Four actors rise to top at Park City

Robert Denerstein, Rocky Mountain News

Published January 28, 2006 at midnight

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Actors tended to make a bigger splash than directors at a Sundance Film Festival that seemed dominated by critical shoulder shrugging.

For me, four actors seemed to rise above the rest:

• Ryan Gosling: The always intense Gosling plays a crack-addicted Brooklyn junior high school teacher in director Ryan Flick's Half Nelson. Hollywood has tried to use Gosling in movies such as The Notebook, but he's done his best work in independent films, most notably The Believer.

Perhaps because he projects an angry, even dangerous intelligence, Gosling isn't easy to cast, but his sense of unpredictability fits perfectly into Half Nelson, which deals with a teacher's shattered life and a failing urban society.

• Maggie Gyllenhaal: The actress, who appears in the movie Sherrybaby, seems to be taking over where Parker Posey left off. If there's a current queen of indie cinema, Gyllenhaal deserves consideration for the title.

In Sherrybaby, Gyllenhaal portrays a heroin-addicted New Jersey mother who faces all manner of difficulties after being released from prison. In addition to finding a job and coping with the indignities of life in a halfway house, she must battle her brother and his wife for custody of her daughter.

Gyllenhaal, who starred in the 2002 Sundance hit Secretary, brings ferocity and an increasing sense of self-awareness to a role that deepens as the movie progresses.

• Gael Garcia Bernal: The actor (Motorcycle Diaries and Y tu mama tambien) provides the centerpiece performance in director Michel Gondry's charming, wildly inventive The Science of Sleep.

Bernal plays a graphic designer who was raised by his father in Mexico, but who travels to Paris to spend time with his mother. He moves into her apartment, takes a job she has arranged for him and falls in love with his neighbor (Charlotte Gainsbourg).

Loaded with visual gags and running on full-throttle brilliance, Science of Sleep qualifies as a director's movie, but it couldn't work without Bernal, who turns silliness into a virtue in a story that takes place in a world where the distinction between dreams and reality becomes increasingly blurry.

• Shia LaBeouf: The actor (Holes and The Greatest Game Ever Played) has been touted as a hot young actor for several years. I didn't totally buy it until I saw A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, a gritty New York drama that swaggers (and sometimes stumbles) into Mean Streets territory.

LaBeouf, who plays a 16-year-old growing up in Queens during the 1980s, does a fine job of providing this sometimes scattered movie with a center. He's completely convincing as a young man who's desperately trying to understand his relationship to his neighborhood and a hard-boiled father.

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