Friday 18 February 2011

Best Supporting Actor 2010: Jeremy Renner in The Town

Jeremy Renner received his second Oscar nomination for portraying James "Jem" Coughlin in The Town.

Renner portrays part of Affleck's bank robbing crew. He is the toughest and the meanest of the group, who doesn't seem to mine creating a few casualties for the cops when he is given the chance. Coughlin is a man who lives on the streets wanting to commit crimes, and would rather go out in barrage of gunfire than ever be sent to jail. Renner is very intense in this performance, in fact he is always intense no matter what the situation is. He always keeps his psychotic stare in almost every scene he is in.

Renner has a challenge here in that Jem is fairly thinly written. There is not a whole lot to him in terms of the film, and his whole point is just to be another factor to keep Affleck's character in the life. Renner though absolutely makes the most of everything he does have giving an effective performance. Although he plays him as written he does take small moments to give some depth to him such as a subtle sadness when talking about going back to jail even though he never loses that aspect of the character. He has some great just small moments giving a little humanity to Jem like the way he takes a drink from a soda before going out to face a legion of cops. It is not an overly complex performance but he goes beyond what is written with his character.

4 comments:

dinasztie said...

I TOTALLY agree with every word and the grade.

Louis Morgan said...

I am glad we agree so much on this one.

Michael Patison said...

I pretty much agree totally with your assessment of his performance. I had heard ridiculously great things about him and was just slightly impressed. I disagree with what I gathered was your opinion of the movie as a whole, though. I actually quite liked it and felt that it managed to a number of possible cliches that run rampant in films of similar type. I greatly enjoyed Affleck's direction and actually had decidedly positive feelings toward his performance, especially considering the quality of the vast majority of his previous performances (actually everything except for Hollywoodland as far as I can think of off the top of my head).

Louis Morgan said...

Perhaps I should have phrased by opinion better because I still liked the film, and for me this is Affleck's second best performance. I did not think is was all that original of a film though.