Domo arigato, Kobayashi

OK, the Times finally arrived at 8:55, but I'm still going to take a few minutes to do what I was going to do if it hadn't: tip a cap to one of the best character actors of our time, Pete Postlethwaite, dead far too young, of cancer.

Here's the best thing I can say about Postlethwaite, and you who know me know that this is a very good thing indeed: when I would catch a glimpse of him in a trailer, my enthusiasm for the film automatically rose, whether from "no" to "well, mayyyybe" or from "oh, yes" to "oh, yes!"

My first keen awareness of him on the screen was not as the wrongly accused Giuseppe Conlan in In the Name of the Father (for which he got his only Oscar nomination) but as the inexplicably named messenger Kobayashi in The Usual Suspects. Brassed Off (currently unavailable on disc, it seems) is the only lead role I can recall for him, and while he was brilliant in that little gem, it's probably just as well that he kept to the periphery--not the ace starting pitcher or the put-it-away closer, but the guy who comes in to get a left-handed batter out with the game in the balance in the seventh inning. OK, it's silly to use a baseball metaphor for a man so very not-American, but the point is that he brought a little bit of perfection to every role. Most recently, for example, The Town was nothing like a great film, but Postlethwaite's portrayal of a gentle florist façade over a vicious gangster was one of the elements that made it 2 fun hours. He shows up in both the Elsinore Project--as the Player King in Mel Gibson's Hamlet--and the Verona Project--as Friar Laurence in Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (I always get a kick out of typing the full title)--and those roles provide a nice précis to the Postlethwaite presence: a small role, but a tricky one, and an essential one, one that, done badly, can cut the heart out of the piece. I'll resist the temptation to say that his loss cuts out the heart of my cinematic world, but the precedent of my articulating at some length an appreciation--and including a photo!--should make it clear how much I feel his passing. For more, see the Times obit. The early online version of that bio revealed that he had been active in protesting the Iraq War and that his Green convictions extended to having a wind turbine on his Shropshire farm. I hope that those tidbits were edited out in the name of space, not of accuracy: when you admire someone without having any idea whether anything about him or her is admirable besides the work, it's always comforting to learn of a shared belief.