By Petr Navovy | Miscellaneous | April 12, 2016 |
By Petr Navovy | Miscellaneous | April 12, 2016 |
Ever have one of those days when you wake up, and you know something is wrong?
You can’t put your finger on it; you can’t describe it to your loved ones; and even the third coffee of the day doesn’t dislodge it from its invisible perch or its darkened corner. It watches you and casts a shadow of dread and you can’t shine a light on it. That’s because it is nothing academic; it’s not a pragmatic fear; it is nothing so prosaic as realising you forgot to turn off the stove when you left the house in the morning or hire a babysitter for Friday night.
No, this is a primal, atavistic dread. A sign of something more fundamental wrong with the world. Some sort of imbalance that must be put right. Something only a few midweek drinks can begin to help you put words to.
I had this feeling yesterday.
So I had a few drinks.
And I figured it out. The source of my unease. The intuitive feeling of an imbalance in the world.
The booze put words to it:
WHERE THE HELL IS VIGGO MORTENSEN?!
Seriously, I felt like I hadn’t seen him in way, way too long.
So off to IMDB I went:
Well.
Firstly: Damn is it easy to forget how long Viggo Mortensen has been acting!
Secondly: I quickly realised that I had actually seen most of his movies from the last decade or so, so I’d had ostensibly quite a steady and healthy Viggo drip in my life.
So why the hell didn’t it feel like it?
And then it hit me: there hasn’t really been a Viggo role for Viggo since Eastern Promises.
I mean, yes, he’s had almost a role per year since The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, but those weren’t Viggo roles. Those were characters that almost anyone could play. If you get so lucky so as to get the perfect symbiosis of craft, charisma, and mystique that is Viggo Mortensen in your movie, you make damn well sure it’s for a role that’s worthy of him. If possible, you structure the whole thing around it. You don’t need to, mind, because no matter what nook and cranny you stick him in he’ll poke his head out of it when needed and you won’t forget it, but ideally you do a Cronenberg or a Jackson and you make the Viggo a substantial part.
I haven’t seen The Road so I can’t speak for that, but aside from his oh-so-brief appearance as William Burroughs in the otherwise subpar On The Road, none of these movies have even come close to doing that.
What gives, movie people?! Give Viggo another Viggo role!
What’s that, 2016?
That…
That…could…be…
Directed by who? Matt Ross? Who’s that?
Carruthers?!
Okay, 2016, we’ll see.
We’ll see.
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Petr Knava plays music