Michel Hazanavicius's silent wonder The Artist is raking the awards in, including three Golden Globes and six BAFTAs. It's poised to do the same at the Oscars. But not talking is nothing new on the silver screen, and we decided to dive into the vault and spotlight some of the other movie mutes that we've loved through the ages.
Beyond The Black Rainbow is one of the most interesting sci-fi movies in recent years, a clever commingling of Stanley Kubrick-style visual freakouts and stark, dystopian ideas. The movie's lead is a woman named Elena, kept imprisoned in a sensory deprivation room. We never hear her speak a word, so her struggle to escape her bizarre and hallucinatory environment is even scarier.
Woody Allen's 1999 comedy Sweet and Lowdown features a fantastic performance by Samantha Morton as the mute Hattie. The English actress is absolutely phenomenal in this film, letting her expressive face and body language communicate a huge range of emotion. When you can share the screen with Sean Penn and come off looking good without speaking, you've got it made.
Most movie monsters aren't very talkative, but Boris Karloff's performance in the 1931 Frankenstein is a marvel of muteness. In the original book, the reanimated corpse monster was a chatty sort, but Boris played him without a single word, and even under a pile of makeup he managed to infuse the creature with an amazing amount of pathos.
Park Chan-wook's Korean thriller Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance has a great deaf-mute lead in Ryu, a factory worker struggling to raise money to buy his sister a black market kidney. When he's laid off, he and his girlfriend launch an insane kidnapping scheme. As played by Shin Ha-kyun, Ryu is a deeply tormented soul who expresses himself amazingly through some terrifying violence.
The 2011 adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close received mixed reviews, but one thing that just about every critic loved was the exceptional performance of Max von Sydow as the Renter. Struck mute by the horrors of World War II, the enigmatic old man provides a necessary counterpart to Oskar, the film's protagonist, who talks non-stop.
In the Wild West, you don't really need to say a lot to get by. Lee Van Cleef's bad guy Jack Colby in High Noon gets everything he needs out of his harmonica. As a member of the Miller Gang gunning for Marshal Kane, Colby is an imposing presence (as Lee Van Cleef usually was) without speaking a single line of dialogue. It's uncertain whether he's actually mute of just doesn't have anything important to say.
Ada McGrath from The Piano is sort of a questionable pick, as she does narrate the movie with her "inner voice," but the character is mute. Holly Hunter won an Oscar (along with a bunch of other awards) for her performance in this 1993 film. Ada had been a self-inflicted mute since the age of six, choosing to let her remarkable, lyrical piano playing be her primary means of interacting with the world, but by the end she was pursuing speech lessons.
