Much of the appeal of the new action-comedy-romance The Fall Guy is that Colt Seavers, the lead character played by Ryan Gosling, is not a superhero. As the movie makes clear, Colt’s stunt-man abilities to take a punch, survive a fall, and roll a car are both the result of proper safety procedures and, nonetheless, actually pretty painful – especially when he’s embroiled in real-life fisticuffs where those safety guardrails aren’t installed. Gosling’s ability to convincingly fight through the slapstick pain, though, is one of his actorly superpowers, albeit a relatively new one for a star who doesn’t do a lot of straight-up action movies. His more lasting power, especially in his big-studio mainstream roles, is a more cosmic, less physical variety, somewhere between science and magic: He can generate chemistry with his co-stars.
A lot of actors can do this – selectively, anyway. But Gosling has the unusual ability to generate convincing sparks with a variety of actresses, especially notable because he got his start playing troubled loners. Some of that disturbed-young-man carried over into grown-up projects like Blue Valentine, a miserabilist romance opposite Michelle Williams, or All Good Things, in which he plays a fictionalized version of Robert Durst opposite Kirsten Dunst. There’s even a little of that energy in The Notebook, where he plays Noah, the free-thinking woodworker who urges Allie (Rachel McAdams) to follow her heart. The Notebook is absolute pablum, as cornily melodramatic and even vaguely insulting as any Nicholas Sparks text, yet it feels like the most elevated of his movie adaptations almost entirely because of the conviction with which Gosling and McAdams perform it. This was the first moment that Gosling’s broody seriousness felt like it might be applicable to mainstream stardom rather than actorly suffering, teased out by a similarly ascendant McAdams.
The Notebook wouldn’t be the first time Gosling’s co-star chemistry would help to partially redeem a misbegotten romance. Crazy. Stupid. Love. is a contrived and at times downright ghastly triptych of romantic stories, and the only one that’s not terribly depressing involves Gosling as a – to quote a much better 2011 romance – playboy or “operator” type who falls for a skeptical lawyer played by Emma Stone. Gosling hadn’t played such a straightforward lothario type before (this was the same year he went on a silent rampage in Drive), and his scenes with Stone, especially those isolated from the rest of the cast for purposes of the dopey plot, feel like another movie entirely, where the cutesy screenwriting becomes secondary to Gosling’s underplayed hunkiness complementing Stone’s screwball fidgets. They make cribbing from Dirty Dancing look like the most natural thing in the world, rather than a hacky crowdpleaser.
It’s no wonder Gosling and Stone worked together again, on the little-remembered crime picture Gangster Squad, and the significantly more-remembered Best Picture nominee La La Land, which pays off their past two collaborations with a love story that feels lived-in even when it’s pursing archetypes. (In this case, the striving ingenue and the purist artiste.) Gosling’s Seb was dinged by some for being a self-serious, self-appointed white savior, but Gosling’s performance is precisely calibrated to acknowledge, deepen, and poke fun at those tendencies, and Stone falls right in sync with those aims.
Most of Gosling’s roles following La La Land didn’t handle romantic chemistry directly, focusing on more fraught relationships like the husband-and-wife disconnect in First Man. Terrence Malick’s Song to Song comes closer than most, but obscures its relationships in Malickian drifting. (At the time, it played a bit like a series of Malick B-sides to The Tree of Life, though in retrospect it could also be read as a more experimental B-side to La La Land as well.) And Gosling’s Oscar-nominated work in Barbie plays hilariously against his good looks, with his Ken specifically not ever the object of affection for a politely uninterested Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie).
The Fall Guy, though, has Gosling going full-on puppy dog as Colt, a stunt man romancing Jody (Emily Blunt), a camera operator – until Colt breaks his back during a stunt and ghosts everyone involved, including Jody. In the meantime, Jody gets her big break as the director of an action-sci-fi-romance megaproduction, and the two have an unlikely on-set reunion in Australia. Some of the movie’s charm has to do with the way Drew Pearce’s screenplay doesn’t pile on phony complications designed to keep the pair apart; though Jody has been wounded by Colt’s seeming rejection, the two clearly like each other, and Pearce doesn’t throw in a bunch of filler sniping to kill time before the climax. On the other hand, the movie has a structural disadvantage in that Colt and Jody don’t spend all that much time together. This is really Gosling’s movie, as the producer of Jody’s film sends Colt on an important errand: track down the movie’s star (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), whose recent absence threatens to scotch the whole production.
Colt’s whole motivation, then, is to make things right for Jody – but Jody isn’t in on his amateur investigation, which vaguely recalls Gosling’s bravura comic work in The Nice Guys. The movie has to make do with Colt and Jody’s interactions on-set, montage-y flashbacks to their relationship, and instances where they cross paths during Colt’s action-packed adventure. It’s here that the movie’s form takes advantage of Gosling’s function: His chemistry with Blunt reacts so instantly and easily that it radiates beyond a physically shared frame. The characters are introduced mid-flirtation on their film set, the camera following them around as Colt prepares for a major stunt, their conversation continuing over walkie-talkie even after he gets in an elevator sending him far above her. This lays the groundwork for a later scene where they talk on the phone, shown via split-screen (which is also the subject of their conversation: Should Jody utilize split-screen in her movie, or is it too gimmicky?). Gosling conveys such attention to his on-screen partner, even when she’s not actually there with him, that their conversation crackles even without any chance of anyone pulling a Dirty Dancing move. This isn’t easy; think of how many superhero blockbusters have labored to convince us that actors were occupying that space, with no thought to whether any of them seemed to want to.
This shouldn’t discount Blunt’s role in the movie’s success, either. Gosling sure doesn’t, referring to Blunt as a “chemist” in a recent interview. He’s not just being chivalrous; she’s similarly versatile in her on-screen chemistry, playing, for one thing, maybe the only convincing romantic lead for Tom Cruise of the past 20 years or so, in Edge of Tomorrow. She’s also lovely opposite Matt Damon in The Adjustment Bureau, and convincingly smitten with Jason Segel in The Five-Year Engagement. As Jody, she particularly masters the art of putting up a tough, decisive front while revealing longing on her face – you can picture her picturing Gosling. Both of them make it look easy.
Of course, some performers have a less reactive, more specific approach to chemistry that’s more dependent on their screen partner, and that’s fine – it makes the reaction seem all the more valuable when it happens. But just as much as movies need skilled stunt performers to make their action sequences more thrilling, they also require actors who can bring their own chemistry to different situations and on-screen partners without appearing self-infatuated. When he was young, Gosling sometimes appeared to be searching for virtuosic solos of despair. Now his romantic dexterity is a walking special effect.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
