An Oscar for Leonardo DiCaprio: Long time coming

The author charts Leonardo DiCaprio's cinematic journey to winning an Oscar

It has been almost a rule in Hollywood for the last three or four decades: Oscars fit particularly well atop victims, the rather infelicitously termed damaged goods.  Oscar-honoured portrayals of an autistic savant (Dustin Hoffman, Rain Man, 1988), a severely handicapped cerebral palsy patient (Daniel Day-Lewis, My Left Foot, 1989), a cannibal (Anthony Hopkins, The Silence of the Lambs, 1991), a blind army pensioner (Al Pacino, The Scent of a Woman, 1992), a jovial dimwit (Tom Hanks, Forrest Gump, 1994), a legendary blind black singer (Jamie Foxx, Ray, 2004), a gay politician brutally murdered (Sean Penn, Milk, 2008), a severely stuttering monarch (Colin Firth, The King’s Speech, 2010) a dying HIV/AIDS sufferer who smuggled drugs not yet legal therapy (Matthew McConaughey, Dallas Buyers Club, 2013) and a brilliant physicist who can move only eyelids (Edward Redmayne, The Theory of Everything, 2014) are only some of the more notable examples.  The heroics must be epical to win the statuette (Ben Kingsley, Gandhi, 1982; Lewis, Lincoln, 2012).  Brave men fighting impossible odds and prevailing are mere garden variety, not quite worthy of the golden statuette.

A stunning reversal of this convention was the early positioning of Leonardo DiCaprio as the favourite for the Best Actor Oscar for his performance as Hugh Glass, a true-blue American frontiersman who survives events and incidents that would have killed even the bravest of men, to ultimately prevail over his nemesis, in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s masterly The Revenant.  On February 28, he duly went on to receive the trophy (Iñárritu was named the best director).  That achievement was in the face of competition from another victimhood performance by Redmayne as a tormented artist undergoing a sex-change procedure in The Danish Girl.  

Most reactions to DiCaprio’s award can be summarised simply as: At last!  He has won the Golden Globe twice before, for his roles of Howard Hughes in The Aviator (2004) and Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) before winning it the third time this year.  But he has never won the Oscar despite being nominated thrice before for the best actor for The Aviator, Blood Diamond (2006) and The Wolf..., and for best supporting actor in an early film, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993).  This caused among the chatterati some wonderment about the actor’s persistent bad luck with the Academy and even a degree of snideness: was it a case of overcompensation, awarding a not-so great performance when the earlier, better ones, went without such recognition?

To anyone who has seen the movie, that is certainly unwarranted cynicism.  Just one scene in this brilliant performance will suffice as substantiation.  Glass/DiCaprio lies on a strung-together pallet, unable to move or speak because of the near fatal wounds he has suffered earlier in a bout with an enraged giant grizzly bear.  The villain mercilessly shoots his beloved son from an American Indian wife.  The combination of anguish and rage DiCaprio expresses just through his eyes and facial muscles is a piece of acting one would remember for a long time.  To this writer, that scene alone is worth all the accolades.

A still from The Revenant

All great acting feats have one trait in common.  Very early on, the audience forgets the actor’s identity and sees on the screen or stage only the character.  Clark Gable is Rhett Butler and Vivien Leigh Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, Gregory Peck is Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, Philip Seymour Hoffman as Capote, Lewis is Lincoln, just as Dilip Kumar is Devdas.  From the very first scene in The Revenant, we do not see DiCaprio, only the rugged fearless frontiersman in the Davy Crockett mould.  He achieved that effect as Howard Hughes in The Aviator also, but only in the second half.

That, of course, limits the types of roles in which an actor can excel.  Make-up and prosthetics can help, but disbelief can be suspended only this far.  Amitabh Bachchan is always Amitabh Bachchan, the superstar playing a role, however sincere the performance may be.  Victimhood and oddity sit with difficulty on actors with spectacular good looks and personality, such as Paul Newman, Robert Redford, George Clooney and, of course, DiCaprio.  That is why they figure so infrequently in the Academy Award winners despite their many spectacular pieces of acting, given the Academy’s well-established penchant to reward portrayals of conflicted roles.  DiCaprio did the mentally troubled brother of the hero in Gilbert Grape, winning an Oscar nomination along the way, but that was not a stand-out effort.

The luminous DiCaprio career includes many critically and popularly acclaimed performances.  His young modern day Romeo in Baz Luhrman’s Romeo + Juliet created a template of sorts.  The poor mid-westerner winning a steerage passage in the tragic inaugural voyage of the Titanic who woos a rich Kate Winslet carried that image forward and became a huge success.  That was the stepping stone to superstardom at an early age (he was 23 then).  Some poorly selected films such as The Beach (2000) notwithstanding, DiCaprio went from success to success.  

Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me if You Can (2002), Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (2002), The Departed (2006) and The Wolf of Wall Street, Sam Mendes’ The Revolutionary Road again with Kate Winslet, then Mrs Mendes in real life (2008), Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010), Clint Eastwood’s J Edgar (2011), Luhrman’s The Great Gatsby (2013), Quentin Tarrantino’s Django Unchained (2012) were among the major milestones in the last 15 years, now capped by The Revenant.

The roles essayed range from an Irish mobster in the late nineteenth century New York to a reclusive billionaire increasingly out of touch with any reality, a completely amoral financial manipulator to a troubled traveller between layers of reality in a science fiction world, a rakish member of the idle-rich party set to a tough-as-nails iron-willed explorer of brutally magnificent wilderness. This is truly astonishing.  Not many stars anywhere have œuvrés to match it.

My personal favourite is Catch Me if You Can.  DiCaprio drops out of high school to break away from his humdrum lower middle class existence in Middle America.  In quick succession, he becomes a member of varied professions such as an airline pilot, a doctor and a lawyer.  His patrons and women he woos have no clue at all.  He puts his knowledge of white collar crime at the disposal of his FBI captor and acquits himself with honour, with the FBI siding with in the end against the French surété.  This was a foretaste of DiCaprio’s phenomenal ability to slip quickly from one character to a wildly different one, effortlessly and with complete conviction.

DiCaprio is not a one-dimensional person whose life is acting and nothing more.  For some time now, he has been a passionate environmentalist.  His acceptance speech at the Oscar ceremony on February 28 was a well-crafted and delivered plea for measures against global warming and ecological conservation.  One of his films forthcoming in the near future will be about the Volkswagen emission data suppression scandal.  No prizes offered for guessing the villain of that piece!

DiCaprio was almost certainly named after the Renaissance genius Leonardo da Vinci.  To draw even parallels, leave alone comparisons, between the two would be sheer audaciousness.  But he certainly personifies excellence in acting synonymous with the name of the award he has so richly deserved for a while now.