Let me have two weeks, $50,000, and Warren Oates, and I´ll give you one hell of a movie. Make it $ 100,000: why should he always be in cheap pictures?
We have to make this picture somewhere on, in, around, and pertaining to the border. What border? Does it matter, so long as it´s poised between chance and fate, and so long as we can remain in doubt as to whether Oates is greeting his destiny with a smile or a grimace?
Oates seem on first sight grubby, balding, and unshaven. You can smell whiskey and sweat on him, along with that mixture of bad beds and fallen women. He´s toothy, he´s small, he´s 53 this year, and he has a face like prison bread, with eyes that have know too much solitary confinement. But the eyes bulge and shrink in a sweet game of fear and courage. And for some of us, Oates is the only human being in pictures.
Is that an exaggeration? Race you over the border to settle it. Lot of good actors around, with De Niro, Keitel, Harry Dean Stanton, Nicholson, Dern, Ben Johnson, and Robert Duvall. Only thing: longer you look at them, the more you get the feeling they´re all bursting with life. De Niro, now, can’t stand still. Never have seen him do nothing. Sublimest thing with Oates is when he does nothing. Only Mitchum could do nothing so well, so that you think a hole is opening up in the middle of the picture and everything is gonna fall down it. Then you see Oates starting that shy grin of his, and you shake yourself because he could’ve been dead. The greatest trick to write about Oates is to catch the spirit of obituary. A death notice for an honorable little sleaze-bag.
Thank God he´s never gonna get near one of those Oscars. You know it from the start. It´ll be fifty years before they catch on to him, and with the films Oates makes, chances are there won´t be any of them left intact by then.
So i´ll deal you the hand now, doubting if there´s more than three of you that have seen them all.
David Thomson
Texto publicado originalmente em Film Comment, edição Janeiro/Fevereiro de 1981.
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