Jake Gyllenhaal - brains combined with a 'troubled look from a swoonsome male'

I was rather intrigued today by an article in the Guardian, which examined the place of genius in the movies. This was prompted by the announcement that Leo DiCaprio is to 'take the role of Nolan Bushnell, creator of pioneering computer game firm Atari in a movie to be called, surprisingly, Atari.' This leads on to the discussion of whether the genius is normally portrayed by film makers as a geek - or, whether a geek is normally cast in the role of the genius.


So, can you have a sexy geek? Can you have a sexy genius? Can you have a sexy geek playing the role of a non-sexy genius? Or is it all an act and the sexy geek actor is, in fact, not a geek but just a sexy actor? You won't be surprised to hear that the Guardian article makes mention of someone who has, throughout his career, played both geeks and geniuses and may be regarded by some members of the theatre audience as a geek - Jake Gyllenhaal. Is it possible that 'geek' may be a term used in place of 'interesting' or 'unusual'?


The Guardian suggests that the most successful geeks in movies are those who combine clear evidence of brains with the 'troubled look from a swoonsome male' and goes on to say 'Without this twist Jake Gyllenhaal might never have had a career. Released the same year as A Beautiful Mind, Donnie Darko cast Gyllenhaal as someone who was both blessed with a metaphysical potency and unable to take his eyes off his shoes. Oh, and he looked awfully handsome too, in his slovenly way. Since then, Gyllenhaal has produced a variation on this performance in the majority of his movies, albeit playing characters with varying levels of smarts. From the vulnerable maths student of Proof to the sensitive squaddie of Jarhead via the instinctual, but unusual, cartoonist-detective of Zodiac, he's done em all.'


Earlier this year, the Telgraph suggested that the new brand of movie hero actors are geeks. The actors of a certain age - Harrison Ford, Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone, Mel Gibson etc - may now be superceded by actors who are, potentially, geeks. This should not be surprising because numerous superheroes themselves have a geeky streak the size of a planet, they just haven't always been played that way. But now we live in a post-Robert Downey Jr as Iron Man world. In this world we can have Jake Gyllenhaal as the Prince of Persia and John Cusack in Roland Emmerich's 2012.


Whether or not Jake is regarded by some filmfans as a geek, in his youth, not very long ago, he played roles that showed smart kids could escape from a grim reality. In October Sky, Jake's Homer Hickam looked to the heavens and used science to escape the pit. However, Donnie Darko had a conception of the world that was too intense for survival - he knew too much. More down to earth was Hal, the drumming, reasonably athletic, contact lensed and inordinately sexy in a white shirt mathematics geek of Proof. Jake, no maths geek himself, has made it clear that he is very much a man of words not sums and, for me, this was the role where Jake did not succeed as a geek. He made up for it in other ways, though.


Most recently, we have Robert Graysmith, undoubtedly a geek and possibly somone who took geekness to scary levels. Jake found the obsessive character of the real Robert made him feel a little uncomfortable. But Jake was superb in capturing the mannerisms of this unusual, tunnel-visioned man, led as Jake was by the ultimate directing geek - David Fincher.


Flixster did a list of its favourite movies for geeks. This was the criteria: 'Geeky cult classics are beloved to the geek sub-culture. They are discussed, quoted, and reminisced over well after the movie is over. They can have done not well, or kinda well, but they cannot have done VERY well in the theater. They contain elements of genre in them (horror, scifi, fantasy) or they can be animated – but never a Disney flick. They can be amazing films, but often they are simply mediocre crap. These are the things defining a geek cult classic.' Sometimes it can be hard to distinguish between the amazing and the crap. However, Donnie Darko is clearly the former and features in top ten lists for both geeks and those who consider themselves non-geeks.


If you read Flixter's review of Donnie Darko here, you can expect big spoilers because geeks have the advantage in that they understand the plot.

And is it a bad thing for an actor to be regarded as a geek? I would argue that, in the case of Jake, not at all.


Includes pictures from IHJ and Michael Stipe.