A Year of Woody Harrelson in the Movies
In the past year I’ve had the opportunity to see a few more movies than I’ve been able to in a few years. I’ve seen just about every movie I thought would be interesting, some I missed, but of the ones I saw I started noticing Woody Harrelson was in a lot of the movies! I thought it was a bit unprecedented but for the most part his performances have been of a high caliber.
I’ve never been a big Woody Harrelson fan I did think his performance in White Men Can’t Jump was a great jumping off point for a film career. Over the years he’s appeared in some very good movies and gave strong performances, Natural Born Killers, Indecent Proposal, Kingpin, Zombieland, and while he’s been in a lot of good movies with good performances none of them have seemingly kicked him into the stratosphere of ‘A’ list actors. While I’ve liked his movies and have gone to see them I never considered myself a fan, someone who would go see a movie just on the strength of Harrelson being in a movie.
This year Harrelson seems to have hit his stride in making movies, I saw him in four films this year War for the Planet of the Apes, 3 Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, LBJ and Solo: A Star Wars Story. IMDB (Internet Movie Data Base) also lists him in The Glass Castle which I didn’t have the opportunity to see, and Shock and Awe which is coming out in July of this year (2018) and falls within my one-year allotted period, so maybe I’ll have a fifth film to add to this later. Here are some thoughts on Woody Harrelson’s year in the movies.
War for the Planet of the Apes
War for the Planet of the Apes is a rough adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, as is Apocalypse Now, in that it has the basic premise of traveling upstream or in the case of War north in search of a colonel who has gone mad is committing atrocities. Harrelson’s performance is a homage to Marlon Brando as Apocalypse’s Colonel Kurtz. Harrelson’s character is known only as “The Colonel” playing the character bald and pontificating on the nature of the war he’s engaged in, even if it only turns out to be madness. Harrelson plays The Colonel subtly, nuanced and looks like there’s a lot going on in the characters head, that there’s something driving him to action and into madness.
3 Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Harrelson plays sheriff Willoughby of the title city who is investigating the rape and murder of Frances McDormand’s character Mildred Hayes’ daughter, but the case has gone cold. Harrelson plays the character in a layered manner, a character that at first appears to be a very proscribed but Harrelson has the confidence to let the revelations occur naturally. This is the best movie I saw all year and is probably Harrelson’s strongest performance in the years’ worth of movies. All three of the main characters Frances McDormand, Harrelson, and Sam Rockwell were all deservedly nominated for academy awards for this film, only McDormand and Rockwell took away an award.
LBJ
More of a character study on president Lyndon Baines Johnson than a bio-pic, it covers the tumultuous period of 1960–64 after he lost the nomination for president to JFK, and despite friction with the Kennedy’s becoming JFK’s vice-president, the assassination and how it affected Johnson and inspired him to push through congress the landmark Civil Rights Act. After seeing 3 Billboards I was really excited to see LBJ because Harrelson plays the title character and after his performance in 3 Billboards I was prepared for Harrelson to go all out in playing Johnson. I was disappointed in the performance Harrelson plays Johnson subdued and focusing on Johnson’s insecurities to humanize a character that history doesn’t always reflect well on. Johnson was a larger than life character, but Harrelson plays to the frailties too much, and at times he seems to get lost in the background. Harrelson had to undergo two hours of make-up in applying the prosthetics to look like Johnson perhaps this limited the range of emotion Harrelson was able to convey, Harrelson in full make-up looks very plastic and unnatural. Harrelson’s initially had a dislike of Johnson and perhaps that affected his performance. Although, he says that as he researched the character he came to understand Johnson in a more complex and sympathetic way as a person.
Solo: A Star Wars Story
Harrelson plays Tobias Beckett young Han Solo’s mentor into the underworld of smugglers and thieves in the Star Wars universe. Harrelson delivers a competent performance as Beckett, but you don’t get any more nuance in the performance that you’re expecting in Harrelson’s performance. In terms of character Beckett seems closely related to The Colonel in War for the Planet of the Apes, both characters are outlaws operating on the fringes of their society, so in contrast to that performance Beckett seems mundane. Harrelson seems to be just playing out the description of the character and nothing of what he brought in similar roles in other movies.