Where “JFK” and “Dracula” make the difficulty of getting a bead on Oldman an asset, Bernard Rose’s unconventional Beethoven biopic “Immortal Beloved” makes it the central theme. Taking a page from “Citizen Kane” (much like “Velvet Goldmine” a few years later), the film uses Beethoven’s address of an unknown “immortal beloved” in letters as a jumping-off point to explore his nature. In flashbacks, Oldman’s Beethoven is by turns deeply sensitive and arrogant, testy and secretive (about his deafness), sometimes within the same scene. Music, even when he can’t hear it, opens him up and transports him, allowing his facial expression to become less guarded. Life is harder, particularly when it intersects with art and he demonstrates casual cruelty toward those around him (a scene in which he threatens to beat a student, who believes him to be joking, only to be stunned and deeply hurt when he does slap her, remains among the most painful in Oldman’s career). Like Charles Foster Kane before him, Beethoven’s longing to be known butts up against his need to conceal himself, making him at once a deeply emotional figure and a remote one.
By the mid-'90s, Oldman became known for taking on virtually every villainous role thrown his way. Some of the parts see him indulging a bit too much in frothing-at-the-mouth monstrousness (“Murder in the First”). Others see him walking a fine line between engagement and entertaining hamminess as he attempts to enliven a middling-to-terrible script (“Air Force One,” “Lost in Space”). The best trade off of his ability to use theatricality as a distancing effect by casting him as characters like “True Romance’s” Drexl Spivey, who obscures himself to intimidate. Oldman may seem ridiculous with his white guy dreads, leopard-pattern bathrobe and fake-deep voice, but he’s able to flip his casual demeanor (smacking his lips while chowing down on Chinese food and gesturing an offer with chopsticks) on a dime, adopting graver tones, dropping the smile and swinging a hanging lamp toward Christian Slater’s Clarence. “I’m still a mystery to you,” he intones, and while his broad adoption of stereotypical black pimp traits is no doubt partly out of real fetishization of those stereotypes, Oldman suggests the character knows the cognitive dissonance playing up that absurdity before switching to genuine menace is very effective.
The actor goes to even greater extremes in his two collaborations with Luc Besson, 1994’s “Leon: The Professional” and 1997’s “The Fifth Element.” It’s easy to see why the performances are too much for some, with Oldman taking the opportunity to fit in every absurd gesticulation and shout that he can. At the same time, Besson is working in a cartoonish register, so Oldman’s cartoonish creations fit the oddball energy of both films rather well. In “Leon,” crooked DEA agent Stansfield’s hopped-up derangement is of a piece with Drexl, as much an effective, exaggerated factor to intimidate as it is a natural effect of the character’s drug abuse and psychosis,. The character’s unmotivated laughter and vocal dips and jumps undermine the sense that his victims know where he’s coming from or what he’s going to do. Oldman is less immediately threatening and more overtly ridiculous as Zorg in “The Fifth Element,” with his whistling lisp and goofy haircut, but it’s still an entertaining performance, one whose rapid-fire, equivocating delivery posits there’s little difference between corrupt tycoons and sleazy used care salesmen.
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