice, varied, full, placed – just what an actor needs to get the job done. All this in place, an actor is free to make something with his imagination and his instinct that is worth our attending to. I am in the right place seeing someone in the right place.

Like Room and Sartre’s No Exit and Hitchcock’s Rope, Nightingale takes place in a single interior, here a suburban ranch-house. We never leave the inside of that and we never leave the inside of his mind. No media, not even the stage, lends itself to motion pictures so well as cloistered space, as inner sanctum. For sometimes what we want and what film alone can give is a closing-up, bestowed by unrelieved close-up. Sometimes, the single soul.

See Nightingale.  

 
Comments Off on Nightingale

Posted in ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, David Oyelowo, TRAGEDY

 
 
Rss Feed Tweeter button Facebook button Technorati button Reddit button Myspace button Linkedin button Webonews button Delicious button Digg button Flickr button Stumbleupon button Newsvine button