ROAD JOURNAL: Actors Playing Geniuses

1 Bridges and Tunnels: 
-- Gunshots downstairs.  Pop-pops.  Then voices.  Then a few more rounds fired off -- clicking off -- like the rungs of mechanized wheels, utilities clicking around a dial, tick, tick, tick; so arbitrary is gunfire.  But Oliver came up out of the bed, not jumping, not reactionary in a human way of jumping at the doctor's mallet to the knee, but as if called.  He came up, and turned her over, turning himself to stand.  She fell as if it were a slapstick.  And from the floor she watched him reach his great body up and out.  He was naked, and old, and the cancer had sucked holes in what should have been solid places on him: his thighs, his chest -- he was a strong beast full of cavities.
(Trying to work Bridge, Tunnel back into motion.  Here's a paragraph, and I can look and look, and I don't know if it's high speed, or poor work.  It can be tiring reading your own voice reaching for something higher than yourself when you can't do that.  You can only reach to you.  An actor, even a great actor, can only truly play his/her own level of ingenuity, intelligence -- they can play below, (sort of), but never above -- it comes off childish when they try.)
-- IF this paragraph above is intriguing, go back, and read the Bridge, Tunnel chapters serialized, (rough drafts), before the final parts post.  And a thank you to those who've been reading it.
2 And About Actors and Intelligence
As mentioned above, it's a theory I have, (wholly from watching actors with an obsessive eye), that a great actor's universal limitation, (beyond the idiosyncratic limitations differentiating one from another), is playing above their intelligence.  An actor, a top talent, often plays a normal person imbued with that high-end charisma that makes them successful actors, so that Robert DeNiro is not just a lonely man, he's GOD'S lonely man, in Taxi Driver, worthy of Dostoevsky; Daniel Day Lewis is THE oil man in There Will Be Blood; they solidify a type of person, and romanticize it, but the person is no greater, and often less greater, than the actor, life compared to life.  When an actor plays a "genius" in one of those "portrait of greatness" movies, even when that actor's talent can orbit the solar system of the subject of their performance, they can only suggest a genius via their near-genius in acting, as parallel lines; this isn't the actor's fault necessarily, as these movies are in themselves weakly constructed: a painter's or composer's or mathematician's genius is in long hours of undramatic work -- and often the films of such types are constructed as, here is a man-child, a person wholly unequipped to deal in the plastic world we, the plebs, have constructed -- but behold, cue music: He Paints!  It is easy to excuse these "genius" attempts, and not hold it against these actors.  But it can get tricky when an actor plays above grade by, say, one intelligence level.  Do I love the movie Heat?  Oh yeah.  But I don't believe Robert DeNiro is smart enough to manage a crew like Neil McCauley.  He wears the suit.  He shoots the gun.  He looks bad and beautiful, but the problem is DeNiro is a dummy.  His best work is in the art of inarticulateness, but in Heat he's operating as a high-end robber who can get in and out of any room with the information he needs.  He may be a great thief because he can fade into the background as he borrows an ambulance, but he would need to be able to speak to people, even if he was a chameleon.  DeNiro saves himself in the cafe because, as Pacino hams it up like a jackass, Bob is seriously cold-eyes; he's the snake; and unlike Albert, he's not breaking character for a "moment" between acting legends; he's still looking at a cop, and while his eyes don't read as guile, they do read as a killer; not for fun, but it won't be difficult either.  DeNiro has never played a character stupider than him, just as he's never been funny.  Sean Penn is like this too.  Stupid and humorless dog-faced boys.  An actor with real intelligence, might, in theory, grow tired of acting, even embarrassed by the easy natural ability of "pretending to be", of calling charm then ferociousness down, on cue, when the camera points their way.  An actor with the upper thoughts of just what this all really is, might go haywire, might begin challenging every facet of their craft; or they might toil long and successfully in the knowing, reactionary support roles of the character actor.  They might be Marlon Brando.  They might be Gary Oldman.
It might be Hamlet is the Everest of acting because no actor in four hundred years, no matter what ungodly charisma they attacked the role with, is smart enough to pull it off; played continuously for all this time, and never got right -- an impossible role.  Hamlet is usually played as either sullen or crazed, (two things many actors excel at), but why is he never dry and hilarious, when the text begs for it?  That play is a black comedy, with a nasty main character, (really a villain), who can see twenty other people around, all who think they are the main character of a play, and, like a high-end sociopath, Hamlet rewrites them, to them.  Hamlet is a sicko.  Actor's can't do this.  They're, most of them, too busy whining to the crowd about being or not being -- they think they're playing suicide contemplation, when it's really the moment when the serial killer has tasted what havoc he can bring down, and is counting on his fingers the pros and cons of going apocalyptic on Elsinore with his game.  When he questions the forgotten country, the afterlife, it is not over his own "suicide", (for what?  Because Uncle killed Daddy?); frankly I can't recall a chap more over-stimulated by a little evil outside himself, so much so that he famously extends this play, (a record for the author), out and out and out, seemingly unwilling to cut to the chase: (Hamlet is three hours of foreplay, then fourteen minutes of mass-climax), this info the dolts give him about the ghost, I kind of think Hamlet doesn't believe in the ghost, (he forgets about it so easily), that his real impetus is these dolts in the castle who report to him believe it, it's a green light to get nuts, so when he does question whether to be or not be, he means "Wipe it all clean, or don't".  When he's dying on the floor, poisoned, after causing the deaths of seven or eight people, (Uncle Claudius's count is one kill), Hamlet doesn't regret the deaths of mother, lover, friends, countrymen -- he just worries over his wounded name.  Sicko.  He begs his lackey Horatio to tell his story, meaning, "tell it my way", meaning, "I had an excuse for this purge!, it wasn't inside me from the get-go, honest."  Makes you think again about those funeral dark clothes he was wearing.  Wasn't he daydreaming all this before the Ghost shows up?
-- How can your average love-starved actor not only play this, but play it effectively; as in, be both a sociopath and a genius?  They can't that I've seen.  But Hamlet is the most beneficial failure an actor can take on.  
-- One actor maybe was smart enough to pull it off, but he would have been miscast in the role.  He also wrote the role.
3 Comedic actors are the eggheads.  Smart enough to play fake dumb.  
                                                                         ny1aug11