Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
In Christopher Guest’s new film Mascots — which debuted directly on Netflix last week — Tom Bennett plays Owen Golly Jr., a second-generation mascot from England struggling to live up to his dad’s lofty expectations. Golly, pronounced with a soft “g” (“Golly? Gosh no! We’re not posh, no. We’re jolly. As in gay.”), mascots as Sid the Hedgehog for a minor-league soccer team, has only one bollock as the result of a childhood skateboarding accident, and is in general a very sweet character. In every Christopher Guest movie, there’s always one or two characters whose humanity pushes past all the mockery, and the audience ends up rooting for them. In Mascots, that’s Owen Jr., and Bennett plays the role with a perfect open-faced aloofness. He’s absolutely the best part of the movie, and one of the reasons why it carries off so well.
And that’s not even Tom Bennett’s best film performance of 2016.
In Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship, Bennett plays Sir James Martin, the wealthy yet dim-witted potential suitor for Lady Susan’s (Kate Benckinsale) daughter. Sir James gets some of the film’s best moments (his bafflement at having searched for Churchill estate looking for a church and a hill but finding neither), and once again, Bennett imbues this incredibly foolish man with an internal decency that belies his position in the story. It makes Sir James fascinating; the viewer ends up actively hoping for his return to the story.
When Love & Friendship was released earlier this spring, Bennett’s standout performance seemed destined to show up on a whole bunch of year-end lists of superlatives. When a relatively unknown actor steps up and snatches a movie out from under the likes of Kate Beckinsale and Chloe Sevigny (both of whom are on their A-game, it should be noted), that demands attention. That Bennett followed that up with a performance like the one he gives in Mascots — nothing similar between the two characters, really, except for the undercurrent of Bennett’s comedic decency — and that really makes you sit up and take notice.
Previous to 2016, Bennett’s best-known role was on another Guest production, HBO’s little-seen Family Tree, where he starred opposite his Mascots co-star Chris O’Dowd. Bennett and O’Dowd share the screen briefly, with O’Dowd playing the hooligan-ish mascot The Fist, and it’s easily the best scene from a 2016 movie that quotes Michael Landon from Highway to Heaven. Much like all of Tom Bennett’s 2016 film work, the scene is deceptive and disarming in its goofiness that wraps around a core of gentle sweetness. Unexpected and unforgettable.
