Casey versus Denzel: A theater critic’s take on who should win Oscar’s tightest race

On the surface, Lee Chandler, the protagonist of “Manchester by the Sea,� and Troy Maxson, the central character of “Fences,� wouldn’t seem to have much in common. Sprung from different playwriting imaginations, they are the products of vastly different American experiences.

If it weren’t that the actors portraying these characters delivered two of the finest film performances of the year, it is doubtful that Lee or Troy would be mentioned in the same breath. But they have been brought together by the counterintuitive magic of awards season.

Odds are that either Casey Affleck, who portrays Lee in Kenneth Lonergan’s scrupulous character study served on New England ice, or Denzel Washington, who plays Troy in the faithful film he directed of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, will walk away with the Academy Award for lead actor on Sunday.

Stylistically, these performances are so different that calling a tie might be easier than deciding a winner. Yet on closer inspection, the roles turn out to be as striking in their similarities as they are in their contrasts.

Psychologically, Lee and Troy aren’t all that far apart. Scarred by their histories, straitjacketed by conventional masculinity and stuck in jobs that squash their self-esteem, they have little reason to believe that their tomorrows will be substantially different from their onerous todays.

Troy, a married middle-aged sanitation worker scraping by in 1950s Pittsburgh, is one of the most memorable characters in Wilson’s 10-play cycle chronicling 20th century African American life. An ex-con who has become a responsible breadwinner since marrying Rose (the glorious Viola Davis), Troy is bitter that his glory days as a star slugger in the Negro Leagues were already fading by the time Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in major league baseball. (“There ought not never have been no time called too early!� he shouts, resorting to a triple negative to convey his helpless dismay.)

Lee is a janitor plunging toilets in apartments outside of Boston as he goes through the motions of a life that could be described as posthumous after a catastrophic loss. (Lonergan keeps from us the details of Lee’s past until we’ve spent enough time trudging in the character’s shoes to understand the weight of what has happened to him.)

Coping is the true profession of these men. Stubborn in their own ways, they are overcome by a sense of futility they see as just plain common sense. Troy is a casualty of the racism that blocked his chance of realizing his potential; Lee is a prisoner of the guilt that has led to his miserable stasis and isolation.

The plots of these characters test their capacity for change. Lee, having been named the guardian of his teenage nephew, Patrick (Lucas Hedges, in a breakout performance), after his brother’s sudden death, is given an opportunity to emerge from his self-imposed sentence of solitary confinement. Troy, threatening to stand in the way of his son’s football scholarship, has the chance to relinquish his grudge over the way his own athletic career played out and accept the possibility of progress for a new generation.

Neither author nor character takes the easy way out. Lonergan, a playwright whose films (“You Can Count on Me,� “Margaret,�) follow the unsentimental path of his exquisitely observed plays (“This Is Our Youth,� “Lobby Hero�), is like Wilson more committed to truth than to consolation. But the parallels end there.

Lonergan plumbs fearsome depths, but the world created by Wilson, one of the greatest of 20th century American dramatists, is far more expansive. Troy’s journey, as wide as it is deep, is as much about history as it is about character psychology.

The performances of the leads reveal the playwriting gap. Affleck, working almost exclusively with a gray palette of anguished reticence, conveys through deadened eyes and somber mien the intolerable burden of being Lee. We watch this shell of a man quietly struggle to fulfill the paternal role thrust upon him. But the internal movement of a character who has difficulty even acknowledging his name is limited, making the subtlest shifts in acting all the more consequential. Authenticity and restraint set Affleck’s performance apart.

More versatility is required of Washington, who must naturalize to the screen a character made for the theater. Troy’s transformations from boozy raconteur to tyrannical father to unfaithful husband to traumatized black man occur almost entirely through bursts of language. The character’s monologues are like jazz riffs, and his soliloquies thunder with existential fury.

From a purely technical point of view, Troy is a more difficult character to portray on-screen than Lee. Wilson was a realist of the poetic variety who exploited the full histrionic measure of his art form. Washington’s task is to honor the theatricality of his character’s verbal squalls while integrating them seamlessly into the frame.

Making matters more complicated, Troy has been interpreted by other actors, most notably by James Earl Jones, who won a Tony for his grand slam performance. (Troy’s prose arias were made for Jones’ barreling baritone.) Affleck’s portrayal is the only existing version of Lee, making it easier for us to pretend that character and actor are one.

Directing a screenplay written by Wilson (who died in 2005), Washington opens up the film by taking us inside Troy’s house and showing us glimpses of the surrounding neighborhood. But Washington’s reverence for Wilson’s writing keeps him from departing from a play that manufactures its universe through talk. Montages are added, but the most significant alteration may be in the cutting of one or two piquant lines, such as the remark Rose makes late in the play about her early courtship with Troy: “I was 30 years old and had done seen my share of men.�

The film has been criticized for not shaking off its theatrical origins, but the “staginess� of the movie is no more pronounced than other landmark films based on dramatic masterworks. Elia Kazan’s movie version of Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire� and Mike Nichols’ movie version of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?� don’t completely hide their Broadway pedigrees either. And if Laurence Olivier’s Oscar-winning “Hamlet� seems like ancient history, it wasn’t all that long ago that Rob Marshall’s “Chicago� nabbed the film academy’s top prize.

It’s easier to lose oneself in the fiction of “Manchester by the Sea,� but the movie calls attention to its own artificiality through its flourishes of classical music, its ponderous fetishizing of frozen landscapes and the jacked-up scenes of barroom violence that contrapuntally comment on all that Lee is repressing. Lonergan’s film strikes me as overpraised, but its realism is unimpeachable, even if the slow, exacting style can’t conceal that all drama is ultimately a fabrication or convince us that verisimilitude is the highest artistic truth.

The theater is comfortable with a wider range of performance styles, but movie acting is in danger of becoming monolithic when the assumption goes unchecked that the best acting is inevitably the most lifelike. Psychological realism, the art that wins approbation through its invisibility, has become preeminent on screens of all sizes. But the history of film is more expansive than this cramped view of an art form in which being larger than life was once the expectation.

The camera may be a powerful X-ray into the soul, but it is also a marvelous frame for showing off, cutting wise, breaking out into song, seducing the masses and turning ordinary life into myth. Realism, it should be remembered, is a counterfeit of reality, and there are many artistic roads to the truth.

Lee’s depressive fog is expertly calibrated, and Affleck deserves all the accolades thrown his way. Having seen “Manchester by the Sea� first in a movie theater and then on a press screener at home, I can attest that the acting didn’t lose anything in the transition from the big to the small screen. If anything, the drama seemed to improve by the snug intimacy, leaving me to wonder whether our standards of acting excellence have been reformulated by the artistic rise of television.

Despite all the criticism of the film being insufficiently cinematic, “Fences� worked better for me at the ArcLight Hollywood than at home. Built for the stage, the drama is comfortable with the wide expanse of the movie screen. Yes, I was always conscious of watching a translation from one medium to another, but that didn’t dampen the pleasures of realism, which coexisted with the advantages of more heightened forms of storytelling.

Washington’s performance, a virtuoso turn as gritty as it is flamboyant, raises the level of the entire ensemble. Davis’ magnificent Rose visibly twinges with every instance of her husband’s casual brutality while still radiating love for the man she’s been joined to for 18 years.

There’s nary a false note from Stephen McKinley Henderson as Troy’s clear-eyed confidant Bono; Jovan Adepo as Troy’s vulnerable football star son, Cory; or Russell Hornsby as Troy’s older son from a previous marriage, Lyons, a musician browbeaten by his father every time he stops by for a small loan. These are theatrical characters built on fundamental patterns and fleshed out with lineaments that come most fully to life in the presence of Washington’s Troy.

But the rewards of “Fences� transcend those of realism. The movie version (every bit as much as the 2010 Broadway revival that earned both Washington and Davis Tony Awards) personalizes American history, giving our nation’s troubled racial past a set of names and sharply drawn personalities, all with their own hopes, heartaches and capacities for endurance.

If Affleck wins the Oscar, you won’t hear any objections from me. His performance burrows deep under the skin of his broken character. That kind of artful honesty isn’t to be taken lightly. But long after the acceptance speeches have been made, it’s the brute charisma of Washington in “Fences� that will stay with me.

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