Welcome to 5 Favorites. Each week, I will put together a list of my 5 favorites (films, performances, whatever strikes my fancy) along with commentary on a given topic each week, usually in relation to a specific film releasing that week.
Now that he’s broken away from the Transformers series, director Michael Bay gets back to work with cheap premises and loud explosions and hopefully not as much sexism and homophobia. Two of the stars of the film, contrary to Bay himself, are interesting to check out every time they show up in a new film: Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II. I focus today on Gyllenhaal who has turned into one of his generation’s finest actors. Let’s take a look at my five favorite films that he’s appeared in.
Donnie Darko (2001)
Even during Gyllenhaal’s early career of chasing the next big thing in hopes of becoming a box office superstar, he managed to find idiosyncratic choices for his filmography. One of his earliest and most bizarre films is this 2001 picture from Richard Kelly that plays with the mind and our perceptions of time. In looking at causality loops, Donnie Darko embarks on a strange journey through sci-fi premises that have been done in myriad films, but seldom better.
Gyllenhaal stars as a teenager who survives a bizarre accident and whose waking life is haunted by visions of a man in a rabbit costume who cajoles him into committing sundry crimes. As his titular character’s psyche slowly crumbles, the circumstances behind the accident and his odd behavior come to the forefront and the audience is treated with a compelling narrative story arc. That it also introduced the world to the foreboding remix of Tears for Fears’ ’80s pop single “Mad World,” performed by Michael Andrews and featuring Gary Jules, is icing on the cake.
Brokeback Mountain (2005)
If there is any film on Gyllenhaal’s filmography that will be remembered for decades to come, it’s his supporting turn in Ang Lee’s involving neo-western romance. Earning an Oscar nomination for the performance, he stars opposite Heath Ledger as two seasonal ranch hands who help protect a herd of sheep on a Wyoming mountain during the summer grazing months of 1963. Ledger is absolutely devastating in the lead and Gyllenhaal provides able support as the two develop a gay relationship that becomes tested when they wed their girlfriends.
It was adapted for the screen by legendary western scribe Larry McMurtry alongside Diana Ossana from a short story by Annie Proulx. Ossana and McMurtry won one of the film’s three Oscars out of its eight nominations. Lee won the award for Directing and Gustavo Santaolalla took the prize for his wistful score. Had there been justice and not a lot of pearl clutching among the Academy’s antiquated membership, the film would have won Best Picture over the mediocre Crash. Additionally, in a just world, Ledger would have won for his nuanced portrayal rather than the terrible and superficial performance of Phillip Seymour Hoffman in the dull and insightless Capote. Yet another in an unfortunate history of fascinating and deep gay characters being overlooked by buffoonery or mediocrity.
Zodiac (2007)
Working for David Fincher can often be a career highlight and that’s certainly true of Gyllenhaal’s star turn in Fincher’s examination of the case to find the Zodiac Killer who terrorized the Norther California area in the 1960s. Gyllenhaal plays a cartoonist who becomes an amateur sleuth trying to solve the strange cyphers Zodiac left for his would-be captors. Mark Ruffalo, Anthony Edwards, Robert Downey Jr., and Brian Cox co-star.
Fincher’s films are sometimes a challenge to sit through. They are intense, but lengthy and this film showed the extremes of both. While it was a fascinating film, it took too much time getting where it wanted to go and ultimately not solving the case. Gyllenhaal and Ruffalo are worth special citation from the film’s impressive cast and it remains a difficult, if rewarding film to watch. It wasn’t among Fincher’s most praised works and didn’t pick up a single Oscar nomination, but if you find serial killers fascinating in the least or the Zodiac Killer in specific, it’s well worth checking out.
Source Code (2011)
Among Gyllenhaal’s laundry list of actual and wannabe blockbusters, Source Code is easily the most compelling of them. From Moon director Duncan Jones with a script by Ben Ripley, the film puts Gyllenhaal in the mind of a soldier who is slipped into the consciousness of another man on board a train that’s about to be blown up. Given 8 minutes to follow the trail of the killer backwards from detonation to apprehension, Gyllenhaal makes numerous re-entries into this body as the commuter train explodes time after time as he inches closer and closer to a solution.
In science-fiction, there are a lot of ideas that are recycled into other better stories and while this film certainly has some solid inspirations, what Ripley and Jones manage to do with the film is nothing short of exciting. As Gyllenhaal makes each new pass and unravels the events as they occur, we’re treated to an incredibly interesting narrative that twists and turns as it maneuvers towards its thrilling conclusion. The revelations that come out of this film are well woven into the tightly packed frame of the film and if you’re looking for a terrific sci-fi experience that not everyone has gotten to witness, this might be your best bet.
Nocturnal Animals (2016)
Donnie Darko is a strange little movie, there’s no denying that. Yet, in terms of pure lunacy, nothing on Gyllenhaal’s filmography can top Nocturnal Animals. Tom Ford’s scintillating follow up to his more melancholy A Simple Man follows Amy Adams as she’s haunted by her ex-husband’s new novel. The violent thriller is a opaquely veiled testament about their crumbling relationship. Gyllenhaal voices her ex as well as plays the main character of the novel in Adams’ imagination as she reads through the dark and twisted novel.
Tom Ford isn’t a prolific filmmaker. This was his second film, following seven years after the release of A Simple Man, starring Colin Firth and Julianne Moore. Adams and Gyllenhaal give him their all in this riveting thriller that unravels brilliantly, slowly exposing emotional and psychological fractures in Adams’ character’s psyche as well as highlighting her ex-husband as an injured man who takes out his frustrations in literary fashion. Ford carefully juggles the present-day sequences and the bleak fantasy segments with equal aplomb. It’s too bad that he hasn’t made a single film in the six years since this film was released. He’s such a fascinating cinematic presence that I’d certainly like to get more out of him. And if you can handle tough subject matters with an emotionally challenging narrative, then this film is worth seeking out.
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