The High-Wire Energy of Great Ensemble Acting

The contemporary idea of the ensemble—a group of performers working together, with a shared sense of purpose, toward an artistic goal—has roots that extend far back into theatrical tradition. In Shakespeare’s day, theater companies put plays on in repertory and had semi-fixed ensembles. Some, like Shakespeare’s Lord Chamberlain’s Men (later called the King’s Men), were joint stock companies in which many of the actors (including the Bard himself) were shareholders in the company. One of the great mysteries surrounding Shakespeare—how he wrote so well and so prolifically and displayed at least cursory knowledge of dozens of subjects—could quite plausibly be explained by this arrangement. Perhaps having a stable of actors enabled him to tailor-write parts for each, and to develop the plays collectively, as other writers have done with their regular collaborators throughout history. We’ll never know, but it’s a nice thought.

European theater is hardly monolithic, and over the intervening centuries the function of a company of actors has shifted several times in different countries. In many places, the ensemble was discarded and replaced with an ad hoc model, in which actors known for performing specific kinds of characters (or “types”) were thrown together to hastily realize plays. At their worst, these productions were nothing more than parades of clichés and recycled material. This was the state of the art in Russia in the late nineteenth century, which led Konstantin Stanislavski, the father of modern theatrical practice, to cofound the Moscow Art Theatre in explicit rebellion against type casting and stock productions. Stanislavski and his partner Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko coined the old adage “There are no small parts, only small actors,” and invented the permanent ensemble—a group of actors who were all salaried employees of their theaters, training together, and working under a shared understanding of the art form, often for multiple years or even decades. We have many surviving accounts from people who saw Stanislavski’s company perform, and a recurring motif in them is how even the most insignificant spear-carrier is a fully realized human being. The core tension of the Moscow Art Theatre was also its crowning glory: every individual mattered, but the ensemble members found their most complete expression by devoting themselves to the collective.

One milieu that filmmakers have long gravitated to is the world of the ensemble itself, in the form of the backstage movie. From Ozu to Cassavetes, many directors have made fascinating work exploring the boundaries between the stage and real life, but few films have taken on this theme as hilariously as Noises Off (1992), another theatrical adaptation, directed by a late-career Peter Bogdanovich. The group of actors the film depicts (played by an array of comedy veterans, including John Ritter, Carol Burnett, Christopher Reeve, and Julie Hagerty) struggle to put aside their egos, insecurities, sexual compulsions, and drinking problems, until at the last minute they transcend their individual selves and come together. To put it another way, the movie is about a bunch of egomaniacs tasked with putting on a terrible play, and the on- and offstage battles that nearly sink the whole endeavor.

Farce is among the hardest genres to pull off. It is extremely technical but has to look natural. In film, the editing and cinematography need to support the genre’s particular rhythms and its blend of physical and verbal comedy. Bogdanovich was no stranger to farce—sue me, but I think his best film is What’s Up, Doc?—but whereas that film is so frenetic it even has a car chase, Noises Off is restrained. It attempts to translate as faithfully as possible the experience of seeing a farce in the theater. While it was widely panned upon release for this reason, the long takes and subtle directing allow the actors to shine, particularly Reeve as the himbo Frederick Dallas, who is incapable of understanding either his lines or his blocking.

Noises Off pursues one tried-and-true method for ensemble films: keeping the characters stuck with one another in a single location (The Big Chill, which is largely set at a vacation house, pulls off a similar feat). But other films use a larger canvas, allowing their casts to collide in various configurations, providing a prismatic view of their world. In Spike Lee’s hilarious, incendiary School Daze (1988), Laurence Fishburne stars as Dap Dunlap, a student activist trying to get his HBCU to divest from South Africa. His cousin Half-Pint, played by Lee, is trying to pledge the Gammites, a brutal fraternity run by the nearly sociopathic Big Brother Almighty (Giancarlo Esposito, having the time of his life). The lead actors couldn’t be more different; Lee is short and wiry, a coiled spring of ambition and energy, while Fishburne is tall and sagacious, with a screen presence of calm authority. But their psychologically realistic performances are the two poles that ground the film. Dunlap is a perfectionist, holding all around him to unreachable standards. He must learn how to accept that life and the people who live it are complicated and flawed. Half-Pint, meanwhile, is all confused yearnings and insecurities. He subtly shifts personas depending on whom he is talking to, performing slightly shaded versions of himself to curry favor. Using this dichotomy to anchor the film, Lee frees the rest of his ensemble—which also includes Samuel L. Jackson and Branford Marsalis—to sink their teeth into their roles. The results are pyrotechnic.

Student yearnings also fuel Can’t Hardly Wait (1998), but while School Daze and Dazed and Confused dramatize how the journey to adulthood is initiated by a series of rituals and rites, Can’t Hardly Wait is about graduating seniors trying to grab one last bit of glory before their childhood ends. Ethan Embry’s Preston wants to finally declare his love to his secret crush, Amanda (Jennifer Love Hewitt). Seth Green’s wannabe gangsta Kenny is desperate to lose his virginity, while Charlie Korsmo’s William seeks revenge on the bully who has made his life hell. Smaller arcs emerge among other seniors played by a surprising number of soon-to-be-famous actors, including Lauren Ambrose, Jason Segel, Clea DuVall, and Jaime Pressly. The ensemble is so stacked that even already well-known stars like Jenna Elfman, Jerry O’Connell, and Melissa Joan Hart have uncredited cameos. New relationships form, friendships dissolve, and lots of alcohol is consumed. The party becomes a crucible that transforms every one of its attendees.

The film works because of its carefully balanced blend of sincerity and absurdity. Preston believes he and Amanda have an eternal bond because they like the same kind of Pop-Tarts. The band at the party is called Love Burger. As soon as someone agrees to have sex with Kenny, he worries he needs to double up on condoms in case he catches an STD. The ensemble works not only because you can play spot-the-star, but because everyone understands the film’s exuberant style, and all the actors work together to achieve it. They are all playing their characters while lightly mocking them at the same time, inviting us to see their struggles as both objectively absurd and meaningful. Together, they offer the kind of perspective an adult brings to their youth—how ridiculous to act this way, and yet how glorious that we did.

In contrast to school ensembles, family ensembles are generationally striated, as the youth repeat the older generation’s failures. Holidays, funerals, marriages, death-bed vigils—these rituals bring everyone home, gathering the ensemble together with an inexorable gravity. This is the story of The Barbarian Invasions (2003), in which an aging lothario leftist professor Rémy (Rémy Girard, reprising a role he originated in 1986’s The Decline of the American Empire) receives a terminal cancer diagnosis. His impending death brings together to his bedside his ex-wife, two of his mistresses, his gay best friends, and his estranged Master of the Universe son. One of those mistresses also has a daughter, a self-described “junkie” who supplies Rémy with heroin so he can die without pain. The protagonist is a man out of time in both senses of the term: he’s dying, but he’s also in the wrong era. His political convictions—a mixture of Quebecois nationalism and social democracy—have few adherents. His sexual libertinism has left him with few friends, dependent on the generosity of the very people he has harmed as he begins to decline. Yet The Barbarian Invasions allows Rémy his dignity, and the ensemble cast delivers so many points of view on him that we begin to realize he isn’t one kind of person but different types, depending on who you ask. It is this multiplicity that gives Rémy and his son the space to forgive and love each other.

A fake terminal cancer diagnosis unites the family in The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), which examines the legacy of an irascible patriarch and how he turned his children into geniuses and failures. No American director since Robert Altman has used the ensemble more consistently as a vehicle for his concerns, and for the refining of his signature style, than Anderson. Though Anderson’s sensibility is precise where Altman’s is shaggy, arch where Altman’s is sensual, symmetrical and dioramic where Altman’s is handheld and Steadicammed, both directors pioneered brave and singular ways of telling stories with sprawling casts. The ensemble in The Royal Tenenbaums features many of Anderson’s key actors (Luke and Owen Wilson, Anjelica Huston, Bill Murray, Kumar Pallana, Seymour Cassel) and other performers with whom he worked only once (Gwyneth Paltrow, Gene Hackman, Danny Glover, Ben Stiller). Part of the film’s achievement is how it gathers actors hailing from different backgrounds and known for different styles, and convinces us that they all belong in the same universe.

That universe has many of the signatures that the director has continued to refine throughout his career: his heightened environments contrasted with his characters’ deadpan line delivery, the farcical plotting, the techniques borrowed from other media (in this case, the storybook narration voiced by Alec Baldwin), the symmetrical framing, the use of comic devices to explore deeply serious subject matter. Anderson often resists genre labels, and watching this film, you can understand why: The Royal Tenenbaums is as funny and as sad as a movie can get. The wildly varied cast finds a common cause in grounding the film’s funhouse mirror world in real-world stakes. Perhaps, then, the genre that The Royal Tenenbaums belongs to isn’t comedy or drama, but ensemble—a tradition capacious enough to encompass many tones and moods, and generous enough to illuminate the interconnectedness of the human condition.