At the risk of reducing an extraordinarily versatile actor to just one sweet spot, it must be noted that Tom Wilkinson had a particular genius for playing the gruff authority figure with a wry twist — a hidden streak of zany rebellion. Again and again, this marvelous English performer, who died on Saturday at the age of 75, located the comedy as well as the gravity in a world-weary visage. That handsome but haggard Everyman frown, which proved so dramatically commanding in films like “In the Bedroom” (2001) and “Michael Clayton” (2007), so often concealed a twinkle of irony, a spark of invigorating mischief.
In “Shakespeare in Love” (1998), he’s a menacing Elizabethan-era moneylender who gets caught up in all the let’s-put-on-a-show fervor; eventually he discovers, to his and our delight, an unexpected talent for stage acting. (Wilkinson is so good here, he actually makes you believe he wasn’t a theater veteran.) And it’s no wonder he was so perfectly cast as the mad but mild-mannered doctor in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” (2004), the one who devises a ridiculously elaborate procedure that erases painful memories. (“Can it cause brain damage?” a wary patient asks, to which Wilkinson replies, with perfect deadpan drollery: “Well, technically, it is brain damage.”)
His flair for the understated and absurd found a perfect, emblematic image in Tony Gilroy’s superb conspiracy thriller “Michael Clayton,” in which Wilkinson plays Arthur Edens, a high-powered corporate attorney who’s gone dangerously off-message (and off-meds). A shot of Edens walking down an alley, carrying a dozen-plus baguettes under his arm, was reposted en masse Saturday after news of the actor’s death spread on social media.
In the context of the movie, the scene is both hilarious and troubling: Here’s a man carb-loading his way to mental oblivion. But it’s also just one aspect of one of Wilkinson’s very best performances, one that turned “I am Shiva, the god of death!” into a movie line for the ages and earned him the second of two Oscar nominations. Edens grabs you from the movie’s opening scenes with a furious, electrifying monologue, a rant against the corporate powers he has until recently served. Wilkinson isn’t even visible onscreen in these moments, but with his voice alone — high, cold, dripping with bitter rage — he has you fully in his grip. Edens has discovered his conscience at precisely the same moment he’s lost his grip on reality, and we hear a strange commingling of triumph and defeat.