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.
Of such dynamic shifts and extremes, Wilkinson’s career was made. He could veer from affable to prickly, from nebbishy to charismatic. He was game to don an Italian accent to play the Gotham City mobster Carmine Falcone in “Batman Begins” (2005), though he was more at home as a London crime boss in Guy Ritchie’s “Rocknrolla,” threatening his enemies with death by crayfish. He had a funny, flamboyant streak, whether falling to a villain’s proper death in “Rush Hour” or engaging in some slow-motion fisticuffs with Paul Giamatti in Gilroy’s romantic-comedy thriller “Duplicity.” (That movie was an inspired reunion for the two actors after their HBO miniseries “John Adams,” which earned Wilkinson an Emmy and a Golden Globe for his supporting turn as Benjamin Franklin.)
Wilkinson was peerless at doing patrician eloquence: a sneering businessman in “The Ghost and the Darkness,” a haughty scientific mind in “The Governess.” And he brought a crafty mix of decency and pragmatism to the role of President Lyndon B. Johnson in Ava DuVernay’s civil rights drama “Selma” (2014), a shrewd characterization that drew criticism from those who’d expected not a depiction of Johnson so much as a deification.
But Wilkinson was equally persuasive as a working-class grumbler, which is what made him such a terrific secret weapon in the hit 1997 comedy “The Full Monty.” His character, Gerald, is a scowling former steelworker who, after some initial reluctance, throws himself into his friends’ amateur-strip-show shenanigans with undisguised gusto. To this day, I can’t hear Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff” without flashing back on the giddy sight of Wilkinson standing in a job-center line, discreetly shaking, thrusting and finally twirling his way to the front of the queue. Hidden beneath that rumpled overcoat and red sweater vest, his performance joyously proclaims, is the soul of a natural-born dancer.
Although Wilkinson had already registered in movies like “In the Name of the Father” (1993), “Priest” (1994) and “Sense and Sensibility” (1995), “The Full Monty” earned him a British Academy Film Award for supporting actor and catapulted him to greater attention from audiences and filmmakers outside the U.K. Four years later, he received his first Oscar nomination for his career-crowning performance in Todd Field’s searing drama “In the Bedroom.” In that movie, Wilkinson and Sissy Spacek give titanic performances as Tom and Ruth Fowler, a middle-aged New England couple grieving, and seeking justice for, their murdered son. Tom is the more easygoing, reasonable-minded spouse, the one who clings in vain to normalcy even after the unthinkable has happened. Spacek has the showier role as the seething, vengeful Ruth, a lobster fisherman’s Lady Macbeth.
The scene of Spacek smashing a plate to the floor became a representative image of the movie and, a bit unfairly, an oft-imitated bit of shorthand for Oscar-clip histrionics. To watch that scene again in its entirety, and with its dramatic context fully restored, is to appreciate how contrapuntally synced Spacek and Wilkinson are, how precisely they capture the entrenched rhythms of a long-married couple. And it’s Wilkinson’s groundedness, his slow-cracking composure, that gives Spacek the emotional ballast she needs; without him, her fury couldn’t erupt or resonate with such spectacular force.
I wish more lead roles of that stature had awaited Wilkinson after “In the Bedroom.” Even so, a single performance this good never fully exhausts its riches, even after multiple viewings. So much of the acting he does in Field’s film is subtle to the point of subterranean: There’s the quiet pleading in his expression as he asks a district attorney for help, the defeated stoop of his shoulders as he prepares to give his wife the worst news of their lives. For those of us who loved this actor’s work, there was a particular poignancy to see words fail him for once, this actor of Shakespearean grandiloquence, tamping down his natural gift for language to express a deeper, more sorrowful truth.