Alternate Best Actor 2024: Jesse Plemons in Kinds of Kindness

Jesse Plemons did not receive an Oscar nomination, despite winning Cannes, for portraying Robert, Daniel and Andrew in Kinds of Kindness.

Kinds of Kindness is an anthology film about three very strange relationships. 

Kinds of Kindness is curiously in a middle ground grey area for director Yorgos Lanthimos, with whom I love his films when written by someone else, finding them a somewhat frustrating experience though when he is nearly the complete architect of the piece. Technically this film falls under that banner being written and directed by Lanthimos and his writing partner for those films Efthimis Filippou. One of the reasons why is in his previous undiluted efforts Lanthimos also directs the majority of his actors to give artificially stiff performances, unlike in Poor Things and The Favourite where he let the actors loose to most delightful ends. It seems like this choice rubbed off on Lanthimos to some extent because while the performances aren’t the fully expressive turns of his last two films, Lanthimos’s directive seemed to be less strict even if like those earlier films the overall style is that of detachment, or maybe just the actors in this ensemble just kind of were best in their particular way around the material. Logical given that Emma Stone as the other lead of the film has obviously been most successful with Lanthimos, but you also have a Lanthimos newcomer with the very talented Jesse Plemons, who somehow I’ve only ever reviewed for his decent but in terms of his oeuvre rather underwhelming as representation of his talent, Oscar nominated performance. 

Plemons plays three different roles in this anthology of three films, where he plays the lead, co-lead then a supporting role. I’ll actually pull a Memento and go in reverse order given Plemons’s expanded role for each. In the third story he plays a cult member along with Emma Stone’s Emily, in the strange water cult lead by Omi (Willem Dafoe) and Aka (Hong Chau), where they are required to consume blessed water and on a quest to find a woman capable of reviving the dead. Plemons’s role in this segment is relatively limited in playing the cult partner searching for that woman with Stone’s Emily. What Plemons is playing in the segment is primarily an obvious jealousy for favor in the cult hierarchy and his performance is one mostly within the reactions of expressing that jealousy. His little glares make their impact in Plemons very much calling upon his Breaking Bad background in playing the little stares, though with a bit more smugness than old earnestly psychopathic Todd. While Plemons’s performance isn’t really the focus of this segment he is effective in his bits of just creeping around the corner of the frame and being this quietly pestering presence as he looks upon Stone’s character with a considerable disdain, then eventual unpleasant satisfaction when she falls out of favor with the cult. And I will note Plemons’s particular delivery of his wanting to have sex with Omi as it just being perfect, being very much the very bizarre humor styling of the film, however Plemons success with that particular style. 

The second story of Daniel, a police officer whose wife Liz, Stone again, sadly was on the Triangle of Sadness cruise and seemingly was lost to the sea. Plemons’s performance in this segment is about capturing the highly specific tone of the Lanthimos detachment. There is something most certainly weird about Plemons’s performance, as no one behaves like a human precisely in this film, except MAYBE Dafoe in this segment and the vet Margaret Qualley in the third segment, but Plemons manages to achieve something in terms of playing with real emotion albeit in a bizarre way. As we get him as this police officer dealing with very real grief of having potentially lost his wife, and Plemons’s general somberness is very sincere. Although tipped to something that is bit much with just how hangdog he is, to the point of touching a suspect and then speaking how the obviously not at all like his wife suspect, and then commenting on the man’s appearance with such desperation. Plemons succeeds in the strangeness that is funny, but to quote the Simpsons, not ha ha funny. Plemons overdoes it in the right way in the sorrowfulness as he makes requests like a kid who spilt milk but with the bizarre contrast that he’s asking to watch a sex tape he made with Liz, his partner and his partner’s wife. It only gets stranger when Liz does appear to have been rescued and it isn’t the happiest of reunions as Liz doesn’t behave exactly as he remembered. Plemons’s performance again plays between reality and complete insanity, as we see the quiet frustrations in his reactions with that of an anxiety of someone genuinely suspected that his wife has been replaced. At the same time though there’s the way he starts questioning which isn’t of slight suspicion but immediate conviction where we get the insanity. Which again is funny in an unpleasant way though where Plemons brings together from that frustration to an intense mania, where now any hint that it’s not Liz he immediately jumps on with a demented certainty. Plemons is remarkable because the intensity there is a reality in the idea of a paranoia that feels very real, but the fact that it jumps to this point so quickly is that kind of tipping into a farce, something that Plemons balances effectively. Something that twists again as Daniel decides to “test” Liz by being verbally abusive towards her and requesting “kindnesses” such as doing harm to herself. Again the switch is of that detached reality, but Plemons is genuinely terrifying though in his cold expressions, with such fuming hate filled emotions just beneath the surface with every demand of Liz. Plemons presents a horrible abuser where he quietly relishes his pain he causes to his wife with this immediate sadistic pleasure for himself. Plemons crafting a twisted portrait of a grief to terrible abuser that isn’t realistic at any point, it is funnyish, but what is so notable is that Plemons crafts an internal logic within his own performance. 

That internal logic being a consistent element as we get Plemons in the first story as Robert. Robert’s story is when Plemons is the unquestioned lead as a man in the employ of Dafoe’s Raymond, an employer who gives Robert gifts but also demands that Robert follow every single order he gives him in life, including who he takes for a wife, whether or not he has children, his weight or even proceeding in a strange vehicular manslaughter with a willing victim. Where again Plemons excels in crafting a very distinct tone of his performance between this strange extreme but with some reality in the internalization of his work. As on the surface Plemons is off in the way he plays the fixation on Raymond’s requests so matter of factly, and obeys his commands initially with this comical desperation because it is so strange. Plemons though balances that in his eyes there is a more honest anxiety connected with it, that even as the scenario is absurd, Plemons artfully plays into the absurdity but with some grounding. In the progression of this plot, where Robert doesn’t follow one of Raymond’s orders leaving him to be lost without the direction of the other man, we see Robert’s whole life fall apart. Something where you get reality and absurdity mixed in. Such as when Robert confesses to his wife all that Raymond has done, including enforcing a lack of children between them, Plemons emotional frustration within his delivery even the intensity speaks to a more honest regret. Less realistic perhaps is however Robert trying to recreate circumstances himself such as an injury to interact with a woman, something that Raymond had done to get Robert to meet his wife, we see Robert try and fail with a pretty hilarious delivery by Plemons by just how phony and ridiculous the act is. Plemons plays successfully the strange extreme but with balance, as we see Robert see his life crumble upon him through a series of slightly absurd reactions however with the grounding of very real distress at the same time as he sees he might be replaced by Raymond and has to stop it at any cost. As much as it is ludicrous as we see the man go about murdering a man to get back in this odd relationship, Plemons plays into the style by accentuating it in his aggressive fixated delivery but within the style he still finds the sense of real distress within that. Plemons in all three performances anchors and excels within the specific sensibility of Lanthimos. As he doesn't get covered by it, nor does he ignore, amplifying it effectively to find the odd humor of it, while also bringing just enough actual humanity to make the style a bit more tangible.