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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Apr 29, 1999 | Is there anyone in the movies who allows the camera to drink him in the way Keanu Reeves does? Movies have always yielded to performers with charisma and beauty. Sometimes the mechanics of a movie -- plot, dialogue -- can seem frozen for an instant as the camera basks in the person in front of it. There have been histories of the movies written in terms of genres and filmmakers. Perhaps one needs to be written in terms of erotics, the moments that break movies down in our minds into images of faces, bits of movement, a snatch of music on the soundtrack. Those moments seem to reveal other, more delicate, movies inside the one we're watching, as if we were in the midst of reading a novel and a symbolist poem had floated up between the lines.
"The Matrix" has already broken down in my head to moments of Keanu Reeves striding through crowded city streets, dank back alleys and the decaying rooms of ghost town tenements. Reeves' movements have always conveyed an unsettled mixture of eagerness and wariness (just as the combination of his muscular build and fine-boned face convey a mixture of strength and grace). Maybe it's the way he seems to be led forward by his shoulders as he walks, or the way he has of looking from side to side as he strides forward, scanning the scene he's already trudged into. If the film's protagonist, Neo, is a role that Reeves seems born to play, it's because it's the one that allows us to revel in his physicality, which has always been such a strong component of his acting.
Movement is accepted as part of the performance of a dancer or a comic. And certainly talking about the physicality of, say, Olivier as Henry V, or Kenneth Branagh as Hamlet, wouldn't surprise anyone. So why does it still startle some highbrow moviegoers and critics that, in an action movie, the way an actor moves is the performance? In her Entertainment Weekly review of "The Matrix," Lisa Schwarzbaum claims she "can't get [Reeves] in focus as an actor," but as for his "fine form," well that she can "clearly see and appreciate."
I don't think that the way Keanu Reeves looks or the way he moves is all there is to appreciate about the guy. But I often get the feeling that admitting to enjoying his physicality means that I'm failing my critic's responsibility of treating cinema as a serious art form, that having a sensual or kinetic response means abandoning intellect, that I'm forgetting to maintain that even failed or boring or pretentious art is more worthy of serious consideration than successful entertainment.
Let's face it: Love him or hate him, nobody wants to envision the movies without Keanu Reeves. If it weren't for him, what would snobs do to amuse themselves?
