Excellence in Acting Award: Hal Holbrook with screening of That Evening Sun Happening: Saturday, November 14, 4:15 PM Duration: 120 Minutes Venue: Starz FilmCenter
Don’t misunderstand: Hal Holbrook is very happy and deeply grateful to receive this year’s Excellence in Acting award. But if you push the Emmy- and Tony-winning legend on the subject, he’ll suggest that maybe the prize is a tad premature, because he still considers himself, at 84, a student of his art. “Even now,” Holbrook says, “I’m learning more about film work.” That’s an awfully modest admission for a man who has offered such a diversity of performances over the course of decades: a loving father worried about revealing his homosexuality to his teen-age son (That Certain Summer, 1972). An enigmatic informant who’s at once cynical and saddened about his role in toppling a world leader (All the President’s Men, 1976). A lonely widower who offers to serve as surrogate grandfather to a tragically discontented wanderer (Into the Wild, 2007). And, most recently, an octogenarian farmer who won’t give up his land or his pride without a fight (That Evening Sun, 2009). And yet, to hear Holbrook tell it, for all his work in movies and television – to say nothing of his stellar stage performances, most notably as witty sage Samuel Clemens in Mark Twain Tonight! – his education in craft is far from over. Fortunately, he says, he’s always managed to find the right teachers when he needed them. From director Sidney Lumet – who guided him through his first film appearance in The Group (1966) – Holbrook learned that less is more. “What you have to understand about film work,” he vividly recalls Lumet telling him, “is that the camera can read your mind.” And he credits another “wonderful director,” Sean Penn, with giving him the confidence to plumb emotional depths for his Oscar-nominated turn in Into the Wild. “He gave you the feeling that anything that came out of you was OK,” Holbrook says – “that he would take care of you or catch you if you fell.” While playing the irascible Abner Meecham in That Evening Sun, Holbrook says, his initial instinct was “to make sure the audience understood the emotional trip he was on.” But writer/director Scott Teems convinced him to avoid any obvious requests for sympathy and play the character rather as unsentimental, even harsh. The result: a powerful performance that even the chronically self-critical Holbrook ranks among his best work. “Yes,” Holbrook says, “after all these years, I think I’m finally starting to learn something about film acting.” That’s what we call an understatement.