Why Michael Shannon is a gift to movie lovers
The ultimate chameleon. Stranger to a bad performance. That's Mr. Shannon.
Michael Shannon can fit into any picture that a filmmaker or screenwriter designs in their head. No matter the character-good, bad, ugly, or a little of each-Shannon could play it, bringing the part to such vicarious life that one would think he existed out there in the real world somehow. If there’s a picture of “character actor” in the dictionary, a picture of him should suffice.
But he’s so much more than that. Calling Shannon a mere character actor poster boy is like telling someone that Ozzie Smith can play shortstop a little. The truth is there is little Shannon can’t do on a screen. He’s played hellbent lawmen in Boardwalk Empire, but also a more grounded badge in Waco.
Shannon can be the guy who hunts Superman down, and also the guy who races across the country with his alien son while religious cults and the authorities chase after them. He’s the cool yet weird uncle who likes to dive out of his boat into a river for random items buried at the bottom. He can play one of the vicious killers in The Iceman, and then switch it up and play a paranoid father building a shelter against an impending apocalyptic storm.
He’s the lawman in a cowboy hat who can stir something out of a witness in an interrogation. He’s also George Jones singing beside Jessica Chastain’s Tammy in a Showtime series. Heck, he rides a motorcycle alongside Austin Butler in the recent theatrical release, The Bikeriders. Butler was nominated for an Oscar for playing Elvis Presley. Shannon played Elvis in a film about the singer going to visit the White House.
He’s done it all, and then some. The performance is never predictable or phoned in, and it slices like a hammer instead of landing like an axe. Out of the 107 credits on IMDB, less than five percent of those roles are straight-laced souls who walk a familiar path or stick to a noticeable tone. Two-dimensional doesn’t get a chance to live in Shannon’s repertoire.
Shannon is easily intimidating. While any critic or interviewer will say he’s a great guy in real life, there’s a dial for menace in his screen persona. It’s a combination of his voice, height, and brooding presence that can make someone uncomfortable. Seeing him go after poor Sally Hawkins in Guillermo del Toro’s Oscar-nominated The Shape of Water makes a viewer want to tear him down, but there’s always a well-built trace to his character’s madness. It’s never hyperbolic or forced.
The gift of Shannon is being able to break your heart with tenderness just as easy as he breaks it with villainous intentions. Towards the end of Jeff Nichols’ Midnight Special, he has to make the toughest decision a father could make: allowing the idea that his son’s safety has to exist in a place without him. Instead of delivering a stirring monologue that lays all the emotion out, Shannon just stares into his son’s eyes.
When his son asks if he will continue to worry about him even without being there with him, Shannon wistfully says, “that’s the deal.” He keeps staring at his son’s eyes, like a person desperately trying to memorize what he is looking at so the sadness doesn’t settle in too quickly.
There aren’t a lot of people who can play all those tempos, and give each one of them an extra layer of wicked uniqueness. The list is incredibly small, because Shannon can do it in a supporting or small role just as easily as he can with a lot more screen time. He’s one of those actors who could retire without an Oscar, thus lessening the conversation about his brilliance.
He’s whatever the camera needs him to be, even if the lens would be frightened at what he could do. Moviegoers come to a theater or film for many things, after all. They want a little of everything. Michael Shannon can give them that, and that’s why he’s a gift to movie lovers.
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