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When a 43-year-old dies of cancer, it is tragic. But when that person is Chadwick Boseman, the word tragic doesn’t fully express it. It is more than tragic, it is cosmically cruel. You feel like the shock of his loss has blown a hole in the world. Boseman was a virtuous actor who had the rare ability to create a character from the outside in and inside out. In an astonishing trio of biopic films, he played Jackie Robinson, James Brown, and Thurgood Marshall, and captured what each of these men was made of: the rebelliousness of what they felt, the heights they climbed, the intoxicating, and at times, debilitating. armor they wore to protect themselves from a world tied to injustice.
Boseman knew how to merge with a paper, record it in three dimensions, bring it his own truth. That is what made him an artist and also a movie star. However, in “Black Panther,” he also became that weird thing, a culture hero, not only because he embodied the first larger-than-life comic book superhero in Hollywood of the franchise era, but because it turned him into such an earthy and tangible character. human being.
His performance as T’Challa is not like comic book and movie performances by other actors. He’s clever, cunning, and vulnerable, with that sing-song accent that lends a thoughtful playful note to everything he says. And because he infused the character with such a miraculously identifiable spirit, Boseman touched a generation. He created a new kind of hero and in doing so showed us what was possible and changed what was possible. It opened a liberating path of hope and connection. The sudden loss of Boseman feels as unsettling, in its own way, as the loss of Heath Ledger, Philip Seymour Hoffman or James Dean – artists who are irreplaceable and who will live.
When Boseman rose to fame in 2013, as Jackie Robinson in the heartbreaking biopic “42,” you immediately felt the power of his presence. He played Robinson as a man who, as the first African American in major league baseball, had to contend with a level of racial animosity comparable to terrorism. The movie is about Robinson’s courage, but because Boseman was such a daring actor, it also shows the outrage that Jackie Robinson felt and was unable to express (at least, not publicly), and the way that gnawed at him inside. The film is good; Boseman’s performance is great: tense, furious, fickle, defining.
A year later when I saw him in Tate Taylor’s “Get on Up”, I experienced the sense of revelation that many felt about Daniel Day-Lewis in 1986, when he followed his performance as the gay punk in “My Beautiful Laundrette” with his delicious performance as the oily romantic dude from “A Room with a View,” and they all said, “Wait, that’s the same actor?”
In Boseman’s case, he couldn’t believe he was the same actor. Like Jackie Robinson, he was furiously contained. Like James Brown, he was …James brown. And seriously, how does anyone play James Brown? It’s like saying you are going to impersonate a tornado. Yet Boseman does it: he nails every impossible dance move, every gesture of funk bombast, and speaks in such a bluntly haughty and fascinating way that we could be in the presence of a hypnotist. He shows you what it took Brown to invent a new kind of rhythm that turned rock ‘n’ roll upside down. But it also shows you the legacy of pain and ego that fueled that rhythm. It’s amazing, it’s cathartic, it’s indelible. (I thought it was the best movie of 2014). It didn’t get the Oscar fondness that Jamie Foxx did for “Ray,” but in a way, who cared? This was a performance designed to stun the gods.
Boseman had incredible taste for roles, which is one reason his resume is short and nice. All was wheat, very little straw. But it’s revealing to see the performance he gave in “21 Bridges,” a garish police thriller that came out late last year (and was a minor hit), because it doesn’t quite measure up to those other movies, so you can see the personality that Boseman contributed to a role when it was not richly imagined; in this case, he was tense and wary, with ragged bursts of bravado. He could dominate a scene with his eyes, with everything they captured. (They swept the room like a surveillance camera). At the same time, there was a warmth to Boseman, a feeling of camaraderie that manifested even when he was playing a cool cop.
Seriously, the sky would have been the limit for him. It saddens me that he never had a great romantic role, because I think it would have deepened his image. Yet when you think of Chadwick Boseman and what he might have been, part of what is so heartbreaking about his loss is that it comes at a time when the entertainment industry is dealing, in powerful ways, with its legacy of racism. , and is trying to open new doors. In the years since Boseman became a star, you can count the leading roles he had with one hand. However, if you watch those performances, you may be overwhelmed by the feeling that as an actor, Chadwick Boseman could do anything. If I had lived, I think I would have. It would have done what the best actors do: show us who we are, but also new ways of being, things that we would never have imagined until we saw them.
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