Jericho and Johh Lloyd vie for top thespic honors

ROSALES in “Walang Forever.”

A KEY highlight of the recently concluded Metro Manila Film Festival was the high level of performances turned in by some lead and supporting players in the annual year-end fest’s eight official entries.

Jennylyn Mercado and Jericho Rosales, the stars of “Walang Forever,” ended up romping off with the top acting awards, but those victories were hard-fought and hard-won, due to similarly strong portrayals from their competition.

Significant challenges

Specifically, the fiercest battle for top thespic honors was waged in the best actor race, with Jericho having to fend off significant challenges from John Lloyd Cruz (“Honor Thy Father”) and other determined rivals. In fact, Jericho’s victory continues to be argued about to this day, since there are film buffs who feel that John Lloyd delivered the “gutsier” portrayal.

We’ve been asked to weigh in on the contentious score, so here’s our P200 worth: Jericho’s character in “Walang Forever” was “on” from beginning to end, so he had a lot to do, and many different thespic stances to take—and make.

For the film’s first two-thirds, he played it light and blithe—then, his character’s medical crisis drastically altered the parameters of his thespic challenge, a key shift that not many actors can manage to pull off.

Happily, Jericho was up to the difficult character twist, proving that, despite an absence of some years, he hasn’t lost his edge over his contemporaries.

For his part, John Lloyd in “Honor Thy Father” makes an even more radical shift from his hit rom-com portrayals, to a deep, dark, “dangerous” and even deadly downward spiral to the heart of a good man forced to go really bad.

Gone is the blithe, beaming star of yore, replaced by a character actor who doesn’t care how he looks, and even shaves off his hair at one point to provide a visual correlative for his character’s corrosion—and seething torment.

Based on major character crisis and change, therefore, John Lloyd would appear to have the edge.

Complicit

We further note, however, that there are times in his film’s early part when he’s relatively quiet, complicit and on observant mode. In addition, once his character is forced to turn to crime and violence to protect and rescue his family, the focus shifts again to “shared” mode, as other characters and accomplices enter and complicate the conflict.

Yes, they’re there for him, but precious screen time is taken up by having to sketch in their back story, so the storytelling’s focus on its key protagonist is diffused.

Given the excellence of both John Lloyd and Jericho’s characterizations, it’s this “structural” factor that tips the verdict in Jericho’s favor. Yes, John Lloyd went deeper, but Jericho’s film focused more consistently and thus ultimately more strongly on him.

This is not a matter of semantics. Longer and fuller screen presence and involvement actually make greater demands on an actor, because he has more to do—and has to “deliver,” not in occasional dramatic spurts, but all the time.

This may not be as showy as emotional breakdowns and confrontation scenes, but it’s an even tougher and more delicate feat to pull off!