“Prick Up Your Ears” (1987)
Known principally at the time for roles as skinheads and punks, Oldman wasn’t the most obvious choice to play the famously witty, gay playwright Joe Orton, a sort of Oscar Wilde of the sexual revolution, in Stephen Frears‘ “Prick Up Your Ears.” But it’s hard to imagine anyone else doing it. Alan Bennett‘s script, told in flashbacks through interviews between John Lahr (Wallace Shawn) and famed agent Peggy Ashcroft (a scene-stealing Vanessa Redgrave), reconstructs the destructive, Mozart/Salieri-like love affair between Orton and long-time lover Kenneth Halliwell (Alfred Molina), which ended in Hallliwell killing Orton, and then himself, when the writer was only 34. Straight off his breakthrough “My Beautiful Launderette,” Frears again shows a key eye for gay life, but the film doesn’t deserve to be ghettoized. It’s principally a picture of a relationship, with the frustrated Halliwell becoming increasingly overshadowed by the boy he helped educate, and heartbroken by his promiscuity and Orton’s callousness towards his lover. Performances are strong across the board, with Molina beautifully sad without ever becoming terribly sympathetic, but it’s really Oldman’s film. He’s charismatic, brilliant, witty (in part thanks to Bennett’s script), ignorant of the hurt he causes, and roughly ten million miles away from his breakthrough part in “Sid and Nancy.” If nothing else, his BAFTA-nominated turn was the first sign that Oldman would be a true chameleon.
“State of Grace” (1990)
Ever wondered what it would be like to watch sparring lions Sean Penn and Gary Oldman face off in their prime? Mostly a film that time forgot – it was overshadowed by “Goodfellas” which came out the same year — 1990’s American neo-noir crime picture “State Of Grace” is mostly remembered as being director Phil Joanou’s last notable film (he directed “Three O’Clock High” before and did nothing notable afterwards, his most recent credit coming on Dwayne Johnson sports flick “Gridiron Gang“) and the fact that Penn met his future wife Robin Wright on the picture. But the film’s secret weapon is not Penn, but his character’s mercurial, irascible loose cannon childhood friend turned Irish mobster, played by Gary Oldman. All greasy, stringy hair, gnashed teeth, dirty fingernails and imbued with the deep redolent rank of day-old cigarettes, Oldman is a dangerously coiled electric wire who chews scenery like he’s just finished the world’s most unpleasant hunger strike. These days the picture itself feels like a standard gangsters, revenge and cops picture not unlike “The Departed. But a young Penn and Oldman riffing and peacocking around each other is still a marvel to watch, displaying an elaborate dance of wild boar intensity. Yes, Oldman plays it big and ferocious, but for many, especially Americans, who had just seen Oldman for the first time, it was a near-spooky performance you couldn’t forget. Mind you, this was before Oldman did his best maniacal turn in “Leon,” but it was a smoldering augur of things to come.
