Near the end of Force Majeure, Ruben Ostlund’s 2014 Swedish drama, the patriarch of a family of four sits outside his hotel room and begins sobbing uncontrollably. Just days earlier, fearing an avalanche was about to engulf their ski resort, he instinctively fled from the table where his wife and two children were eating lunch. For the remainder of their vacation, he represses the guilt and shame of that selfish, emasculating decision. To his wife, he’s a traitor; to his children, he’s a coward. Then, finally, the geyser erupts. Playing this broken man, actor Johannes Kuhnke moans and weeps like a child, an outwardly melodramatic and cathartic recognition of his weaknesses. It’s startling, powerful, committed, even a little funny. It’s going there.

In Downhill, the American remake from directors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, which opens in theaters this week and stars Will Ferrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Ferrell doesn’t quite bottom out like Kuhnke does. The closest he gets to a breakdown—to really getting into it with Dreyfus—comes halfway through the movie. When Ferrell's Pete invites friends over for dinner, he and Dreyfus's Billie make them unwitting jurors, throwing passive-aggressive barbs at each other as they recount their lunchtime scare. The party quickly turns into a courtroom. Billie pulls in her sons as key witnesses to testify against their father and Pete digests the verdict. Then he erupts, unleashing an expletive, swigging alcohol and quieting the room. It’s a thrilling moment and it exposes a path this movie isn’t ready to go down. Here is Ferrell attempting something unhinged—not as a familiar frat-boy, but as an insecure father, capable of cruelty. The scene ends with an awkward laugh. It doesn’t want to take the same risks Ferrell is ready to.

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Though he only offers a glimpse of this darkness, it’s glaring. For most of the last decade, studios have been afraid to showcase one of the most bankable comedy stars of this century as a lead dramatic actor. You can understand their reasoning. Ferrell has always leaned into the absurdities of his naif caricatures. It’s true when he’s been the star, sitting in the anchor chair or running naked in the pits, and it’s true when he’s been in the margins, behind bars or crashing funerals. It’s a brand that’s worked for a long time (and produced a few sequels), even as he’s transitioned from man-child to father figure. But as he’s continued to age, that energetic persona has become less sustainable. Really, it’s become tired. That’s what makes that moment in Downhill so exciting—you can sense a change, the potential for a real career pivot. Ferrell is continuing to unravel the dramatic performer he’s mostly kept in the closet, and it feels right. He should be doing this more.

Ferrell is continuing to unravel the dramatic performer he’s mostly kept in the closet, and it feels right.

Ferrell has offered several tastes like this before. His dramatic resume primarily began with Woody Allen’s 2004 comedy-drama Melinda and Melinda, playing an unhappily married and frantic actor, who remarkably embodies Allen’s anxious pitter-patter dialogue. There are notes of his goofiness, but for the first time, he isn’t trying to be a punchline. The next year he re-teamed with Zooey Deschanel in Winter Passing, a small, brooding movie about a girl that travels to Michigan to visit her father, a reclusive, well-respected author. Ferrell plays an emo, wannabe musician shacking up with them and you barely recognize him through all the angst and timidness and eyeliner.

His first fully-realized and leading dramatic performance came in 2006’s Stranger Than Fiction, a surrealistic, Charlie Kauffman-lite adventure. Ferrell plays a rigid IRS agent who discovers he’s the main character in a novel that just happens to be written by an author who always kills her protagonists. It’s the first time you really see Ferrell showing vulnerability in a muted way. In so many of his comedies, his characters express emotion in irrational, flamboyant ways—he makes lakes out of shallow cartoons. But here you witness the emergence of his sensitivity, especially as Marc Forster’s movie merges into a romance. So much of the time, Ferrell is doing the talking and the yelling. Here, he’s forced to listen.

One of the underrated qualities of Ferrell’s acting is his storytelling. Take a marriage counseling scene in Old School, when Ferrell sits beside his wife and slowly admits the twisted fantasies he thought up during a recent dinner date. As he reflects on that night, he never tips his hand. Ferrell is layering jokes but you can’t tell how far he’s going to keep pushing. The payoff is hysterical, but it’s only possible because of the delicate way it builds. In 2011’s Everything Must Go, Ferrell is doing something similar. In his backyard, he chats with his neighbor, played by Rebecca Hall, about his circumstances—he’s lost his job, his wife and his car. His alcoholism is to blame. It’s the first time he’s diagnosed the recent wreckage of his life and it’s tragic. Ferrell’s not just playing understated here, he’s playing sedated, which makes moments of honesty and connection like that glimmer.

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It’s a character that slightly resembles Bill Murray’s Oscar-nominated turn in Sofia Coppola’s 2003 drama Lost In Translation. Though Murray had slowly built out his own range over the previous 20 years, playing Bob Harris, a lonely aging movie star, offered something brand new. His cocktail of melancholy and wisdom established him as a legitimate dramatic force, and redefined his next two decades. Murray was 52 when that movie was released, the same age Ferrell is now. Not everyone has an inflection point like that—and he and Ferrell are two different kinds of actors—but the blueprint seems plausible. Take Adam Sandler, who, in 2002, entered from left field in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love, tried more drama in 2004’s Spanglish and then, 15 years later, turned in transformative work as a diamond district gambler in Uncut Gems. Before Jim Carrey’s seminal role in 2004’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, he used the late 1990s to piece together evolutionary performances in The Truman Show and Man on the Moon.

It would have been too much to ask for Ferrell to lose comedy at the height of his powers. For the better part of a decade, his star shined brighter than anyone’s. But his dramatic bullet points help build a case for eventually sinking into a similar kind of serious-minded rebirth. Recent leading turns in 2018’s Holmes and Watson and 2017’s The House have underperformed at the box office. Even when receipts have been strong, like in the case of Daddy’s Home 2, the movies have been uninspired and critically panned. As big studio comedies continue their decline within the streaming landscape, Ferrell is approaching a crossroads that should really be seen as an on-ramp. Downhill might not be a fully-realized dramatic role, but it’s a reminder of what’s lurking. It’s time he, and the movies, embraced it.

Jake Kring-Schreifels Jake Kring-Schreifels is a sports and entertainment writer based in Washington, D.C.

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