Oscar or not, these were some of the best performances of 2022

Great movie acting provides an extraordinary passageway into a protagonist’s soul. This mysterious alchemy is the height of the performer’s art. The actor fuses with the role and, in a sense, so do we. More than simply identifying with the character, we are that character. 

Movie acting rarely reaches such heights, but when it does, or even comes anywhere close, it can transform a middling film into a must see.

We are now in the run-up to the Oscars, airing March 12 on ABC, and, as usual, along with a few favorite nominated standouts, there are many performances I admired in 2022 that went unrecognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. I’ll weigh in on both. 

Best actress

Of the five best actress Oscar nominees, the two that rang the bell for me were Cate Blanchett in “Tár” and Andrea Riseborough in “To Leslie.”

Except for Blanchett’s hyperdriven portrayal, I thought her film was vastly overrated – a love-hate letter to the tribulations of musical artistry that was way too heavy on the hate. But whatever one thinks of her role as an autocratic orchestral conductor with a taste for sexual predation, Blanchett gives a full-on portrayal of a woman self-immolating in her own sovereignty.

It’s too bad that Riseborough’s nomination was attacked in some quarters for its movie-star-driven Oscar campaign, mostly by people who hadn’t seen the movie. (It came and went almost without a trace last year.) Her inclusion made some feel that other acclaimed performances, like those of Viola Davis in “The Woman King,” or Danielle Deadwyler in “Till,” got pushed out. But Riseborough belongs in this company. She plays a West Texas former lottery winner and single mother whose boozy life is in free fall. Her darting, ardent performance avoids all the scenery-chewing clichés endemic to these sorts of roles. I didn’t detect a false note in it.

Among the unnominated, I did especially admire Davis’ performance as the leader of an all-female West African battalion in the slave-trading early 1800s. There has always been a fierceness to Davis’ acting, even in repose. In this film, she looks both indomitable and ravaged. In the little-seen Irish film “God’s Creatures,” Emily Watson is a doting mother who lies to the police to protect her criminal son, played by Paul Mescal (who was rightly nominated for best actor as a troubled father in “Aftersun”). Watson shows us the anguish born of torn loyalties. Her face becomes a map of brutish sorrow.

Something of the sort can also be seen in Nathalie Boutefeu’s plangent performance as Leo Tolstoy’s long-suffering wife Sophia in “Un Couple” (“A Couple”). This one-woman monologue, shot mostly outdoors on a sprawling estate, was directed by longtime documentarian Fred Wiseman and dramatizes Sophia’s voluminous notes and diary entries. Boutefeu, who co-wrote the screenplay with Wiseman, brings it all to life. Her portrait is alternately forgiving, pleading, and vehement.

Lest you think all the best work in this category occurred in the gloomy realms, there was also Leslie Manville’s superbly graceful and touching turn in “Mrs. Harris Goes To Paris” as a working-class charwoman whose high-fashion fantasies are fulfilled. And should you desire further proof of Manville’s astonishing versatility, just think back to her diametrically different, Oscar-nominated performance as the stern sister of Daniel Day-Lewis’ haute couture dressmaker in “Phantom Thread.” 

Best actor

The five Oscar nominees for best actor are all recommendable. Besides Mescal, Austin Butler is a triumphantly convincing Elvis Presley in “Elvis”; Brendan Fraser is good enough in “The Whale” to make you almost forget the character’s prosthetic tonnage; and Bill Nighy deftly underplays as a civil servant facing his own mortality in “Living.” 

I liked Colin Farrell in the overrated “The Banshees of Inisherin,” though his performance as Pádraic, a dullish man who wakes up to his ire when his best friend unaccountably rejects him, takes a while to cook. (The friend is well played by supporting actor nominee Brendan Gleeson.) Two unnominated performances were startlingly good: Caleb Landry Jones, who won the best actor award at the 2021 Cannes film festival in the barely seen “Nitram,” delivers an utterly original portrayal of a real-life Australian mass shooter. In “The Good Nurse,” Eddie Redmayne plays a nurse, also real-life, whose hospital murders have long gone undetected. Like Jones, he reimagines a seemingly standard villain into something entirely new. 

Best supporting actress

Kerry Condon, as the exasperated sister of Farrell’s Pádraic in “The Banshees of Inisherin,” stands out for me among the nominees for best supporting actress. Her deeply knowing performance, so quietly comic and yet so passionate, radiates emotion in all directions.

In this category, the Academy particularly failed to notice some of the year’s best work. As two of the women who spoke out against Harvey Weinstein in “She Said,” both Jennifer Ehle and Samantha Morton, in cameos, put a human face on searing testimony that most of us had only read about. Judy Davis, as the mother of the shooter in “Nitram,” demonstrates yet again that, at her best, there is no one who surpasses her power or intensity. Why has this great actress not had more great roles?

The most welcome appearance this year was Frankie Corio, who plays the doting 11-year-old daughter in “Aftersun” opposite Mescal. The film’s structure is elliptical and arty, but Corio grounds it. Her Sophie has the fervor of an adolescent moving tentatively – and bewilderingly – into young adulthood. Whether Sophie is singing bad karaoke or absorbing her father’s woes, Corio easily holds her own with Mescal. No small feat. It’s always especially exciting to discover a potentially major performer so early in her career. 

Best supporting actor

Of the Oscar nominees for best supporting actor, far and away the strongest for me is Brian Tyree Henry, who plays opposite a very fine Jennifer Lawrence as a troubled auto mechanic in “Causeway.” I remember seeing him in “If Beale Street Could Talk” and thinking I had not seen a finer portrayal all year. Lawrence plays an injured war vet experiencing PTSD, and Henry’s character has his own demons. His performance is so richly inhabited that even when he’s just bellying up to the bar or sharing some ice cream, the character’s full set of sympathies comes through. His easygoing nature is a poultice for his grief.

Among the unnominated, I would single out two very different acting jobs from Anthony Hopkins. 

In “Armageddon Time,” he plays an Old World Jewish grandfather without a trace of shtick. In the otherwise mediocre “The Son,” his single appearance as a rapacious father opposite Hugh Jackman not only steals the scene. It steals the movie. 

Peter Rainer is the Monitor’s film critic.