![]() He has a quality no acting school can teach and few actors can match: You cannot look away from him. The earlier niceness was not an act to throw people off their guard, we sense he really was feeling friendly, and did not necessarily anticipate the sudden rush of rage.Įric Bana's performance suggests he will soon be leaving the comedy clubs of Australia and turning up as a Bond villain or a madman in a special-effects picture. There is a startling moment in the film, during a brief stretch on the streets between prison sentences, when he revisits old haunts and old friends and seems genial and conciliatory-until his mad-dog side leaps out in uncontrolled fury. But it provides a clue in the way he stands outside criminal gangs and has no associates he is not a "criminal," if that word implies a profession, but a violent psychopath who is seized by sudden rages. The movie wisely declines to offer a psychological explanation for Chopper's violent amorality. He looks down at blood pouring from his body as if someone else has been wounded, and then up at his attacker as if expressing regret that it should have come to this. He's as fascinated by himself as we are, and isolated from his actions. He pretends that he doesn't care how he's perceived by others, but I suspect he really does." That's how he comes across as a film-as a man who seems to stand outside himself and watch what Chopper does. I want to know what you think of me,' so we didn't pursue it. We did offer to show him the script, but he declined, remarking, `Anything I say would be fiddling. "After we'd passed some time with him," says Bennett, "we could see that he was waiting to gauge our reaction before he proceeded. The writer-director Andrew Dominik and producer Michele Bennett, who met Chopper Read while preparing the film, sensed the same thing. He seems curiously conflicted about what he sees-as if the Chopper on TV has been somehow constructed by others and then installed inside his skin. ![]() We feel we're looking at a hard man, not at an actor playing one.Īs the film opens, Chopper is in prison watching himself on television. Bana's performance makes the character believable-in fact, unforgettable. And another where he shoots a drug dealer and then thoughtfully drives him to the emergency room. There is a scene in the movie where Chopper is stabbed by his best friend, and keeps right on talking as if nothing has happened his nonchalance is terrifying. He creates a character so fearsome and yet so clueless and wounded that we can't tell if the movie comes to praise or bury him. Since the real Chopper is again behind bars, the film depends entirely on its casting, and in a comedian named Eric Bana the filmmakers have found, I think, a future star.
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