Muriel Award: Best Performance of the Decade (Male)
We had a lot of tight races this year (including, as you’ll see in a couple of days, a vote that literally could not have been closer). Yet, there were also a couple full-fledged blowouts. Today’s category is the first of those, and you can probably guess where it’s going…
Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood [183 points/25 votes]
“Daniel Day-Lewis isn’t exactly a recluse—you think Howard Hughes would have come out of his cave for Nine?—but he does think long and hard about which projects to commit to, almost as if he didn’t waste his time, or ours. He did fine, quiet work in The Ballad of Jack and Rose, and his epic-scaled, daring performance in Gangs of New York, which inspired one critic to compare it to the Bread and Puppet Theater, put most CGI to shame, but it was P.T. Anderson who, in recent years, has done the best job of directing him to scale clouds while making good on his promise to meet him on the other side. His Daniel Plainview is a capitalist villain out of American protest literature from a time when socialism was still regarded as a viable option, and Day-Lewis plays him without any softening or groveling for sympathy, yet he makes this monster—a man who has to kill the only person with whom he lets down his guard enough to reveal his heart—not just convincing but, in a way, heart-breaking. To watch this performance and then switch on the news to see CEOs whining about how much it hurts their feelings to hear people bitching about their bonuses is to be made to feel that they don’t make capitalist monsters the way they used to.” — Phil Nugent
Runners-up:
Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight [66/11]
Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler [48/8]
Heath Ledger, Brokeback Mountain [46/7]
Bill Murray, Lost in Translation [36/6]
Click for complete results
