Focus Features

It’s hard to define exactly what makes a film a character study, since nearly every film has a character or two in it. And yet it’s easy to identify different films as character studies, that is, filmic explorations that illuminate the complexity of the human psyche. Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg, for example, is a comedy that gets much of its humor from the way character keeps colliding with reality. The poor guy can’t help but get in his on way. When writing the screenplay, Baumbach set out to bring a literary focus to the character. “I wanted to do a real character piece and I wanted to do something I associate more with American novels,” explained Baumbach. It is perhaps that depth, that empathy with and appreciation of the complexity and contradictory nature of human beings that makes a character study. To coincide with Greenberg coming to the screen, we lined up a few other character studies to think about.

Orson Welles’ masterpiece is a character study fractured up into various genres: detective story, political expose, romance, biography, etc. Central to each strain is the question: who was Charles Foster Kane? The fact that Welles loosely based his towering figure on a real man, William Randolph Hearst, only made the question of character even more perplexing. In the film, after a newsreel reports on the death of Charles Foster Kane, the editor demands his reporter dig deeper: “What we've just seen are the outlines of a career - what's behind the career?  What's the man?  Was he good or bad?  Strong or foolish? Tragic or silly? Why did he do all those things?  What was he after?” The movie ends with as big a question as it begins. For Welles, Kane turns out to be as much a fragment of what we believe him to be as he does a complex and contradictory person. 

The psyche of the movie star is undoubtedly one of the most slippery forms of character study that a filmmaker can tackle. For one, any study of an actor will undoubtedly suggest a real one. But more, actors by definition play characters, and so it is always hard to divine where the real ends and make believe begins. As such Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard still remains one of the most mesmerizing and terrifying studies of character.  Early on, Wilder explained his interest in the story: “We weren’t particular interested in doing a Hollywood story. What appealed to us was the comeback story—which is much more moving that the success story—plus the tragedy of the aging woman.” The mix of hope and death, of fantasy and fatality, gives the film its Grand Guignol atmosphere. As aspiring screenwriter William Holden moves deeper into the world of Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), the more he is enveloped by her insanity. As a faded screen goddess living in the glory of her stardom, Desmond has erased the difference between the present and the past, the real and the fantasy. A police arrest with flashing press cameras and crowds pressing in to catch a peek becomes in the mind the same as an opening night premiere.

Perhaps no director helped create and explore the mythology of the American West as fully as John Ford did, often with his laconic hero John Wayne standing in solitary relief against an endless sunset. In earlier Ford films, like Fort Apache and She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, Wayne remained a man of quiet virtue and independent character, but in The Searchers his heroic persona is turned inside out. An ex-Confederate soldier for whom the war never ended, Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) returns to find his family slaughtered and his niece abducted by the Comanche. As Wayne drives deeper into the American west to find her, the film pushes far into the dark recesses of Edwards’ psyche––his near-sociopathic obsession, his irrational violence, a racism attitude toward Native Americans that could easily double for infatuation. Critic Greil Marcus captured Edwards frightening journey when he wrote, “Wayne changes from a man with whom we are comfortable into a walking Judgment Day ready to destroy the world to save it from itself.”

Move The Searchers up a century and plunk it down in the middle of New York City and Taxi Driver is what you might get. Writer Paul Schrader and director Martin Scorsese partially based their color-saturated noir about Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), an ex-marine cabby on a quest to save a teenage prostitute (Jodie Foster), on John Ford’s masterpiece. Taxi Driver remains one of the great character studies of contemporary cinema, an intoxicating mix of urban psychosis and American virtue. For Scorsese, “Travis really has the best intentions, He believes he’s doing right, just like St. Paul. He wants to clean up life, clean up his mind, clean up the soul. He is very spiritual, but in a sense Charles Manson was spiritual, which doesn’t mean it’s good.” 

One of the perverse joys of watching Walter Salles’ The Motorcycle Diaries, an adventure-filled travelogue of a young Argentine medical student Che Guevara (Gabriel García Bernal) and his friend Alberto Granado (Rodrigo de la Serna), is that we know what they don’t––their destiny. However as viewers what we don’t know is what events and circumstances helped mold the mind of a revolutionary. In short, we know the history the character helped create, but not the history that made Guevara into who he would be come. For Salles, “Guevara is such an extraordinarily complex character that you need to listen to all the sources to capture as many angles as you can…It’s really a journey of finding one’s identity, it’s a journey of understanding who we are and in what place of the world we want to be and fight for.” 

Raymond Durgnat said of Le Samouraïdirector Jean-Pierre Melville, “Melville has a way of watching, rather than sharing, his characters' perplexities. He seems not to mind what they do, provided it suits them.” Indeed Melville’s hit man Jeff Costello (Alain Delon) is less a person, as a collection of gestures and mannerisms. The character says very little, explains even less, but is nevertheless aware of every gesture he makes, from adjusting his hat in the mirror to handling a gun. Melville once explained, “There is a moment of truth in all my films. A man before a mirror means a stock-taking.” His character begins––and in many ways ends––with how he looks.

Chatal Akerman’s 1975 three-hours-and-21-minute film about three days in the life of a Belgian housewife is one of cinema’s great character studies. At first, one fears that the unrelenting repetition of every banal event in this woman’s life will equal watching paint dry for suspense. But, strangely, the opposite happens. Shot at waist-length with no camera movement, with everything facing forward as if on stage, the film seems to hide nothing. But over time, the plain surface of daily events (her cooking, drinking coffee, turning tricks) grows more cryptic and filled with meaning. The repetition of her schedule becomes at once comforting and filled with questions. Akerman said of her character: “She doesn’t leave any room for anxiety. It’s like the workaholic; they do the same. When they stop, they die, because then they have to face something inside of them that they don’t want to face.”

In the New York Times, Janet Maslin praised Ang Lee’s suburban drama The Ice Storm by commenting, “No known reference book addresses the historical unease that Ang Lee's film captures so hauntingly.” The time is Thanksgiving 1973, and Nixon is on the brink of resigning, the economy is shot, and everyone wants to talk about his or her unhappiness. The Hoods and the Carvers, the drama’s two central families, are not only awash in their secrets and lies, but are unsure which ones they should confess and which ones to keep private. When Ben Hood (Kevin Kline), for example, admits his confusion and anxiety to Janey Carver (Sigourney Weaver), the neighbor with whom he is having an affair, she tartly responds, “Ben, you're boring me. I have a husband. I don't have a need for another one.” Here the character of the times seem perfectly reflected in the characters’ psyche. According Lee, “These characters have so many reasons why they're unhappy, or why they distrust each other, or why their needs are not fulfilled….The characters have pop psychology, fashion, polyester, the idea of an open marriage, liberation, desire, fulfillment - but where do they go?”

Probably no genre seems farther from doubling as a character study as the musical, but Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz, a frenzied autobiographical fantasy about a director-choreographer who is quickly killing himself with Dexedrine, alcohol, work, cocaine, Visine, Alka-Seltzer, and sex, is also a profound psychological portrait of a man, Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider), dealing with his morality and sense of self worth. Fosse once quipped, “My friends know that to me happiness is when I am merely miserable and not suicidal." And in the film, the character’s happy misery stems from his insatiable (and impossible) desire to make everything he does (dance, film, love) perfect, while sabotaging the results in the process.

When Mike Nichols was casting The Graduate, the ultimate 60s anthem to alienated youth, he originally looked at actors like Robert Redford, since the character of Benjamin Braddock, a child of WASP Pasadena parents, would have no doubt been a blond-haired, blue-eyed California youth. His choice of Dustin Hoffman surprised everyone, including the actor who though he was too Jewish. But Braddock, a boy on the cusp of his life with no interest in moving forward, is a character who either can’t, or won’t, see his place in the world. In this way, Hoffman’s own background gave him the perfect experience for understanding the character. Hoffman, who grew up in Los Angeles, always despised it.” He explained, “I lived in anti-Semitic neighborhoods, and I never felt a part of it, and I used to go to the Saturday-matinee movies to see the Dead End Kids jumping into the East River, and I wanted to be one of them.”

Alexander MacKendrick’s 1957 terse drama about a powerful columnist J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) and criminally ambitious press agent, Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis), recounts the high cost of fame. Based on the experience of a real-life press agent Ernest Lehman (as it appears in his short story “Tell Me About Tomorrow”), it explores how quickly Falco will sell out his friends and family to get to the top. “The best of everything is good enough for me,” Falco says. Strangely the character of the manipulative press agent is so successful that its character has lived on as a type. Ben Brantley later wrote, "I've heard theater publicity representatives speak wryly of going into their 'Sidney Falco mode'.”

Tell us what character study films you like.