This Complex, Courageous German Actress Gave the Two Best Performances of 2023

In Slate’s annual Movie Club, film critic Dana Stevens emails with fellow critics—for 2023, Bilge Ebiri, Esther Zuckerman, and Mark Harris—about the year in cinema. Read the first entry here.

Dear All,

We’ve gone and done it—reached our last round of discussion, while just beginning to jiggle the lock on this year’s vault of movie riches. This is your last chance to share your free-form thoughts about 2023 in film. We’re heading into the heart of awards season, when even the most Oscar-resistant of movie journalists becomes a part in that institution’s ineluctable machinery.

Grousing about awards, whether on the part of critics or viewers in general, is a small but crucial cog in the system: In pointing out that the best movies or performances of the year often go unrecognized, we bring that work some attention and, with luck, a few new viewers. But we also, willy-nilly, uphold the idea that getting past that velvet rope would mean something for those movies’ future, and for the future of movies. We bitch about the gatekeepers—sometimes for good reason, and occasionally with positive real-world results, like the changes in the size and makeup of the Oscar voting body in recent years. But in doing so we can’t help but reinforce the symbolic power of the gate.

In the entertainment industry as it now exists, these paradoxes are probably irresolvable, but that’s OK.  The velvet rope of awards recognition does matter, even if it’s far from the most reliable measure of which movies will live on as either popular entertainments or works of art. And the closest we can come as critics to getting outside of the closed loop that is awards season is not to rage against the machine, but to observe its workings with bemused but dispassionate interest (and maybe just a couple of rooting favorites per season).

One of my rare rooting favorites this year will be Lily Gladstone, the quiet hurricane at the center of Killers of the Flower Moon. Gladstone is in fact the current favorite to win Best Actress, in the opinion of many who make it their business to quantify such tricky things as shifts in early-awards-season favor. NGL: I would love to see her clutching that trophy and to hear what I expect, based on the thoughtful and passionate person she comes across as in interviews, would be a sensational acceptance speech. I robustly dissent from the notion that Gladstone’s relatively modest total screen time when compared to her co-star Leonardo DiCaprio makes her role more of a supporting one. (I’ve always found the concept of “category fraud” silly in its hyperbolic estimate of the degree of wrong committed: One pictures a gentleman dashing his silk top hat to the ground and crying, “That, sir, is naught but category fraud!”) Once you’ve seen KOTFM there can be no question that, whichever of the two actors highlighted more dialogue in their shooting script, Gladstone and DiCaprio were equal partners in collaborating with the director to make the film what it is—to my mind, not only one of the best of the year but among the most ambitious and powerful of Scorsese’s long and masterpiece-studded career. When Gladstone’s Mollie is absent from the screen for a stretch late in the movie (for reasons that still make my pulse race with fear and anger three months after seeing it), the viewer misses her with a visceral pang. Without Mollie in it, the world Scorsese has spent by then two-plus hours building in such fine detail and at so dizzying a scale makes no moral sense—and that scary sensation of chaos, of being cast adrift in a universe taken over by evil forces, is precisely the point of removing her from the screen for a time. Her experience of powerlessness and abandonment becomes the audience’s own.

There’s more to be said about what Gladstone does to make Mollie, a woman of few words, someone we come to care about deeply, even as the actress guards for Mollie alone some part of the character’s mystery and privacy (a gesture Scorsese repeats with that meta-narrative coda set on a radio stage). But in the hopes that Esther, who I know also loved Gladstone’s performance, will say more about it in her next post, I’ll move on to two other noteworthy 2023 performances, both from the same remarkable actor. Both movies will likely come up more than once in the awards conversation to come; whether they do or not, they should certainly be a part of ours.

Sandra Hüller is a much-lauded German actress who has been working on the stage, in film, and in TV since she first appeared with a national youth company at a Berlin theater festival in high school in 1996. But for most filmgoers outside Germany, Hüller first came to light in the one-of-a-kind 2017 comedy Toni Erdmann, playing the workaholic daughter of an eccentric-bordering-on-bizarre dad. That role won Hüller the German equivalent of an Oscar, and also imprinted her face—that ordinary but unforgettably expressive set of features—onto the brain of anyone who saw Toni Erdmann. This year she plays two completely different women with astounding virtuosity and a wild sort of actorly courage.

In Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, Hüller plumbs the psyche of a successful novelist and devoted mother who may or may not have pushed her husband out a third-story window to his death. The script, written by Triet and her life partner Arthur Harari, is a tour de force of multiplying perspectives; just when we think we’ve figured out who’s misrepresenting themselves to whom and why, a new line of courtroom questioning or rug-pulling flashback arrives to shift our allegiances again. Hüller is on screen for nearly every moment of the movie’s two-and-a-half-hour running time, constantly being asked to retell the story of an event whose gruesome aftermath also becomes the subject of an intensive forensic investigation. Yet neither the viewer’s certainty about what occurred that day at the chalet nor our understanding of the motivations of Sandra—not by accident the character’s as well as the actor’s name—are satisfied until the movie’s final frame, and (again depending on your perspective) possibly not even then.

Though Anatomy of a Fall more than fills the bill as a suspenseful murder mystery—152 minutes long or no, it’s as tight as a Hitchcock thriller—what sets it apart from your average art house pulse-pounder is the fullness of characterization Hüller brings to her name-double, an ambitious, resentful, lonely, loving, sometimes manipulative woman. The actress conveys the layers of self-deception, selective memory, and other forms of half-truth that enable Sandra, along with most of us, to get through the day, all with such immediacy that when it comes to the movie’s big hidden truth—how did that man fall out that window?—the character’s opacity is all the more perplexing. Unlike some other heroines in 2023 movies I could name—fine, Greta Lee’s character in Past Lives, I said it—the morally ambiguous protagonist of Anatomy of a Fall could never be accused of functioning as an audience-proxy Mary Sue. She’s a complex creation, infuriatingly closed off at times and heartbreakingly vulnerable at others. If someone as recognizably real, flawed, and ordinary as Sandra can be reasonably suspected of murdering a loved one, where does that leave the rest of us?

In his last post, Mark pointed us to Manohla Dargis’ scathing pan of Jonathan Glazer’s purposefully uneventful Holocaust drama The Zone of Interest. That film, whether you like it or not (I loved it, if one can classify that form of queasy admiration as “love,” and put it on my list for the year), poses a very specific acting challenge to its two main characters, the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife, Hedwig (Hüller). Friedel and Hüller must convincingly inhabit the bodies and minds of a complacent Nazi couple who not only have no problem with the mass slaughter of European Jewry taking place on the other side of their high garden wall, but are actively working to enable that slaughter in order to continue leading what seems to them like a happy and wholesome family life. If the actors were to subtly telegraph to the audience that they, of course, understand the monstrosity of their characters’ actions, Glazer’s study of the banality of evil (to use Hannah Arendt’s phrase about a different middle manager of the Third Reich) would be stripped of its banality, and thus of its true horror.

This is why Manohla’s complaint about the story’s static, repetitive quality (which Mark echoes to some degree, though with more sympathy for what the film sets out to do) doesn’t rhyme with my own experience of The Zone of Interest’s hard-to-endure but not excessive-seeming one-hour-and-45-minute duration. Since the lead couple has a vested interest in keeping up that literal and figurative wall, stasis is kind of the point. By contrast, when Hedwig’s mother comes to visit the Hösses’ eerily pleasant compound, with its swimming pool and well-tended flower garden, she is at first curious, then disturbed, and finally frightened away by the plumes of smoke and occasional muffled screams coming from the other side of that garden wall—a barrier Glazer’s camera never crosses. It’s the movie’s rigor in maintaining that boundary that sets The Zone of Interest apart from most fictionalizations of the Holocaust, which, whatever their individual level of prurient voyeurism or tasteful restraint, exist above all in order to show us the very thing that Glazer won’t allow us to see.

As was the case with Killers of the Flower Moon, though Friedel’s Höss may get more screen time (including that gut-churning final scene of him alone on a staircase), it’s his slightly-less-onscreen wife who is the movie’s moral center—only this time, that morality is reversed so that “center” becomes “soul-destroying abyss.” Sandra Hüller must have gone somewhere very dark inside to come back with a character as blandly self-absorbed and casually cruel as Hedwig Höss. This is a doting mother and respectable middle-class matron who thinks nothing of modeling a fur coat stolen from a Jewish prisoner in front of her mirror, then slitting open the lining to pocket the jewelry hidden inside. Playing such a person could easily offer an actor an opportunity to go big with the villainous sadism; instead, Hüller’s stubbornly human-sized performance has the effect of making the viewer ask, to even more bone-chilling effect than in Anatomy of a Fall: Under what circumstances could this person be me?

Bilge, I’ll hand the torch off to you with a question: What was the performance that most stayed with you through the dazzling year of filmgoing that was 2023?

Wanted in 10 states for category fraud, I remain

Dana

Read the next entry in Movie Club: Is Adam Driver’s Performance in Ferrari Realistic? No, It’s Just Great.