Robert DeNiro probably started it all when he ate his way across Europe to put on extra weight so that he could play the older, fatter version of boxer Jake LaMotta in "Raging Bull." He did variations of this later in his career, putting on weight again to play Al Capone in "The Untouchables" and becoming pumped and ripped to play Max Cady in Martin Scorsese's remake of "Cape Fear" (Best Actor nomination). Matthew McConaughey's Best Actor win for "Dallas Buyer's Club" was at least partly a byproduct of how shocking and impressive it was to see him drop all that weight to play an AIDS sufferer. Tom Hanks got an Oscar nomination for "Cast Away," which shut down production for a year so that Hanks could lose 70 pounds to play a man who'd been stranded on a desert island. He had previously won two Best Actor Oscars, for playing, respectively, a Candide-like simpleton who had polio as a child ("Forrest Gump") and a man dying of AIDS while fighting for his rights in court ("Philadelphia").



Pauline Kael was first to call out this acting-as-endurance test idea, writing of "Raging Bull" way back in 1981, “What DeNiro does in this picture isn’t acting, exactly. I’m not sure what it is. DeNiro seems to have emptied himself out to become the part he’s playing and then not got enough material to refill himself with; his [Jake] LaMotta is a swollen puppet with only bits and pieces of a character inside, and some religious, semi-abstract concepts of guilt.” I love DeNiro in that movie, but he definitely validated some wrongheaded tendencies, as did the academy which rewarded him as much for his athlete's focus on enduring pain as for his imagination as a performer.



Every year, one or more critics writes a piece complaining about this kind of thing. It's been going on for decades now. Nothing ever changes.



There's something seriously amiss here.



Endurance test acting, or transformational acting, can be great acting.



But why is it prized above other forms of acting?



Why do we not see subtle or "small" acting, fun acting, light acting, acting that is not about suffering or transformation, as great acting, too?



DeNiro is a great actor. Most of the people mentioned in this piece are great actors, including DiCaprio, who in the right role can be magic. He was magic in "Titanic," for which he did not receive a nomination—boisterous, cocky, utterly charming. He is magic in more (as they say now) problematic roles as manipulative and deceptive alpha males, in "The Great Gatsby" and "The Wolf of Wall Street" (both the same year, and he got a nomination for "Wolf").

