Alternate Best Actor 2017: Joaquin Phoenix in You Were Never Really Here

Joaquin Phoenix did not receive an Oscar nomination, despite winning CANNES, for portraying Joe in You Were Never Really Here.

You Were Never Really Here follows a hired gun as he gets involved with retrieving the kidnapped daughter of a state senator. 

Joaquin Phoenix is obviously an actor I have covered many times, and have covered him many times for playing men who are on some sort of extreme psychological edge. As Joe in this film this is yet another entry, yet an extremely unique entry within his oeuvre, and as I’ve written before, the great actor isn’t always about playing extremely different roles but rather finding compelling variation within similar roles. Within that idea Phoenix immediately crafts something quite different here as Joe than his earlier Freddie Quell or his later greatest hits rendition in Joker. It begins with his specific physicality and I will say while this is an expected element within Phoenix’s work in terms of an inclusion, it is completely different than expected in terms of execution. While Phoenix previously depicted Quell as the literally bent man unable to even physically stand like a healthy man, as Joe Phoenix reinvents that to create something I quite honestly wasn’t aware he could do, which is be physically intimidating. While Phoenix obviously bulked up for the role, it isn’t just that, rather the way he holds himself. Where Freddie was bent, here Phoenix reworks himself into that of essentially a lumbering brute, where all of the intensity he typically has is somehow all forced into himself as a singular shroud of protection. Phoenix wholly convinces at being someone you don’t want to reckon with, and while Phoenix has obviously been dangerous in other roles, it was usually as a live wire type situation, here, you can see him as a specific force. 

That brilliant physicality, which again just is wholly convincing and grants you something immediately new from Phoenix, it goes further as is common to Phoenix is a character dealing with trauma, but in this instance the reaction to that trauma is something quite a bit different. An overriding and callback to aspect of the character of Joe is his suicidal ideation, where throughout the film we see Joe play with methods of killing or harming himself. The film opens with a bag over his head to suffocate himself and soon afterwards, when visiting his elderly mother, he plays around potentially stabbing himself with a knife. Phoenix is incredibly disturbing in the way he handles these scenes, because there is no dramatic element to them either speaking towards intensity of the moment like say Riggs in Lethal Weapon, nor is it even say the way Freddie Quell is festering in his own anguish such as in the prison lash out scene from The Master. Rather Phoenix does something entirely differently by playing it as incredibly casually, which in terms is particularly off-putting. Phoenix portrays this unnerving comfort in Joe in these actions as though they are everyday occurrences for the man, because they are everyday occurrences. What Phoenix presents them as instead as his version, his very disturbing version, of playing with a stress ball, as he brings the same kind of matter of fact quality to these early moments, as a man who just uses that as part of his way of dealing with existence. 

There’s an idiosyncrasy within Phoenix’s approach here within his own turns but just performances in general, particularly within the revenge or vigilante genre. Phoenix makes Joe his own beast and even subverts your expectations of such a character in many ways. There is for example quite a bit of calm in his performance, and calm is usually something that denotes the badass in one way or another. While Joe has traits of such a type of character, the approach Phoenix takes ensures that you would never describe Joe as such. Part of it is the way this calm is more so the way he presents Joe as existing in his world as more so part of this near malaise of his existence that is burdened by unending trauma and violence. And in a way if you had a less intimate view of Joe, you could believe him as a badass when you see him interact with his liaisons, Phoenix delivers his lines with confidence of a man who knows the job and the routine. He has no questions or hesitations about it. Even when he goes about infiltrating the house where the senator’s daughter is being kept, Phoenix interrogates the runner for the house again as a man who is most efficient. Menacing even in his way of just so matter of factly requesting the information where the violence of the man is so innate in himself that Phoenix can barely raise a pulse in his questioning and getting set up to go in for the retrieval. Phoenix does command the space, but what he does is connect this to that same blasé manner towards his own suicidal tendencies, of a many with an eerie comfort towards death. 

That comfort to death extends to the particularly practical but also particularly brutal method of killing each time, which is largely with a hammer he buys at a hardware store. Where we see him go about his trade where Phoenix plays the sequence of killing all the men in the house with not exactly ease, but the same sort of approach someone might take to hammering down a ton of floor boards. It is absolutely routine for him, there is no weight in it, it is just what the man does. An approach that could seem like too little yet I found what Phoenix does here absolutely captivating in creating the idea of a man who in a way thrives with violence because internally he is filled with so much horror that to put it out externally is merely a continuation of that existence. As Joe is haunted by so many horrors of his own abuse as a child, the abuse of his mother by his father, death as a soldier, a mass grave in law enforcement, the man has more ghosts than people, and Phoenix is able to create this state within his performance. One where the horror is within his stare and even so within his consistency when he is killing or facing more death. Phoenix portrays someone so broken by his experience that he is a curiosity in himself and living still is also part of that curiosity. The only breaks whatsoever coming specifically from anyone who seems to try to present themselves to him in any way that isn’t violence. 

The moments where Phoenix breaks the state of Joe in any way are impactful through that consistency he crafts in his idiosyncrasy. As through his journey with his mother, we do see a loving if in no way untroubled son as he helps his mom out in her decrepit state. When he rescues the abused girl the first time, Phoenix says much in the moment where she first embraces him, then tries to kiss him. Where Phoenix in his subtle reaction creating how much any tenderness is more so a knife than what an actual knife would do to him, as he shows both surprise of the care and horror of her attempt to kiss him, stemming from her own mistreatment, where Phoenix reveals the broken psyche of Joe by how deeply each impact him, of course deeply within the malaise of Joe. The next break comes when after the initial rescue the plot gets murkier as the governor has her kidnapped again, trying to cut off all loose ends including Joe who barely escapes and finds that the men even went to his home and killed his mom. And there’s a powerful contrast between two scenes of when Joe sees his mother has been killed and when he “interrogates” one of the men who killed his mom. The former is again a rare moment of released emotion where we do see how much Joe still loves his mom even through the drama, and Phoenix is incredible in letting it eek out. It is amazing particularly since Phoenix often is so emotive, that it becomes so powerful in the way he artfully breaks the state of Joe’s mind only in these rare but impactful moments. And that is further emphasized by when, after wounding the man, asks the man if he killed his mom. Joe is back to his violence and state of perpetual trauma, and Phoenix is almost relaxed in the way he asks. Something that makes sense through Phoenix is realization of this particular state where more suffering is merely the norm. A powerfully shown element when Joe goes about weighing his mother in water and choosing her initially to join her in death by drowning himself. Phoenix’s portrayal creates the turning point of the man just going about accepting what he has been as there is comfort as he goes about his own death, until he sees a vision of the girl he did not save. Leading to the final act, where Joe seems to save the girl, who is him in so many ways, right down to how the plot realizes itself. However pivotal is the final release of his own defenses by seeing himself reflected in so many ways, and Phoenix doesn't suddenly go big. He’s remarkably small, still yet so incredible in the way he releases the emotions dormant, not as a pressurized valve, but rather this quiet erosion through the final scenes. Phoenix presents not a man with an understanding of any of it, or what to do with it, yet Joe cannot escape it. His final line delivery of repeating “it’s a beautiful day”, after being told so by the “rescued” girl, Phoenix is amazing in his underplay, of reaffirming, as an acceptance, yet in no way is it of renewed optimism or anything easy. Rather a man living within his fate of existence, as painful as it is, but speaking that it is what it is. I loved this performance by Phoenix, as much as it is a man on an extreme, Phoenix uncovers wholly new ground in crafting a different kind of tragedy and different kind of experience. Utilizing a more minimalistic and quieter choice, which pierce still so powerfully in creating captivating and unique portrait of a withdrawal of emotion rather than an explosion of it.