Evil Captor has suffered a mental collapse, and he doesn’t even know what movies he’s talking about anymore. He thinks Wilford Brimley starred in every action movie since 1980.
Gael Garcia Bernal’s Stephane isn’t happy at the beginning of The Science of Sleep–he’s dealing with his father’s death, talking to his dad in dreams, and chasing his artistic dreams in a country across the world with a language he feels shaky in. But he’s certainly “normal” and functioning.
Can I add Joaquin Phoenix in Gladiator - even though he was pretty strange at the beginning.
She was stable and living in a world she controlled. That world got…disturbed and so did she.
The protagonist of 28 Days Later had a pretty interesting take on the whole “mental collapse” schtick; so did the protagonist of Brazil.
Daniel
Not the best but worthy of note- Lillian Gish in The Wind.
There’s sort of a big hint he’s going downhill when he’s talking to his rifle afterwards.
Is anime fair game here? Because Mimarin in Perfect Blue was my first thought.
Does being on the edge of a nervous breakdown count?
My mother swears she hates Almodóvar and his movies (she’s, uh, slightly prejudiced) but got hooked on watching that one with me once - now whenever she starts her “I hate Almodóvar” speech all I need to shut her up is remind her of the only Almodóvar movie she’s actually watched.
I can’t imagine making an action movie without Wilford Brimley.
Of course - it’s the right thing to do.
Bruce Dern at the end of Coming Home. Boy, did his world and everythng he believed in collapse in around him.
The cross-cutting between a physically damaged but mentally very healthy Jon Voigt and Dern in the final moments left me sobbing.
It wasn’t a permanent collapse, but William Forsythe losing hope during The Waterdance left me crying too.
Gwyneth Paltrow in Sylvia.
CMC fnord!
How so? Does he belong to some minority group she dislikes?
Which movie?
On a similar note: Peter in the original Dawn of the Dead when he
[spoiler]gives up on life and holes up in his room with a gun to his head. That moment, when the strongest (mentally and physically) character in the movie–the one who inspired the other three with his “never-say-die” mentality, empowered Roger in his final days and overcame the animosity between himself and Stephen to unify the party in the name of survival–is overcome by the horror of fighting another zombie onslaught, is powerful.
Apparently Romero wanted to have Peter and Fran both commit suicide, and both scenes were shot–Peter putting a hole through his brain and Fran putting her head in the way of the chopper blades, and then the chopper was going to run out of fuel and die a couple of minutes later to show that their escape would have been futile anyway. Someone convinced him to have them both survive, but you can still see the build-up to their suicides when Fran hesitates once she’s inside the helicopter.[/spoiler]
Jessica Walter started out (seemingly) sane in Play Misty for Me (I never thought about it before, but this movie was its generation’s “Fatal Attraction”).
Very understated, possibly more true to life, and acting like the role was made for him:
Omar Sharif in Dr Zhivago.
I thank you.
Great flick!
Yeah, Ellen Burstyn in Requiem For a Dream qualifies. She’s just a regular old lady at the start. By the end she’s . . . a babbling lunatic in an asylum.
And it’s so gradual, too. It was a real shock to me to watch the movie a second time and see how normal and healthy she looked at the start. A completely different character by the end.