BENICIO DEL TORO

COMPLETE FRAGMENTS BUILT AROUND INTERESTING IDEAS AND OBJECTS

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

The tough side on either the good side or the bad side gets melded with an idea for screen performances.

Benicio del Toro has the film craft fine tuned to an art form, with this character being good, but having all his mental energies, if necessary, focused on a motivating singularity.

The screen character can also be bad, with all the moral turpitude of a homicidal sociopath fighting something more evil than himself.

When the James Bond franchise cast Benicio, he was perfect in the brief role given him at the age of 21 in Licence to Kill (1989).

Benicio creates a sublime performance as Marxist Revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara, 20 years later in Che (2008). The quiet resolve of the Argentinian doctor to lead the people of Latin America out of an era of state exploitation was for the betterment of humanity.

Director Steven Soderbergh gets a complete performance out of Benicio in a slow grinding telling of the guerilla leader who joined Fidel Castro in overthrowing the corrupt Cuban regime.

The narrative follows Che through the South American jungles as he branches off from Castro after the Cuban Revolution to spread the guerrilla war against other corrupt South American governments.

This complex leading character appears in juxtaposition to the supporting roles when the singularity of an idea creates a complete personality.

Soderbergh directs a dramatization of events that teeters toward the documentary genre. Benicio provides a stirring portrait of the guerilla leader while Soderbergh inserts into the linear narrative black and white psychotropic flashes of Che appearing at public events and speaking to the United Nations General Assembly on behalf of the Cuban Revolution.

The end film product is a lot of gritty realism through the telling of what was required to be a revolutionary incrementally advancing through the jungle until reaching the cities.

Benicio provides quite a different performance as a recovering drug addict that cannot quite stay clean and sober in Things We Lost in the Fire (2007).

Halle Berry and David Duchovny co-star as a happily married couple with two children who eventually suffer tragic loss. Brian Burke befriends Jerry, a former lawyer who cannot seem to clean up and straighten out.

Benicio maintains his internally transformed screen character but he also adopts a very singular focus on an idea or an object that accents many of his film roles. Jerry has been modified by the drugs to the point of being controlled by them.

The eccentricity of the character explains the decline from a life as a lawyer grazing from cocaine to rock to something harder. The uniqueness of the performance remains evident even through more normalized scenes when Jerry has episodes of sobriety.

The complexity of this screen character is shown as a lawyer who has become lost viewing reality through the veil created by psychedelic drug use.

Johnny Depp co-stars as Raoul Duke, a gonzo journalist following story leads during an extended hippy era that is accented by drug and alcohol experimentation in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998). Duke and Dr Gonzo go on a road trip to Vegas and encounter various drug induced issues between them and the hotel, and between each other.

Johnny and Benicio show how the characters struggle with the need that arises, from time to time, to reconcile with who they really are in between psychotropic experiences. Duke must eventually write the story he is meant to as a gonzo journalist. And Dr. Gonzo must spontaneously provide sober legal advice to his associate with whom he is sharing a hotel room and a big cache of illicit drugs.

The film, directed by Terry Gilliam, dramatizes the generational novel, of the same name, written by Hunter S Thompson, that defined the era of “Gonzo” journalism in 1972.

In the Fan (1996), Juan Primo is a franchise player with the San Francisco Giants. Benicio again shows a singular focus, this time as an iconic baseball player with the fan support and a multi-million dollar paycheck.

That internalized screen character is suddenly one of the greatest young hitters in Major League Baseball.

This singularity of purpose shapes a character shattered into a fragment by the cross border drug wars.  In Sicario (2015), Benicio plays a member of a deep cover drug enforcement unit that breaks a lot of rules to get the law and order agenda completed.

Alejandro’s hatred for the chaos and corruption created by the drug cartels drives his character so much that the first film advances to a second film. In the sequel, Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2018), the assassin becomes all the more determined.

The character stream often has a more complex conventional background whose journey has taken the personality into the darker sides of life. The doctor becomes a revolutionary. The lawyer becomes enveloped inside psychedelic experiences.  The professional baseball player finally loses out to the petty jealousies of teammates.

In Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017), Benicio gets cast for the reversal scenes as a shady code breaker when the official ‘greatest codebreaker’ cannot be retained for an important mission to disengage a device used to track the rebel fleet.

DJ has unmatched skill in opening locked jail cells and locked electronic doors to a secret instrument panel. This personality with a valuable steely focus also has a hidden background personality that ultimately reverses the course of the film’s interstellar journey.

A perfect internal character provides the foundation for unique screen performances. This complete person becomes fragmented into eccentric personalities that are shaped by the environment and also by exposure to the various moral vices and virtues within that environment.

The focus might be on an object as simple as a baseball or on an idea as complex as a Marxist guerrilla revolution. Benicio nevertheless provides the unique performances for each script that compels the narrative forward from scene to scene.