Two of the best performances this year are by Benicio del Toro

This is how I like to think of Del Toro himself, a quicksilver presence gliding through films. That’s how he became famous, as Fenster, one of the thieves in The Usual Suspects (1995), a rogue so charming it didn’t matter you could barely understand a word he said. There have, in the years since, been the kind of roles Hollywood deems more award-worthy—the Mexican police officer in Traffic (2000), the tortured ex-con in 21 Grams (2003), Cuban revolutionary Guevara in Che (2008)—and he’s done well by them all. But I'd rather return to his gangster in The Funeral (1996), his warm Benny in Basquiat (1996), and his manic Dr. Gonzo in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1996)—performances full of joy and risk.

Del Toro has two of his best roles ever this year, in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another and Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme. In the former, he plays the karate teacher of Charlene (Chase Infiniti), daughter of Pat, a former leftie militant, now a deeply (and justifiably) paranoid hippie. When she goes missing, a frantic Pat turns up at his dojo. At the same time, a crazed military officer, Col. Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn), has laid siege to the Latino areas of the town as a smokescreen for tracking down Pat and Charlene. Sergio, who shelters undocumented immigrants (“a Latino Harriet Tubman situation, all legit, from the heart"), is suddenly having a Henry-Hill-hears-the-choppers day.

Though it’s Pat who’s been contingency planning for years, Sensei leaps into action like he’s waited all his life for this moment. He brings Pat home, then evacuates the immigrants. Pat is captured, so he rescues him again, then sets out to reunite him with Charlene. He does all this calmly and with authority—but also with relish. On the tensest day imaginable, he’s enjoying himself. “Ocean waves, ocean waves," he says cryptically to Pat as a police car blares in pursuit (fittingly, his soldiers are skateboarders, surfers on land).

With DiCaprio giving a hilariously tortured, frantic performance, Del Toro must be the film’s spark and light. It not as if Sergio doesn’t recognise his burdens—“We’ve been laid siege to for hundreds of years," he says, brushing off Pat’s apologies for bringing the authorities to his door—but that he regards them with a shrug. The waves will keep coming, there’s no point railing against the ocean.

There’s a sight gag in One Battle involving Sensei, a trap door and a carpet. It’s so utterly Wes, rather than PT, Anderson that Del Toro—who went from shooting The Phoenician Scheme in Babelsberg to One Battle in El Paso soon after—might have wondered which set he was on. It’s his second collaboration with Wes; he played an artist in prison in The French Dispatch (2021), one of the anthology film’s many leads. In The Phoenician Scheme, however, he’s the lead—a challenge for any actor, given the exactness of Wes’ tone.

A lot of the conversation surrounding Wes Anderson tends to be about his visual approach, with its rigid geometric framing and movements. But the writing in his films is just as distinctive—it’s up to the actors to tease out the soul in dry staccato utterances. “The dialogue is put together like a clockwork that if you take something out, you lose the spark of it, because his writing is painted with a thin brush," Del Toro told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s precise."

Anatole “Zsa-Zsa" Korda is a shady business magnate who reconnects with his estranged novitiate daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton), in a bid to pass on his estate to her. Like many of Anderson’s protagonists, he’s a man of great resourcefulness, but also shallow and self-centred. Del Toro is in practically every frame of this 1950s-set film, a neat moustache and suit lending him the air of an older breed of Hollywood star, like William Powell. He has the glancing charm of Powell too, tossing off Wes’ non-sequiturs like he was raised on them. Each time he says “Help yourself to a hand grenade", it’s with a slightly different intonation, and it always kills. And his other phrase, “Myself, I feel very safe", becomes more affecting as he and Liesl patch up but the attempts on his life continue unabated.

These two repeated lines hark back to Del Toro as Benny in Basquiat, friend of the New York artist. Benny addresses Basquiat as “Willie Mays" several times in the film, after the legendary baseball player. Like in The Phoenician Scheme, it’s altered each time, reflecting playfulness, familiarity and, finally, heartbreaking concern. It’s a reminder of how deft an actor Del Toro has always been, and why his annus Andersonis should be celebrated.

‘One Battle After Another’ is in theatres.

‘The Phoenician Scheme’ is on JioHotstar.