I love the fact that Robert Downey Jr. has won an Oscar. He’s one of those actors, like William Holden or Audrey Hepburn, or Gene Hackman or Tuesday Weld, who seems incapable of giving a bad performance. He just has this endless well of performance inspiration energy that is awe-inspiring.
His performance in “Oppenheimer” is a wonderful, controlled, deeply convincing performance, so his Oscar was certainly earned.
But when I watched David Fincher’s ‘Zodiac’ the other day, I was reminded of just what a wonderful, inventive, funny, tragic and beautiful performance he created in Paul Avery, the crime writer for the San Francisco Chronicle who was tracking the real-life killer Zodiac.
The real-life Paul Avery character has this tremendous, epic arc: newsroom bon vivant, well dressed, articulate, popular and funny - at first. And then he descends. At one point, now dressed in tattered clothing, Avery asks the Jake Gyllenhall character, the Chronicle cartoonist Robert Graysmith who is also obsessed with Zodiac, if he’d like to go out for a drink. “It’s 10 o’clock in the morning,” says Graysmith. “Late,” says Avery. And then Graysmith asks Paul if he is okay. Downey looks at him and says, softly, ‘No.’
It’s just gorgeous. Watch, or re-watch ‘Zodiac’, and think how Robert Downey Jr. should not have one Academy Award, but two
.