The "Partial" Great Performance Effect

I think I recall you saying at one point that a Paul Newman/Lee Remick pairing would have been great had the film adaptation been made in the era of the book's release. Would you say that Newman displayed a greater capacity for conveying self-loathing (given a performance like Hud) that made him more suited to the role than DiCaprio?

Kate Winslet in Steve Jobs gets much, much better as she goes along, to the point I wish they had reshot the entire first act.

Meryl Streep is so much better in the latter-day scenes from The Iron Lady than she is in the 80s stretches that I really wish they'd tossed Abi Morgan's script and gone to someone else to write a proper draft focusing entirely on elderly Thatcher.

Kevin Costner in JFK. His initial "oh no" at hearing of JFK being shot is laughably underwhelming, as is his whole scene of reacting to the news of his death. He's downright terrible in those two scenes, but then shifts to creating credible conviction, if not obsession, as Garrison works the case. As the film goes on the better he gets to his outstanding final speech where he delivers such powerful emotion to every word in finding the essential heart of needing to discover the truth and see that justice is done.

Another one I thought of is the early scenes of Russell Crowe - an actor I'm sort of mixed on - I enjoy his 10 year run to the early 2000s and after that to me a (very) steep decline but his A Beautiful Mind performance which is mostly great in a bad film is hampered by not looking remotely believable to me on campus.

He was 36 when he played that part and to me looks older and entirely out place - it really takes a while to settle into the performance with that casting conceit.

I notice it more frequently when is a period film. The one that immediately comes to mind is Lupita Nyong'o in 12 Years a Slave, her performance hits all the right notes ( when she cries or just looks closely ) but in her big scene she's supposed to stink and look bad yet she has perfect teeth and overall incredibly good looking, didn't believe for a second she was a slave in a precarious situation. Couldn't imagine her living like that her whole life. Woodard informs more about her character in just a couple of scenes, same for Oduye.

@tyler  I totally get what you mean, there are certain characters that simply are asking way too much suspension of disbelief, however I didn't get all that with Personal Shopper. Have to say, I was entranced by it from the moment the title appears. Maureen seems to have a good eye on fashion, though, more like she's a good observer and sensitive ( maybe complementing her medium talents ) and knows what her boss wants, in the end, she seems like just another pop star and Maureen is efficient going from one place to another, etc. And the fact that is an american in Paris, I think just increase the mood and situation of the character, the sense of loneliness in such a bussy european city. 
There are certain filmmakers that work that way, trying to get away with things that wouldn't be realistic at all, a primal example would be Hitchcock and her leading ladies looking like Barbies and wearing dresses they couldn't affoard. Almodovar works that way too, it's all about to inform the character, don't know if you've seen Julieta, it doesn't have to do anything with visas but the main character is supposed to be a professor yet she has a luxurious apartment with furniture that seems suspicious for her to afford, like a Freud painting or a limited edition Klimt silk night gown, yet reinforce and complemets visually, the character.  I see it as an undeniable decision directors have to make in order to their movies look and be experienced as actual movies and fell under the spell and not tv on the big screen.

Good thread, definitely will post more later when I remember them.

One thing that I've been thinking about is the way we frame our critique of a performance that only partially works, and in doing so I've been questioning how much agency we ascribe to an actor when part of their performance fails. Like it's one thing to claim that parts of performances don't work because you don't buy a certain aspect of their character based on the actor playing them, but saying that the actor doesn't "get" certain aspects of a character or claiming that they give an "incomplete" performance is arguing something more specific.

In the case of Sean Penn, we might struggle to buy him as a guy holding a normal job or as a guy married to Naomi Watts when those components of the role are in such close proximity to the emotionally fraught or psychologically unstable sides of the role... but rather than frame that issue as Penn's consistent failure to believably link those two aspects of a character somehow (the mundane and the extreme) across separate roles, couldn't we also say that Penn is sometimes a tricky actor to cast in the sense that he more naturally fits the sensibility of uniformly broken, erratic character types than people who are supposed have had at least a history of being "normal"? And perhaps he succeeded so "completely" with Milk because that role is designed in such a different way than the others you mentioned - the role and the material allowed Penn to coherently fill out the character in a way that doesn't depend on the audience buying him as someone with the distinctly diverse traits inherent in those other roles, which may not align with the way we "see" Penn in general. I'm not sure if "he got every aspect of Milk right" tells the whole story so much as "casting him in Milk worked completely in his favor this time." To be clear, I don't want to downplay the actor's own process of shaping a character, but the implication that Penn suddenly learned how to give a well-rounded, great performance in Milk (as opposed to a partially great one) doesn't seem totally right to me.

I guess what I'm getting at is an actor's "castability" (which they have limited control over) vs. the work they put in to coherently fill in the psychology of a single character. Similarly, in the case of DiCaprio, I'm hesitant to assume that he suddenly figured out how to play subtext with his career best Wolf of Wall Street performance, and would probably say instead that it was rather a perfect match of actor and role that allowed subtext to vividly shine through in his performance - so I can't say for certain that he wouldn't have been capable of giving an equally great performance of the same type 10 years earlier if the opportunity arose back then... What if DiCaprio's next 5 performances are bereft of subtext and what would that say about him? Maybe only certain roles facilitate his engagement with subtext and he hasn't tapped into a way of playing it consistently? I guess my point is that there's the risk of overstating an actor's agency in a performance's degree of success because it might lead to a skewed assessment of their skill set and what they have or do not have control over in terms of how audiences see them and the roles afforded to them (with DiCaprio it's a bit different because there have arguably been opportunities for him to go deeper with characters prior to WoWS). How much could Penn control his believability as a storeowner in Mystic River? What could he have done to link the different aspects of the character better? (these are intended more as rhetorical questions, but they don't have to be) 

Another one just came to mind. Julianne Moore in Gloria Bell

It might have to do that lives under the shadow of the original, Paulina Garcia was born to play role, she has the looks of an ordinary woman and is easy to relate to her situation, she sells every corner of that character. Moore is good, in fact is one of her most understated performances, but I never ever believed her in that situation. Not that she was wearing those huge glasses the whole time, that she loved dancing salsa, or that she was woman with a messed up life.

Was thinking about Joaquin Phoenix in Joker while scanning the results for the current poll about the Best Acting Winner of each year, and remembered this thread existed. I think he kind of fits this type of performance imo in that it feels "incomplete" to me in spite of certain aspects of it being great.

The performance is an impressive feat of physical acting, and Phoenix doesn't just  nail the psychological instability, he also vividly captures the character's sadness, pain, and delusion........ but he's ultimately supposed to be playing a Batman villain, and I just don't buy him as a future criminal mastermind, which is pretty crucial if this is the origin story of Batman's arch-nemesis. You might also blame it on the tragedy-porn screenplay, but Phoenix's Joker lacks a certain intellect that is integral to the Joker, and both Nicholson and Ledger were able to convey it.

Though I suppose the issue becomes moot if you subscribe to the theory that Arthur Fleck isn't Batman's Joker, and only inspired that one.

There is a comic called Three Jokers that kind of plays with this concept, formulating that Joker has been at least 3 different people over the years, which explains his wildly different personas over the years (criminal mastermind, insane nihilist, playful prankster etc).

Leo in Shutter Island. Very fine in some scenes (the lake flashback) and unsuited in others (his arrival, war flashbacks).