Each of these extraordinary actors uses language beautifully, but more powerful than any word they have ever uttered is their ability to communicate sheer volumes of thought, emotion, and depth of insight with their eyes, hands, mouths, fingers, feet, stomachs, legs, torsos. These are the actors I prefer watching because they do not rely on the cheap substitute of language to express what a look or a moment of frozen stillness can express wordlessly.
As a writer, I realize that my calling language "cheap" is probably a bit hostile to someone who doesn't know me. But the truth is that, though I've been writing since my youth and I've seen quite a few winters since then, I find that language can only take us so far. It has profound limits. And beyond language there is a vast realm of greater truth found in pure physical being. Maybe it's only to be found in erotic moments where two people come undone and lose themselves entirely, or perhaps in moments when we just let go of words. In those moments, we forget to lie, and that is beautiful.
In film and on stage, I love more than anything else to watch the actors who understand how beautiful the unspoken word can be. Natalie Portman delivered a bold and almost damaging performance as the darkly brilliant dancer Nina Sayers in Black Swan. The very best of her moments in that film were those in which she said nothing, when she just let her beautiful, elegant body and those dark, haunted eyes speak for themselves. There was more poetry in her sad movements and sudden shifts of mood than in all the words of Shakespeare's sonnets.
Silence is something so few people seem to appreciate anymore. I thank my lucky stars that I can still watch movies where great actressess like Portman and Mirren and Blanchett explore silence as a mechanism for powerful communication. I find it galvanizing and as bracingly beautiful as a clear mountain stream in northern Montana at sunrise.
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