Leonardo DiCaprio

About

Leonardo DiCaprio has spent thirty years making ambition visible on screen -- not the actor's ambition, but the character's, that specific hunger which lights up behind the eyes and quietly eats everything else. You can trace it from the very beginning. In What's Eating Gilbert Grape he went the other direction entirely: ambition dissolved, replaced by a boy with no guile whatsoever, a performance of such unguarded specificity that you forget there is technique involved at all. This Boy's Life gave him a young man straining against the walls of his own life, every muscle saying escape. The Scorsese collaborations are where DiCaprio found his adult register. The Departed has him sweat through every scene on a knife-edge of exposure -- it is a performance about a man performing, and he never lets you forget the cost. The Wolf of Wall Street opened a different cabinet entirely: here the hunger becomes farce, Jordan Belfort's appetites played at a pitch that is somehow both repellent and irresistible, DiCaprio committed to the excess with complete physical abandon. The Revenant asked him to strip almost everything back -- very little dialogue, the body doing most of the heavy lifting. Killers of the Flower Moon is the ripest work: slow, interior, a man letting himself be looked at rather than looked to. Like a long-aged cheese that has developed something complex and slightly unsettling, DiCaprio has grown more interesting the further he moves from easy charm.