James Toback is a director who is known for causing controversy, stirring up trouble and portraying the younger generations as Larry Clark-like, complete with more drugs, gambling and sex than one could imagine. James Toback is not a director, however, who is widely known for his ability to get good performances out of actors. With his very gritty use of the camera, Toback’s realistic and almost documentary-like style can occasionally detract from an actor’s presentation. None of these factors influenced actor Adrian Grenier’s performance in Toback’s Harvard Man.
In Harvard Man, Grenier plays Alan Jensen, the starting point guard for the Harvard Crimson. Jensen is a free-spirited college student, interested in experimenting with everyone and everything he can get his hands on. The high point of Grenier’s performance comes midway through the film when Jensen takes three hits of super-strength, virtually genetically engineered acid. Warned on different occasions not to take more than one hit at a time, Jensen’s world quickly changes.
On a film with a much higher budget than that of Harvard Man, significant special effects and CGI’s could be used to create the unusual and (sometimes) scary world of the acid trip. Unable to do much more than distort images and play with sound, Jensen’s nearly 20-minute long acid trip is pulled off with gusto because of Grenier’s shifty-eyed, rapid-fire, physical transformation.
The audience knows that Jensen is in a much different universe than anyone else on-screen, and it is up to Grenier’s reactions to the things that he sees to take us there. And that he does in spades.
Reactions (and reactions to reactions) are twofold: they’re either believable or they’re not. Typifying the acting struggle, believable reactions are rather tough to create, especially since the actor knows what is going to happen ahead of time. This is also what makes it so hard to act opposite CGI and blue screens. And even knowing ahead of time what he was going to be faced with, Grenier’s countenance remains fraught with tension and paranoia. This is one of the best performances of a trip in memory.
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