It begins and ends with a look. In that look is hesitance, longing, desire, confusion, confidence, conviction, hope. Even love. On NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour, writer and critic Glenn Weldon described real chemistry between actors living in the look, elaborating on the attraction manifesting in the movement of the eyes.
Colin Farrell, donning a rather “Joaquin Phoenix in Her” disposition and attire, sits on the couch, facing away from his presumed wife as she tells him the details of the man for whom she’s leaving, doesn’t say much.
Robert Zemeckis’s The Walk, based on Philippe Petit’s wire walking across the Twin Towers in the early 1970s, opens on the face of its star Joseph Gordon-Levitt, thereby setting the tone for the film: Zemeckis puts much technical effort and detail into accentuating the depth and various surfaces of the actor’s face, and as the star, as wire walking Philippe, begins to talk, nothing but tall tales falls from his mouth.