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I like Eisenberg, but I mostly just thought of him as a better version of Michael Cera - a curly-haired guy playing nerds. But I was struck by this assessment from a double review:
Eisenberg was born in Queens, but moved with his family to East Brunswick, New Jersey. His father was an academic; his mother entertained as a clown at children’s parties. Eisenberg started acting in school plays, then attended the Professional Performing Arts School, in Manhattan, and later studied anthropology at the New School. In his first great movie performance, in Noah Baumbach’s “The Squid and the Whale” (2005), he played Walt Berkman, a teen-age denizen of book-lined Park Slope, a poseur who mimicked the pompous literary opinions of his novelist father. Eisenberg demonstrated a startling originality, playing the lost adolescent in a light, glancing style, without the anguished emotionalism common to such roles. He was twenty-one, but he looked the character’s age—sixteen—and not at all like a potential movie star. Pale and slender, unmuscled, he had rather close-set blue eyes, curly brown hair, a slightly pointed jaw, and twin peaks on his upper lip, which turned out to be a gift—the mouth made it easier for him to look cocky. He also displayed an astonishing verbal speed and self-assurance, which allowed him, without breaking tempo, to emphasize key phrases and make his lines snap. And he did something canny: he didn’t exaggerate or satirize Walt’s pretensions; he played them straight, as a needy boy’s desire for approval in an intellectual family. Anyone who has ever bluffed his way through a literary conversation would have recognized himself in that character. But Walt’s quickness and his egotism—even his lies—suggested that he would learn to be a winner someday. Eisenberg was the latest smart-boy Jewish movie actor to hit the mainstream, but he wasn’t neurotic, like the young Dustin Hoffman; or self-deprecating, like the young Woody Allen; or bumptious, like Ben Stiller. He’s openly demanding, a nerd hiding his fears behind aggression. Richard Dreyfuss did something similar, but Eisenberg is more nuanced. His indelible performance as Mark Zuckerberg, in “The Social Network,” suggested that a new kind of personality had entered the world, a code-based brainiac who deals with life as if it were data. Racing through Aaron Sorkin’s brilliant script, Eisenberg short-circuits or wrong-foots other people. Yet, on second viewing, you can see that for all his bullying speed, and the smirking put-downs, he ruffles the surface of Zuckerberg’s confidence and reveals an easily wounded temperament underneath. Eisenberg is an economical actor, often relying on no more than a flutter of his eyelids, or a half smile, or a sweet glance that shades into contempt. He is unafraid to play jerks, solipsists, narcissists.
I like Jesse Eisenberg, but for some reason never pictured him being nominated for an Oscar. Maybe it's because he's so young, I don't know. But I do know that I eventually have to watch The Social Network.
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