Tuesday 1 February 2011

Best Supporting Actor 2000: Albert Finney in Erin Brockovich

Albert Finney received his fifth Oscar nomination for portraying lawyer Edward L. Masry in Erin Brockovich.

Erin Brockovich I find is not a very interesting law suit procedural, that I particularly dislike because of its focus on the central overblown performance.

Edward L. Masry is a lawyer who works with Erin Brockovich to procure settlement money for people mistreated by a big company who poisoned their water. The one thing that Masry does a whole lot of is shake his head at the antics of Erin Brockovich and her fairly over the top way. Albert Finney always tries to underplay, and react to Julia Robert's performance. I think Finney does this pretty well actually, and I must saw I greatly prefer his natural reactions to Robert's very loud performance.

Finney overall is not given that much to do despite having a good amount of screen time. He mostly just does the work of Masry and reacts naturally to what he sees and does most of the time, although he adds a little humor to his part from time to time which Finney handles very naturally, and it works well with the part. Masry really is not delved into all that much, and is just shown to be an hard working man who wants to do the right thing. Finney is fine, and does really everything he can with the fairly limited character he has, and I really cared more about what he was doing than anything about Robert's character and her bombastic performance.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow, you're moving fast :)

Well, I definitely wasn't impressed by him, but I found him more credible and watchable then Roberts.

Fritz said...

I liked him.

dinasztie said...

I liked him very much.

dinasztie said...

BTW, what are you going to write on your new blog?

Louis Morgan said...

I made it to write special request performance reviews such as Joe's request for Judy Garland in the Star is Born, which I am trying to get around to write.