Paul Dano is a piteous thing always on the verge. The thin smile of an obliterated angel; his brow furrows up to a single wrinkle; baby cheeks descend into quivering chin. From out of that very smile comes a voice that’s pristinely enunciated, whose softness badly covers over a closeness to madness. He comes across as someone deathly afraid of death and yet deliriously near to it: it’s the frailty of a doomed animal. I have loved Paul Dano since L.I.E., where his “meek outsider” type plays the main character before he’s sidelined into indelible supporting roles for most of the rest of his career (so far). I’ll go out of my way to watch a bad movie just to see his wincing face and the difference its pathos makes.
Directors love to hurt him: he’s torn limb from limb in Looper, whipped to bits in Twelve Years a Slave, dragged through oil puddles in There Will Be Blood, beaten to a pulp in Prisoners. (YouTube has already, indelicately, observed this.) But it’s the way he conveys emotional pain that I keep coming back for. So often, he plays a man discovering his limits for the first time; and such an experience of the limits tears him apart, pushes him into full hysteria. When something tips him past that pitiable verge—Eli Sunday’s desperate falsehoods, Brian Wilson’s paranoiac exasperation, Dwayne Hoover’s colorblindness revelation—his affects become an exploding schizo-star of confusion, injustice, anger, sorrow, loneliness. Listen to the high whine of his screams wherein lie the tantrums of the wounded child.
"He comes across as someone deathly afraid of death and yet deliriously near to it: it’s the frailty of a doomed animal."
Paul Dano brings out masculinity’s intrinsically pitiful nature; he’s gripped by an unmendable rift in himself, and can neither back down from it nor transform it through communication with the people he loves. His dyadic oscillation between schizoid coldness and volcanic hysteria reveals, to me, all the contradictory impulses that disturb the stoic surface of manhood; that mark masculinity as being far less in control of itself than it wants to appear. This is starkest In There Will Be Blood, where Eli Sunday and Daniel Plainview avenge themselves upon each other like dueling voids. Each is eaten alive by their refusal to encounter their inner emptiness—their unconquerable greed; Sunday performs the love of God and Plainview the love of family, but any love that might’ve been is ultimately instrumentalized for money. His characters rarely arc toward redemption; they falter, succumb, and grovel toward their destruction. For Dano, it’s not the tragic hero’s hubris that is his downfall, but a miscalculation, or a passivity that lingers a second too long, or a biting off more than he can chew. One of his quietest roles is in The Fabelmans, where his Mr. Fabelman is castrated by his own archetypal fatherhood: he’s rational, rigid, cold; but caring, and unimpeachably, annoyingly, good. By campfire light he can tell that his wife is in love with his best friend; a solemn look falls on his face and you can hear the mechanisms of repression loudly whirring. Here, Dano’s insanity never boils over but rests on the surface of his character like a constipative straitjacket.
Paul Dano is pity’s most nuanced icon. “This is not how this was supposed to go,” The Riddler screams, before collapsing into a whinging tantrum. Dano runs down the wrong road of destiny, and you watch that wrongness dawn on him too late, too far down the line to make a turn. Pity the boy who rails so uselessly against the fate brought down by his own condition, and makes a man-baby of himself in so railing. He’s fetal, a half-formed thing, relentlessly pursued by the sheer overwhelm of the world. Yet when pity mixes itself with the evil and desperation of his most villainous roles, our negative judgments are still haloed by forgiveness. Dano’s a kicked dog playing the main character in a tragedy. I feel both repulsed and attracted to him, to his weakness that at once wounds others and ruins himself, and—impelled by maternal strains of desire—I take a terry cloth to his bloody face before finally turning away.
Paul Dano is a piteous thing always on the verge. The thin smile of an obliterated angel; his brow furrows up to a single wrinkle; baby cheeks descend into quivering chin. From out of that very smile comes a voice that’s pristinely enunciated, whose softness badly covers over a closeness to madness. He comes across as someone deathly afraid of death and yet deliriously near to it: it’s the frailty of a doomed animal. I have loved Paul Dano since L.I.E., where his “meek outsider” type plays the main character before he’s sidelined into indelible supporting roles for most of the rest of his career (so far). I’ll go out of my way to watch a bad movie just to see his wincing face and the difference its pathos makes.
Directors love to hurt him: he’s torn limb from limb in Looper, whipped to bits in Twelve Years a Slave, dragged through oil puddles in There Will Be Blood, beaten to a pulp in Prisoners. (YouTube has already, indelicately, observed this.) But it’s the way he conveys emotional pain that I keep coming back for. So often, he plays a man discovering his limits for the first time; and such an experience of the limits tears him apart, pushes him into full hysteria. When something tips him past that pitiable verge—Eli Sunday’s desperate falsehoods, Brian Wilson’s paranoiac exasperation, Dwayne Hoover’s colorblindness revelation—his affects become an exploding schizo-star of confusion, injustice, anger, sorrow, loneliness. Listen to the high whine of his screams wherein lie the tantrums of the wounded child.
"He comes across as someone deathly afraid of death and yet deliriously near to it: it’s the frailty of a doomed animal."
Paul Dano brings out masculinity’s intrinsically pitiful nature; he’s gripped by an unmendable rift in himself, and can neither back down from it nor transform it through communication with the people he loves. His dyadic oscillation between schizoid coldness and volcanic hysteria reveals, to me, all the contradictory impulses that disturb the stoic surface of manhood; that mark masculinity as being far less in control of itself than it wants to appear. This is starkest In There Will Be Blood, where Eli Sunday and Daniel Plainview avenge themselves upon each other like dueling voids. Each is eaten alive by their refusal to encounter their inner emptiness—their unconquerable greed; Sunday performs the love of God and Plainview the love of family, but any love that might’ve been is ultimately instrumentalized for money. His characters rarely arc toward redemption; they falter, succumb, and grovel toward their destruction. For Dano, it’s not the tragic hero’s hubris that is his downfall, but a miscalculation, or a passivity that lingers a second too long, or a biting off more than he can chew. One of his quietest roles is in The Fabelmans, where his Mr. Fabelman is castrated by his own archetypal fatherhood: he’s rational, rigid, cold; but caring, and unimpeachably, annoyingly, good. By campfire light he can tell that his wife is in love with his best friend; a solemn look falls on his face and you can hear the mechanisms of repression loudly whirring. Here, Dano’s insanity never boils over but rests on the surface of his character like a constipative straitjacket.
Paul Dano is pity’s most nuanced icon. “This is not how this was supposed to go,” The Riddler screams, before collapsing into a whinging tantrum. Dano runs down the wrong road of destiny, and you watch that wrongness dawn on him too late, too far down the line to make a turn. Pity the boy who rails so uselessly against the fate brought down by his own condition, and makes a man-baby of himself in so railing. He’s fetal, a half-formed thing, relentlessly pursued by the sheer overwhelm of the world. Yet when pity mixes itself with the evil and desperation of his most villainous roles, our negative judgments are still haloed by forgiveness. Dano’s a kicked dog playing the main character in a tragedy. I feel both repulsed and attracted to him, to his weakness that at once wounds others and ruins himself, and—impelled by maternal strains of desire—I take a terry cloth to his bloody face before finally turning away.