Jordan has won our hearts and the box office. But there's debate about his craft. After watching "Sinners" for the fourth time, I understand his talent.
The other week, at the former SAG Awards (I'm just not ready to call them by that new name: the Actors, ay-yi-yi), Michael B. Jordan was in the middle of greeting his new best actor statue when an expression came over him that I'd never seen him make.
He was thanking his "Sinners" cast mates by name, while his Actor statue gazed up at him from a table, and suddenly it seemed to occur to him that this accolade really was his. His gaze was downward, his eyes ever so widened, his mouth forming the "o" of "Omar," as in Omar Miller, who plays the movie's sharecropping doorman, when Jordan’s hands went up to his temples, as if to keep his head from exploding. He was dumbfounded. That was the new expression.
It must have been fresh to other people, too, because the internet selected this moment as the thumbnail meme of his win. It captures him at the peculiar junction where the human experience overlaps with a nominees’s: acceptance, of oneself, of validating hardware, of oneself via hardware. Michael B. Jordan had won. Not for something cutely specific like "best action sequence" or arguably rigged like "sexiest man alive." He'd won for his ability to bring a character to life, for acting. And because he plays twin gangsters in "Sinners," the win was for bringing two characters to life. His fellow actors had voted him the best. Michael B. Jordan! He couldn't believe it. (Timothée Chalamet's been the year's prize magnet.) Watching it live, neither could his fellow nominees, neither could any other actor in the room. Neither could I. Speaking for us all, it was the happiest kind of wild.
And now we're a day away from the Academy Awards, and Jordan's upset has gone and goosed the odds for his being dumbfounded all over again. The suspense is terrible, even for me. And all I'm doing on Sunday is sitting on a sofa. But that I think speaks to the curious thing about movie stardom in general and about this particular movie star. He's won my heart yet not my figurative best actor ballot. I'm in the tank for Wagner Moura, the long fuse snaking and sneaking its way through "The Secret Agent."
So what is it that I couldn't believe about Jordan winning that award? He had just never done it for me. Like Brad Pitt for a long time, Jordan can seem remote in repose. Or as if his performances are happening so fast, so desperately, that I'm usually left to wonder what the rush is. That was an early Harrison Ford problem. Jordan often seems like he's playing blood pressure as an emotion. That can work for high-stress scenarios like his climactic face-off with Chadwick Boseman near the end of "Black Panther." Yet that encounter is as much ideological as it is physical, and Jordan’s line readings tend to conjure the pages bearing those lines. Boseman conjures podiums and proscenium arches. Fights about Jordan’s acting have lit up chat rooms and nearly destroyed barbershops. Is he good? We’re just. Not. Sure.