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Andrew Garfield found the Norman Bates of Silicon Valley, and he could win an Oscar for it.
The Academy gave “Psycho” (1960) four nominations at the 33rd Oscars, and none of them were for the motel clerk with the stuffed
birds. Alfred Hitchcock landed his fifth and final best director nod. Janet Leigh, whose Marion Crane doesn’t make it out of the first half the movie, was nominated for supporting actress. Anthony Perkins, who turned Norman Bates into the most likable monster the movies have ever produced, didn’t get a nom for what many consider one of the greatest performances in film history (The American Film Institute ranked Norman the No. 2 villain in film history, behind only Hannibal Lecter).
And now, 66 years later, you can see the ghost of Perkins’ work in the horror classic, watching Andrew Garfield pull off the same trick as OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman in Luca Guadagnino’s dark dramedy “Artificial,” which premiered at the New York Film Festival and received a rapturous reception. Hopefully this time, voters offer Garfield a better outcome than they did for Perkins.
“Artificial” tells the true story of the five days in November 2023 when OpenAI’s board fired its CEO, watched more than 700 employees threaten to walk out and handed him his job back. Guadagnino and screenwriter Simon Rich make a persuasive, often very funny case that those five days were humanity’s last real chance to pump the brakes on artificial intelligence and that the chance got traded away for money and the bruised egos of a few tech bros who have never once been told no. It also feels like a warning shot for us all as we descend into more AI usage, and words like “super intelligence” become mainstream in our modern societies.
But doomsday feelings aside, we’ve got a bona fide Oscar contender on our hands. It’s Guadagnino’s best film since “Call Me by Your Name,” and Garfield, along with his leading co-star Yura Borisov, is delivering top-tier acting work across the board.
To be clear, nobody is accusing Altman of keeping his mother in the fruit cellar (at least not today). The comparison is about the craft and how Garfield approaches the character. Perkins understood that Norman only works if the audience likes him: He stammers, fusses over sandwiches and chews candy corn while chatting with a private detective. Garfield builds his Altman the same way. Sitting almost constantly crisscross-applesauce, his voice stays soft, as his eyes get wide and he listens intently, as if he’s completely fixated on the human being in front of him. Until, suddenly, the life drains from his eyes, sometimes for barely a second, and returning before anyone else in the scene notices. But the audience does. And that’s when you realize the movie has been giving you all the clues you need to recognize the monster you’ve been spending time with, and it reveals itself by the end credits.
While the easy and apt comparison is that this is more of the spiritual sequel to “The Social Network” (2010) than “The Social Reckoning” itself, the structure Guadagnino and Rich construct is perhaps a bit closer to “Psycho” as well. Hitchcock’s film’s first act is about Marion, before pulling the shower curtain back. “Artificial” hands its point of view to Ilya Sutskever, the Soviet-born computer scientist Borisov plays as a man who sees the cliff ahead. Altman doesn’t wander into this part until a decade into the story. Both films are engineered to make the audience misjudge who really matters to the tale. That’s why Neon, as Variety reported exclusively, is submitting Borisov as the lead and Garfield in supporting for awards season.
Borisov, an Oscar nominee for “Anora” (2024), delivers an impeccably strong turn. The unknown breakout of Sean Baker’s best picture winner might not have been expected to return this strongly so soon. Yet here he stands, thought-provoking and stoic, with a turn that recalls someone like Mark Ruffalo in “Spotlight.” He stands as one of the film’s greatest strengths and deserves a spot in the ever-so-crowded best actor field. The talented ensemble around Borisov and Garfield helps, including Cooper Hoffman as Greg Brockman, the loud, obnoxious board chairman and Oscar nominee Monica Barbaro (“A Complete Unknown”) as Mira Murati, the chief technology officer who sees the company’s pitfalls coming.
The supporting actor category has always had a soft spot for a villain with charm and a sharp blade tucked behind it. Javier Bardem (“No Country for Old Men”), Heath Ledger (“The Dark Knight”) and Christoph Waltz (“Inglourious Basterds”) won supporting actor statues at three straight ceremonies. At recent ceremonies, Robert Downey Jr. won for “Oppenheimer” as Lewis Strauss, a real-life power broker whose wounded pride helps bring down the movie’s hero, and just last year Sean Penn took home his third career win for playing a white supremacist in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another.” The Oscars love themselves an entertaining bad guy.
And then there’s the résumé that Garfield has assembled as a two-time best actor nominee (“Hacksaw Ridge” and “Tick, Tick … Boom!”) with no wins. Not to mention his snub for “The Social Network” which landed him a Golden Globe nod as Eduardo Saverin, the co-founder squeezed out of Facebook, before the Academy passed on his work. The overdue narrative is sitting out in plain sight.
What will help the buzz for Garfield, and the film itself, is that Altman is very much alive, still in the headlines and behind the product some Academy members have perhaps used to draft thank-you notes. Plenty of voters will flinch at a movie this pointed about an industry Hollywood is busy negotiating with, as seen when Amazon MGM dropped the film in June, months after its parent company put $50 billion into OpenAI. Given the quality Guadagnino has put out, it’s hard to argue that move was anything but political. Neon, which won best picture with “Parasite” and “Anora,” has embraced the opportunity with open arms. This could be one of Neon’s best picture entries this year, which they’ll have to juggle alongside the Palme d’Or winner “Fjord” and the other Cannes premieres “All of a Sudden,” “Clarissa” and “Paper Tiger.”
“Psycho” concludes on Perkins’ smile, and interestingly, “Artificial” does on Garfield’s. Let’s see if this expression is repeated on the Dolby Theatre stage.
“Artificial” will next play at the BFI London Film Festival before heading to select theaters on Christmas Day, followed by an expansion in January.
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