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Chapter 5: Acting

Essay: Naturalistic and Non-Naturalistic Performances

Actors generally employ naturalistic acting to convey recognizable parts of life and human behavior, and they reserve nonnaturalistic acting for depictions of "outsider" existence—the offbeat, the oddball, the weird, the monstrous. To convey such deviations from the norm, actors exaggerate and even invent facial expressions, gestures, and vocal mannerisms and tones that exceed what is considered "natural" or conventional. They must still convey some essence of a character within a story. But even when the dramatic context (perhaps within the larger context of genre) justifies "strangeness," nonnaturalistic acting tends to go beyond the expected and the "realistic" and into the realm of pantomime, camp, caricature, stereotype, and self-aware mockery.

When Johnny Depp played a sort of suburban, teenage Frankenstein's monster in Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands (1990), his character's cartoonish oddness made perfect sense within the fantastic context. Just as Edward Scissorhands's outlandish, Gothic costume and science fiction appendages fit the movie's highly stylized design scheme, so Depp's "mechanized" movements and projection of innocence matched the movie's vision of this artificial young man. Put the same actor in entirely different contexts, however, and he might deliver equally nonnaturalistic and equally inventive performances: Depp has acted nonnaturalistically to great effect in John Waters's Cry-Baby (1989), Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994), Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), Burton's Sleepy Hollow (1999), and Gore Verbinski's Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003). In fact, even in relatively realistic films, such as Jeremy Leven's Don Juan DeMarco (1995) and Lasse Hallström's Chocolat (2000), Depp's performances can be larger than life, his acting more self-conscious than that of generally naturalistic actors.

Perhaps the most famous contemporary nonnaturalistic actor is Jim Carrey, whose performances are brilliantly manic and outlandishly exaggerated. In Julien Temple's Earth Girls Are Easy (1988), Carrey plays an alien who accidentally lands on Earth and must navigate contemporary Los Angeles. In Chuck Russell's The Mask (1994) Carrey plays a man who becomes possessed when he wears an ancient mask. In Ron Howard's How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000) Carrey plays the perfect character for a nonnaturalistic performer: a Grinch, which is neither a human nor any earthly beast we know, but a wild invention of children's-book author Dr. Seuss.

Perhaps the most famous nonnaturalistic performance by an actress is Elsa Lanchester's as "The Monster's Mate" in James Whale's Bride of Frankenstein (1935). While some of Jim Carrey's performances have been greatly enhanced by elaborate costume and makeup, Lanchester employs primarily her own expressions and gestures. Her simple and effective costume and makeup do not obscure Lanchester's face and body:

Of course, it also takes a great actor to convey expression successfully from behind heavy costume and makeup. The series of films derived from Pierre Boulle's novel La Planete des Singes (Planet of the Apes, 1963) provides one of the best examples of nonnaturalistic acting en masse. The original film, Franklin J. Schaffner's Planet of the Apes (1968), offers affective nonnaturalistic performances, from inside heavy latex masks, by Roddy McDowall, Maurice Evans, and Kim Hunter (first frame below). In Tim Burton's remake of that film (2001), Tim Roth (second frame) and Helena Bonham Carter (third frame) draw imaginatively upon human and simian behavior, helped by more realistic and more flexible makeup than their predecessors wore:

While we can pretty much tell from afar that actors playing apes will deliver nonnaturalistic performances, a movie such as Earth Girls Are Easy presents other possibilities. Jim Carrey, Damon Wayans, and Jeff Goldblum play furry aliens named, respectively, Wiploc, Zeebo, and Mac, so we can safely guess that their performances are nonnaturalistic. But what about Geena Davis, who plays Valerie, the movie's leading Earth girl? In fact, even though her ditzy character is recognizably human, Davis's work in this broad musical comedy is nonnaturalistic, exceeding the bounds of what we would expect from such a person:

Case Study: Nicolas Cage

Nicolas Cage's great range as an actor enables him to blend naturalistic and nonnaturalistic styles, even within the same role. The three Cage films discussed below provide illustrations of highly nonnaturalistic and more conventional performance styles. While the frames and audio clips that accompany these discussions will give you a sense of how Cage employs three primary acting tools—facial expression, gesture, and voice—to fully appreciate the performances you should see the films in their entirety.

Highly Nonnaturalistic:
Peggy Sue Got Married

What if, at her high school reunion, middle-aged Peggy Sue (Kathleen Turner) went back through time to her high school years? This is the premise of Francis Ford Coppola's Peggy Sue Got Married (1986). The major conflict involves Peggy Sue reconsidering her marriage to her high school sweetheart, Charlie Bodell (Nicolas Cage). Traveling back in time to high school, knowing what she knows now, and retaining the experience, desires, and emotions of an adult, Peggy Sue has an affair with Michael Fitzsimmons (Kevin J. O'Connor), the dangerous high school poet, and asserts herself with Charlie, forcing him to more actively court her. Kathleen Turner plays the time-traveling Peggy Sue "straight"—that is, she presents a believable, naturalistic performance in a film filled with high school sterotypes and exaggerated depictions of the early 1960s. In contrast, Cage's Charlie Bodell is an extreme caricature of an overly emotional and attention-seeking teenage boy. The consummate class clown and an aspiring singer, Charlie "progresses" from entertaining his friends to, in middle age, making outrageous television commercials for his successful appliance dealership. Exceeding our expectations for a high school comedy, even one that involves time travel, Cage parodies a teenage voice, employs self-consciously quirky gestures, and takes on an outlandish appearance (costume, makeup, hair).

The three frames below come from a scene in which Charlie sneaks into Peggy Sue's bedroom after discovering her affair with the motorcycle-riding poet. In this scene, Cage plays the teenage Charlie as if he were a silent-film vampire; Charlie's wiggling fingers cast shadows on the wall as he toys with the idea of smothering Peggy under a pillow.


This scene helps illustrate Kathleen Turner's naturalistic, or "straight," portrayal of Peggy Sue and her time- traveling predicament

Here we can hear Turner and Cage in the same scene and compare their different performance styles

After performing his doo-wop song for Peggy, Charlie makes his move, which includes an odd little "lover burp" that he cannot seem to contain


One of the funniest scenes in the film plays on Peggy Sue's status as an "older woman" who is more sexually aggressive than a 1950s teenager would be. In this scene, Cage pushes his exaggerated vocal effects and facial expressions to the point of comic absurdity

Nonnaturalistic:
Raising Arizona

Joel Coen's Raising Arizona (1987) is a live-action cartoon—sort of like one of the Road Warrior movies, but starring the Road Runner instead of Mel Gibson. Nicolas Cage plays H. I. McDonnough, a four- or five- time convicted convenience-store robber who falls in love with police officer Edwina (Holly Hunter); they get married, buy a trailer, and search for their "salad years" in the Arizona desert. H. I. and Edwina's happiness, however, is nearly crushed by their inability to have children and their subsequent decision to babynap one of the Arizona quints born to furniture baron Nathan Arizona (Trey Wilson). When H. I.'s old prison buddies break out and come to visit and Nathan hires a mythically monstrous motorcycle-riding bounty hunter to retrieve his son, the couple's love is sorely tested.

For Raising Arizona, Cage uses nonnaturalistic acting techniques, but around him the movie's design and cinematography firmly establish a comically exaggerated cinematic world. Thus Cage doesn't have to exploit his voice and facial expressions as much as he does in the comparatively realistic Peggy Sue Got Married. Instead he simply suits his body movements and postures to the mis-en-scène. (Look for the Road Runner tattoo on H. I.'s right bicep—it's the filmmakers' little cue for us to see this live-action film for the cartoon it is.)

Nonnaturalistic and Naturalistic:
Leaving Las Vegas

While Peggy Sue Got Married and Raising Arizona are great fun—and works of art, though perhaps not high art—they aren't the kinds of movies that serious critics tend to focus on and that the film industry lavishes prizes and awards on. Nonnaturalistic performances in comedies and in cartoonlike dramas simply don't command the same respect that more straightforward performances do. In 1995, for example, Nicolas Cage won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role as Ben Sanderson in Mike Figgis's Leaving Las Vegas (1995). Sanderson is a failed, deeply depressed screenwriter who goes to Las Vegas to drink himself to death, and unexpectedly falls in love with a prostitute he meets there. The melodramatic predictability of the story is held in check by Nicolas Cage's incredibly moving, and disturbing, portrait of a man killing himself with alcohol. This serious performance includes naturalistic acting and understated moments, but Sanderson's moments of drunken joy and foolery also put Cage's nonnaturalistic talents to use.