tMF | The Movie-Fanatic

tMF is coming up with its list of 10 Best Performances from young actors. This Blog-a-thon will run this week and a final post will feature tMF's top choice. Our second post features the amazing and talented Jamie Bell. In Hallam Foe, Bell has proven once again that he is cinema's most enduring and consistent young lead and that playing quirky, weird characters is a sure-fire way to standout. I'm pretty sure I'm not alone is saying that there is consistency when it comes to Bell's performances. He never did anything bad. The movie's box office result maybe lackluster, but his acting remains masterful and authentic.

Hallam Foe is probably his most significant performance after Billy Elliot and before Undertow where he played Chris Munn, a teen aching for sex and acceptance. As Hallam, Bell brought to life a young man in search for the truth behind the death of his mother and more importantly, of himself.

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Says Jamie Bell of his character:

He's kind of an enigma. I remember receiving the script - and my agent was a big fan of David's; he'd had a client in YOUNG ADAM. But I remember reading the script, and in the first fifteen pages I was like, "Why do we like this guy? He's called his mother a prostitute at the dinner table, he's estranged himself from the rest of his family, he's perving on people, and he's drawing red lipstick circles around his nipples!" (Laughing) But it's the loss that he's encountered. I think before the loss, he was probably a mommy's boy to some degree. She was obviously such a huge influence on his life that when you see him [acting out], you can't help but sympathize with everything he does; when a young person experiences such loss, they harbor such intense guilt and intense anger that... it all comes out in these very weird ways. His feral-ness, the way he's almost like an animal, and his obsession with observing people, that's all to do with his sense of loss. So for me, essentially, the film charts his trajectory of change, of growing, accepting and becoming - understanding that people come and go, and that's okay.

Bell's performance was nominated for the Best Actor award at the British Independent Film Awards and also at the Scottish BAFTA.

Synopsis

Hallam Foe (Bell) is a troubled young man whose knack for voyeurism paradoxically reveals his darkest fears, and his most peculiar desires. A 17-year-old misfit, Hallam spends lonely days spying on others at his father's (Ciarán Hinds) estate in the Scottish Highlands. Haunted by his mother's sudden death, he begins to suspect that his beautiful step mother (Claire Forlani) may have had a played a hand in it. Confusing matters even more for Hallam, he finds himself attracted and repelled by her in equal measure.

When the tension that has been brewing between the two erupts, Hallam runs away. Out of money and out of friends, he crashes down into reality in Edinburgh. Adept at fading into the background and peering in on the lives of others to escape his own every day life, he continues what he learned at home to the city. He soon becomes obsessed with Kate (Sophia Myles), who bears an uncanny resemblance to his mother. When his world collides with Kate's and the reality of life back home, he is faced with betraying the memory of the mother he longs for or using his one last chance to grow up.

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Critical Acclaims

The New York Times' A.O. Scott took note of Bell's performance in his review:

Hallam (played by the excellent Jamie Bell, who has gained some skill and shed a bit of cuteness since “Billy Elliot”) would no doubt benefit from some counseling, and the melodramatic twists of the plot ultimately serve as a kind of substitute therapy. It’s certainly more entertaining to watch a confused young man work out his issues through kinky sex and daredevil wall-climbing than to be a fly on the wall as he talks things out with a shrink. And if the extremity of Hallam’s temperament tests the limits of our sympathy as well as our credulity, Mr. Bell’s ability to seem by turns sweet and scary prevents us from losing interest entirely.

So does Mr. Mackenzie’s success in translating Mr. Jinks’s prose into an atmosphere that is both gritty and picturesque. He infuses the examination of Hallam’s emotional disorder with enough macabre and comical touches to prevent “Mister Foe” from sliding into the clinical sensationalism of the case study. That is more or less what it turns out to be in the end, but the film is also a nimble, acrobatic tour of Edinburgh, traipsing through narrow alleyways, up drainpipes and across gables and gutters as it follows Hallam on his pathological way.[ read more ]

Also, European-Films' Publisher, Boyd Van Hoeij, comments on Jamie Bell's performance:

McKenzie's most important accomplishment is finding the right tone and here the director is greatly aided by Jamie Bell. The young actor, most famous for his star-making role as Billy Elliot, is revealing himself to be a future Meryl Streep (only male and British) in the way his own personality seems to become more enigmatic with every role he plays, because he does not simply play each character but actually seems to be the character tout court. Bell really sells Hallam's teenage confusion; teetering on the brink of madness and conspiracy theories one moment only to be completely absorbed by something seemingly unrelated the next. [ read more ]

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More Insights into Jamie Bell

The Guardian's Emma Brockes wrote an impressive profile of the young actor, going back to the time he played Billy Elliot and took note of the many challenges Bell has to face - because he is not normal like kids his age.

Like a lot of young film actors, Bell has had to learn how to spend time on his own. He keeps a journal and likes to read, mainly biographies and, rather sweetly, "instruction manuals". At the time of our interview, he is reading a biography of Kurt Cobain. "I don't take any photographs. I travel a lot by myself, and I feel weird taking photos on my own. If there's a bunch of us taking pictures of each other, that's fine. But on my own ... I find that writing in my journal is enough. It's not about the place I'm in - Tokyo or wherever - it's about the mindset that I'm in."

The success of Billy Elliot - Bell won a Bafta for it - could have turned him into a brat in the mould of the young Leonardo DiCaprio (in fact, he's a big fan of DiCaprio's and thinks he has been unfairly cast as a "pretty boy"). And, indeed, Bell does knock about in a kind of British rat pack with, among others, Max Minghella, actor son of director Anthony, but he has an easy humour that seems to deflate the hype around him. And he is too funny-looking - strong-featured, but a little wonky - to inspire much hysterical female attention. Bell really would rather be Albert Finney than Tom Cruise.

Among his contemporaries, he admires James McAvoy, but says that, generally, "I don't think there's a lot of actors out there right now who really know what they're doing at all. There was a generation of actors who were classically trained, knew what it was. But now I think younger actors, there's no real progression. They're just doing it."

Albert Finney than Tom Cruise. That's extraordinary! I don't think his fans would have it any other way.

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