A Hard Dose of ‘Weak Sauce’: Paul Dano’s Best Films – Ranked! | film

This unsettling debut narrative from British director James Marsh (The Theory of Everything) is a kind of simple Cape Fear film. Gael García Bernal plays a sociopathic outsider who threatens the idyllic life of his long-lost preacher father (William Hurt). In what now seems like a pilot for “There Will Be Blood,” Dano is the earnest son who struggles to teach creationism at school, but is defeated by the appearance of his evil half-brother. Variety described the film as “harmful”. It’s bad, no doubt, but Dano helps liven it up.

On the surface, this friendship film is harrowing, with Dano playing a stranded shipwreck survivor and Daniel Radcliffe as a corpse washed up on shore, and it’s surprisingly moving. It’s certainly filled with the kind of artificial weirdness that would reach fever pitch in the same director’s next film, Everything Everywhere, At Once. But even when Dano uses Radcliffe’s body as a water dispenser, a hunting weapon, and a wind-powered raft, a clear tenderness emerges. They make a beautiful couple.

For a measure of Dano’s versatility, try this: Within a few months, he played quiet engineer Bert Fabelman, the workaholic father of the director’s budding hero in Steven Spielberg’s biographical epic (loosely based on the director’s father, Arnold). and Gotham City is threatened by the role of the Riddler in Batman. Dano overcomes Bert’s silent, swallowed-up grief as he watches his unfaithful wife (Michelle Williams) and ambitious son (Gabriel LaBelle) break free from his influence.

A beloved road movie about an Albuquerque family who drives cross-country in a yellow Volkswagen truck so the youngest child (Abigail Breslin) can compete in a beauty pageant. It now smacks of some 2000s Sundance indie bombast, but the cast, including Alan Arkin (who won an Oscar for playing the disreputable grandfather), is a joy. Dano is poignant and funny as the emo teenager who communicates only through written notes (eg: “I hate everyone”) until a crisis pulls an agonized Munchian scream out of him. Few actors can deliver the following mission statement dialogue – “Fuck beauty contests! Life is one fucking beauty contest after another!” – He seems very sincere.

Comedian Kate McKinnon described Danno in 2016 as a “huge sex machine with sad eyes,” but that quality is rarely exploited directly on screen. The only exception is this wrenching study of a rock musician who seizes a last chance to connect with his daughter. “The film has come alive thanks to Paul,” said the film’s director, So Young Kim. “He developed so many details. The clothes, the rings, the nails, the hair, the way he walked and carried himself. He was completely transformed.”

As the masked, breathless, film-covered Riddler, also known as Edward Nashton, Dano is terrifying even when he’s not dispatching his victims with hammers and bombs. It even seems to give Robert Pattinson’s Batman the heebie-jeebies. Best of all is the moment near the end of Matt Reeves’ increasingly loose film when Dano is finally seen without his mask, and the suspense builds all at once. He was arrested by cops in a restaurant and presented with a set of different ID cards, each one bearing his face. “Who are you?” asks the arresting officer. “You tell me,” he answers quietly. He spoke like a real character actor.

Dano had gained plenty of childhood acting experience — by the time he was 12, he was already sharing the Broadway stage with George C. Scott — but his special talent for flayed vulnerability was first evident to a movie audience in this troubling independent drama. In only his second screen role, he plays a neglected teenager who falls into the orbit of a sex offender (Brian Cox). Still shocking is the moment when Cox gently shaves Dano’s angelic face with a razor. “My first thought now is: How did we do that?” “He was beautiful to me,” Dano said in 2023, before confirming that Cox, whom he met again in the odd couple comedy drama The Good Heart and on TV in the BBC’s War and Peace, was beautiful to me.

Marketed as a romantic comedy, it’s much more sophisticated and complex than that label might suggest: one person described it as “Annie Hall meets Frankenstein.” Returning to the care of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, the husband-and-wife directing team behind Little Miss Sunshine, Dano plays a blocked novelist whose creative juices start flowing again after he invents an ideal female character, Ruby (played by Dano’s partner, Zoe Kazan, who is also the film’s screenwriter). Once she comes back to life, he discovers that he can modify and control her properties simply by writing them down on paper, leading to a very disturbing climax. Dano is skilled at dividing what’s sweet (the Swiss Army Man) and what’s abhorrent (the prisoners), but it’s great to see them mixed together here on the same canvas.

When Paul Thomas Anderson fired Kell O’Neill, the actor who initially played the grouchy, disguised preacher Eli Sunday, Dano was promoted to the role with only a few days’ notice. (He also retains his original role, the smaller one played by Eli’s brother Paul.) The result is dramatic: Eli may squirm and writhe as he exorcises demons from his party, but it’s Dano who feels like a man possessed. By accusing him of giving a “non-existent performance,” Quentin Tarantino misunderstands the dynamic between ogre-like oil prospector Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) and the annoying Eli, whose stranglehold he threatens. The Pulp Fiction director longs for an equally unlikely showdown. But the oil giant is terrified and angry precisely because this seemingly insignificant opponent gets under his skin. He cannot understand the boy: he is not a business competitor, like the proto-suits that Plainview taunts in the restaurant scene, and he is not a cheat, like the man pretending to be Plainview’s brother. Those steroids are normal. (Plainview insults the former and wastes no time in killing the latter.) However, Eli is a uniquely stubborn nuisance. Putting another type of alpha male against Day-Lewis would have made the fight traditional. This is the one thing Dano couldn’t do if he tried.

This ping-pong film, which tells the story of Brian Wilson, jumps between the 1960s (as LSD, and Pet Sounds, the first gathering of the loud voices in Wilson’s head) and the 1980s (when the genius beach boy is drugged and controlled by an exploitative doctor, played by Paul Giamatti in skin-crawling mode). A bold concept requires bold actors, and this film has them: John Cusack is appropriately dazed and wary as the older Wilson, while Dano has the more demanding task of encapsulating the musician’s highs and lows, as well as all shades of trauma in between. From Wilson’s perfectionism in the studio, leading a chorus of barking dogs or abandoning an expensive recording session due to bad vibration, to his haunting shyness in the presence of his abusive father (Bill Camp), this is a layered and powerful performance—Danno’s best on film, in fact, equaled only by his portrayal of a convict having an affair with a prison employee in Ben Stiller’s 2018 Escape at Dannemora miniseries. Judging by Tarantino’s macho sarcasm (he calls Dano “weak sauce” and “weak sister”), his beef seems to be based on the milky-faced actor’s perceived lack of red meat. A few minutes of Love & Mercy is all it takes to make this charge at best ill-considered, at worst daft. As Anthony Lane attested in his brilliant New Yorker review: “There’s nothing weak about this [Dano’s] Good portrayal of Wilson.