The Best of Albert Finney: Where To Even Begin?

We remember Albert Finney, who died Friday at 82, with a special warmth. One reason: although he played plenty of troubled or problematic guys in his six-decade-long film career, he rarely portrayed an out-and-out villain. (Do you count The Judge in the film of one of Roger Waters’ elaborate live versions of The Wall? I might not, but his role as terrible father Austin Sloper in Agnieszka Holland’s too-little-seen 1997 adaptation of Henry James’ Washington Square definitely fills the villain bill, but it’s a relative rarity.)

But it’s also because he was that most cherished of actors: the value-adder. Like Gene Hackman, like Viola Davis, and like almost hardly anybody else, as soon as you saw him in a film’s credits or enjoyed him making an entrance, you knew that whatever else was the case, he was going to show you something worthwhile. Michael Crichton’s idea-rich but production-value threadbare 1981 Looker feels like high cheese a lot of the time but  Finney’s indignant Beverly Hills plastic surgeon running around uncovering a murderous mind-control conspiracy is kind of a one-man momentum machine.

Finney’s early days as a rebellious/rakish leading man made him a star. He did an unusually good job transitioning from romantic lead to character lead and ensemble man, and it’s in some of these films that he did the work that I enjoy the best. Finney’s path wasn’t easy — he needed to get away from stardom more than once in the 1960s in order to clear his head and resolve what he wanted to do with his life and career. His most dramatic transformation came with 1974’s Murder On The Orient Express. With his slicked-down hair, curled mustache and an overcoat that tied him tight as a straightjacket, he buried his natural sex appeal to play Agatha Christie’s epicene Brainiac detective Hercule Poirot. One of the keys to a good Poirot —and Finney is an absolutely delightful one— is to concoct a Belgian accent that sounds as if you’re speaking with marbles in your mouth, and at the same time pronounce your dialogue coherently. Finney’s is a miracle performance in this and every other respect.

For 1981’s Wolfen, his accent is all over the place, and that’s better than fine. In director Michael Wadleigh’s quirky, impassioned sort-of-eco-thriller, Finney plays another eccentric detective, NYPD’s own Dewey Wilson, solver of the unsolvable. His investigation of a series of ultra-brutal crimes, complete with dismemberments and decapitations, opens up a whole new world for him, and Finney takes the far-fetched goings-on as seriously as Wadleigh does.

Almost too intense is Finney’s work in 1982’s Shoot the Moon, in which he plays an alpha male losing his alpha. Here Finney plays author George Dunlap who, in spite of his success, is letting his marriage go. He’s taken up with a mistress, while Diane Keaton’s Faith, his wife, is helpless to insulate herself and their daughters. Bo Goldman’s complicated script gives the Finney and Keaton a lot to work with (at least until she takes up with a lover herself), and Alan Parker’s direction is atypically understated. Finney’s performance first picks apart the behavioral ticks of what we ’70s kids used to call a “midlife crisis,” then goes full bore on the kind of monstrous behavior that jealousy–fueled rage can motivate. Both performers give jaw-dropping, revelatory performances, but the emotional violence Finney is asked to enact, and delivers, is genuinely frightening. Kind of odd to consider that he played Daddy Warbucks in the extremely odd, John-Huston directed film of the musical Annie the same year. And he’s good in that, too!

In 1983’s The Dresser Finney plays a character only referred to as “Sir;” a venerated actor; Tom Courtenay plays Norman, the title character, who prepares the performer for, in this case, King Lear. The movie brought together for the first time Finney and Courtenay, two icons of the Angry Young Man theater explosion in Britain in the late 1950s. Finney played the soon-to-be-legendary character of Billy Liar in a play of the same name in 1960, and Courtenay played the role in John Schlesinger’s 1963 film. The old pals do not betray their delight in working together in this tense and often painful drama but instead give poignant portraits of decline and despair, but also of love.

Finney reunited with John Huston in 1984 for a more apropos project, an adaptation of Malcolm Lowry’s great modernist novel Under the Volcano. I say more apropos because of the work’s themes, but I should add that I consider Lowry’s novel pretty much unfilmable. And there are plenty of scenes herein that bear me out. However. Huston knew alcoholism damn well, and you have to believe at some level Finney did as well. And playing the hopeless drunk Geoffrey Firmin, a British ex-consul on a permanent tear in Mexico, Finney gets everything frighteningly right: the stiff bearing of the man who’s had too many drinks but is nevertheless searching for his next one; the dandyish delivery of his ironic but not always worthy bon mots; the forced meticulousness of his speech. All the way down to how he breathes. Finney incarnates a dead man walking.

I do not believe I have to tell you how he makes the Coen brothers’ Miller’s Crossing, or how he effortlessly, graciously consents to play second banana to Julia Roberts in Steven Soderbergh’s 2000 Erin Brockovich, as her gruffly lovable boss. Check out his reaction when Roberts’ Erin, responding to a request to dress more modestly, says, “As long as I have one ass one ass instead of two, I’ll wear what I like, if that’s all right with you.” His reaction when she adds “You might wanna rethink those ties” is even better — and his back is to the camera for that one. This is an occasion when you really do have to throw out those two clichés, “one of the greats” and “he will be missed.”

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny  reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny.

Where to stream The Dresser