Period films fail when actors lack the weathered grain of an era

Evidence

Eras produce certain voices, certain faces. What’s missing in Alfredson’s version is something like the grain of the 1970s. … Too often, the actors seem like 21st-century moisturised metrosexuals in 1970s drag – and bad drag at that. Presented with photographs of people from the 1970s, the clichéd but accurate observation is that people looked so much older then. But the preposterously fresh-faced likes of Benedict Cumberbatch (who plays Guillam) and Tom Hardy (in the role of rogue agent Ricki Tarr) aren’t nearly weathered enough to convince as 1970s secret agents. The skin, the hair are too good. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 168

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Used disliked music can transport a writer back to an era’s grain — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 184; Period settings become style quotations rather than lived worlds once fully aestheticized — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 170

Broader Connections

• Period settings become style quotations rather than lived worlds once fully aestheticized #complicates (0.78) — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 170