philosoraptor42

End of Watch (2012)

Y'know what? Jake Gyllenhaal is great. Sure, he always seems to play a pretty similar role but it's not a simple role to play by any means. He generally seems to play a mostly well-meaning, but by no means perfect, typical guy.

Perhaps what distinguishes Gyllenhaal from other actors trying to pull of the same sorts of roles is that he seems to make typical subtle flaws seem effortless. In "Jarhead" for example, there's a scene where a fellow soldier's wife had spitefully sent him a homemade porn video where she cheats on him. The soldier, keen to see the video his wife has sent, discovers this betrayal with all his fellow soldier's around him also watching. The soldier walks out furious and everyone is asked to leave, but Jake Gyllenhaal's character insists that he wants to stay and watch the video.

This isn't because Gyllenhaal's character is going to gain pleasure from watching it, but because he wants to watch someone else be destroyed in order to feel better about his own situation. It's pure spite and selfishness, but we don't feel shocked by this turn in his character and we don't feel especially less of him for it either. We recognise that Gyllenhaal's characters are typical human beings who are free to make good or bad choices at any moment. There's nothing clean-cut or saintly about them; they're just people.

Even in Gyllenhaal's earliest film "Donnie Darko" he played a character who would be rude and defiant, sometimes because he was just acting his age, sometimes because he was rebelling against authority and sometimes because of a strong moral sense - And sometimes because of all three. And when we see him trying to attack a vision of a creepy rabbit in the mirror with a knife, it's not clear how we should feel about it. There's a deep moral ambiguity to Donnie Darko in general and Jake Gyllenhaal, in hindsight, was the perfect choice for the role.