Why harrison ford is a good actor

The role of James Marshall in Air Force One could've made any actors career, yet for Ford it was just another amazing character he brought to life.

I'm sure everyone has an opinion on who the greatest actor of all time is. John Wayne? Marlon Brando? Jimmy Stewart? Dustin Hoffman? Al Pacino? Robert De Niro? I'm sure the list of possible candidates would be a mile long.

But I'm pretty sure no one would disagree with Harrison Ford being in that conversation. Enjoyed this? Rather than to say Ford is funny, it seems more accurate to say that contexts arise in which the way Ford happens to be becomes a vehicle for humor. To be clear: A check is a good reason to do most things, such as this article. Think of it as a kind of endeavor to try to work toward a theory of the late, checked-out Ford, or as a masochistic, headstrong test of endurance—my own private Free Solo exertion.

Part of the deal with Ford, traditionally, is that no one really understands who he is. His enigmatic public persona funnels into the appeal of the antihero characters which made him a movie star in the first place: Han Solo, Indiana Jones, Rick Deckard. We might credit his charm as an actor to the compelling eccentricities of his jaw, like the way he pulls one side of his mouth up and hardens his gaze a bit ironically.

But there is something great about Ford that somehow has nothing to do with him—it stems from the absence of something more than what is actually there. Think great antihero actors like John Wayne or Robert Mitchum, only even richer and with a heavier weed intake.

What is actually there? These days, it seems to be mostly an eternal grump factor that transmits strongly even in his gentlest performances. When I die and access the objective aesthetic truth of the world from the afterlife, I hope to resolve ambiguities like these immediately. When it comes to quality of performance, it is perhaps hardest to judge Ford while he is reprising iconic characters he originated more than 30 years earlier. In the recent Star Wars trilogy, he showed up to play a part he could do just by appearing onscreen in the right costume: Han Solo.

As part of the obsessively crowd-sourced Rube Goldberg machine that is a Disney-produced Star Wars movie, he is a walking, talking piece of script with a clear context and purpose. Nearly two glacial hours of film are rolled out like a red carpet for him and then all he has to do is just be Harrison Ford—ripped and decrepit in sepia-toned light, not talking much, every motion and angle staunchly choreographed—and once again, he is our favorite dystopian-noir protagonist.

His Obama-era Indiana Jones , I will say, is something a bit different and significantly less up to code. Distractingly, though, Gary Oldman—a man who truly knows how to use a changed appearance to give the impression he is making brave acting choices—is always there next to him, giving Ford a run for his money as a rival blood-thristy surveillance-tech guru.

Onscreen together, the two of them are like dark clouds, chasing each other and hoving over some alien planet—one very much like our own, but where Liam Hemsworth is a successful film star—and bathing it in eternal darkness. Bad news: Paranoia sank without a trace, and deservedly so.

Business ethics and airport-novel pulp collide, and the mistake everybody in Paranoia makes is taking this nonsense seriously. But it is worth noting how comfortable and commanding Ford is, just a year after Star Wars , effortlessly stealing the screen from more experienced actors like Robert Shaw, Franco Nero, Richard Kiel, and Edward Fox.

The film was a commercial disappointment. Based on the Orson Scott Card book, it was one of several YA adaptations that Hollywood launched in the hopes of snagging some of that Hunger Games audience.

Still, on all fronts, this is far, far away from Star Wars. Ford plays a Russian submarine captain who deals with a radiation leak with officers Liam Neeson and Peter Sarsgaard.

This political romantic thriller features Ford as a police sergeant who discovers that his wife has perished in a plane crash alongside the man with whom she was having an affair. Initially, he was going to play the judge turned drug czar part in the Oscar-winning Traffic that ultimately went to Michael Douglas.

Another recent Ford project that should have been way more delightful, Morning Glory stars Rachel McAdams as a perky TV producer who has to revive the fortunes of a fading morning show called DayBreak. He has fun with it! You wish he would have tried stuff like this a little more often. It was, instead, the Anne Heche Is a Lesbian in a Straight Romantic Comedy Movie, which led to a frankly rather embarrassing press tour, in which a series of men on talk shows asked Ford whether it was weird to pretend to be in love with a lesbian.

Ford, to his credit or to his detriment, did not point out that he was not, in fact, in love with every woman he kissed in a movie. They were just acting. He even has some affecting moments as a man trying to run away from his past before realizing what his purpose ultimately was for. Either by choice or because it was dictated by audience indifference, Ford had stopped doing leading roles around the time of 42 , becoming a grizzled character actor that would lend a little old-school star power to a project.

This biopic of Jackie Robinson Chadwick Boseman is pretty paint-by-numbers, reducing an inspirational and supremely talented ballplayer to feel-good Hollywood formula. Ford teams with Brad Pitt in a drama about a New York City cop Ford who takes in an IRA freedom fighter Pitt without realizing his political affiliations, and the complications that arise.

Ford wins, but Pitt would live to battle another day. He and wife Michelle Pfeiffer are being haunted in their comfortable Connecticut home by … something. But as soon as Adaline and William meet, he realizes this is the same woman who captured his heart so long ago, before she had to abandon him, lest he learn her secret.

The Age of Adaline is fluffy nonsense about fate and unrequited love, but Ford captures all the pain of a man who grew up, settled into a life, then rediscovers the one person who once gave it such meaning. As a romantic figure, the actor tends to be more of a swashbuckler than a sensitive soul, but this was one of those rewarding exceptions.