After going through the best supporting turns of the year earlier this week (check out that feature by clicking here) and dealing with the onslaught of awards and nominations this week including the Golden Globes and Chicago Film Critics Association (a group of which this critic is a proud board member), we thought we'd take a look at the names above the title that really stood out this year.

From drama to comedy to science fiction, the best lead performances of 2009 came from diverse films and were delivered by actors and actresses with varying degrees of experience. From stars who have made the top five in Best Actor or Best Actress in the past (Jeff Bridges and George Clooney) to excellent actors finally getting the part to display their talent (Colin Firth and Maya Rudolph) to new faces (Carey Mulligan and Gabby Sidibe), it was an amazing year for lead performances. Here's the best:

 

Easily the toughest category to whittle down to five, the coolest thing about the competition for Best Actor this year was the diversity of product. Best Actor performances regularly come from the drama genre, but they popped up all over the genre spectrum this year. Matt Damon did arguably the best work of his career in The Informant!, Johnny Depp produced his most subtle work in years in Public Enemies, and Philip Seymour Hoffman delivered one of the best vocal performances of all time in Mary and Max. Speaking of Max, the great work by Max Records was the beating heart of Where the Wild Things Are. Other great lead actor performances were provided by Clive Owen (Duplicity), Edgar Flores (Sin Nombre), Souleyemane Sy Savane (Goodbye Solo), Seth Rogen (Observe and Report), Joseph Gordon-Levitt ((500) Days of Summer), Ben Whishaw (Bright Star), Willem Dafoe (Antichrist), Tom Hardy (Bronson), Morgan Freeman (Invictus), and Daniel Day-Lewis (Nine). The two most immediate runner-up trophies would go to Joaquin Phoenix for his remarkable performance in Two Lovers and Ben Foster's heartbreaking turn in The Messenger – a pair of performances that I desperately wanted to recognize in the top five but couldn't squeeze in. Any five of the names in this paragraph would have been a great list of nominees in previous years. They are all runner-ups to the following gentlemen….

 

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One of the best actors of the 2000s hasn't given a performance like Up in the Air in years. In fact, the on-screen persona that Clooney has developed over his career only serves the emotional impact of a man reaching a life crossroads on his way to ten million frequent flyer miles. Clooney has played such controlled, bottled-up characters that it only adds to the impact of the vulnerability he brings to Ryan Bingham, but Up in the Air is not a typical tale of self-discovery. What director Jason Reitman does so well with the film is avoid melodrama, allowing the small steps taken by Bingham to register subtly across Clooney's face. The final scenes have a remarkable emotional power and it's all there in Clooney's eyes as he comes to terms with the fact that a life without any expectations or plans leads nowhere. It’s arguably career-best work.

 

The regular romantic comedy star displays a stunning depth of emotion in just the first few scenes of A Single Man. George Falconer is a man suffering through unbelievable pain on a daily basis and he has decided that he doesn't want to wake up tomorrow. Completely unable to get over the death of his lover (and his inability to even express that grief as he's still in the closet and his partner's family won't even let him attend the funeral), George is a shattered man. He's "single" because he has retreated into his own depression, espousing that others, especially his students, should refuse to live a life in fear, and yet, in many ways, doing so himself. When life can take away what matters to you the most in the blink of an eye, how do we go on? A Single Man, a film that we will write about more in a full review later, is a complex film in that it can be looked at as a very deep philosophical examination of the fragility of life or it can simply be viewed as a devastating character study of loss. Firth works in both films, understanding the overall poetry of the piece but always keeping George tragically human and relatable.

 

The second-best Lead Actor performance of the year comes from a young man who has displayed the potential to give such a memorable turn in films like Dahmer and shows like The Unusuals but who never had the stage or the spotlight in which to shine. One of the smartest decisions made by Kathryn Bigelow, who deserves an Oscar for Best Director, was when she cast Renner. Very few actors understand how to make a character like Sgt. James three-dimensional. The role of a hothead bomb specialist would have been an easy part for so many actors to turn into a cliché but Renner never strikes an unbelievable note. From the very beginning, Sgt. James feels genuine, a man who feels comfortable only when he's on the clock, working to save his life and those around him. Hopefully, The Hurt Locker will open the door for more quality roles for Rennner. I have a feeling he'll be back in the spotlight and back on this list (and Oscar's) before the end of the next decade. Probably even before the halfway point.

 

With a career of great choices and some of the most consistent work of the last decade, Sam Rockwell has become one of the best actors of his generation and he gives the best performance of his career in the fantastic and underrated Moon, a film that absolutely deserved to be a bigger part of the year-end conversation of the best of 2009. Rockwell stars in what is essentially a one-man show, playing distinctly different roles (just see the movie, it's hard to explain) and bringing humanity to a genre often bereft of it. Duncan Jones' Moon is a daring, complex drama about fears of age and obsolescence that just happens to take place somewhere other than Earth. It will almost certainly become a beloved cult hit on DVD and Blu-ray and a large part of that is due to the amazing work by Rockwell, the best performance from what was clearly the genre that will define 2009.

 

The best thing that could happen in the movie industry in early 2010 would be for Jeff Bridges to finally get an Oscar. The man has been the most underrated actor working for the last quarter-century, an actor who deserved more Oscar consideration for Tucker, The Fisher King, Fearless, and arguably even The Big Lebowski. It took way too long but actors as good as Bridges almost always find that one career-encapsulating role eventually. Thank God Crazy Heart didn't get offered to another actor because none of them would have brought the same gritty realism to the role of a man who learns a tough lesson about fame and forgiveness when his alcoholism gets in the way of both. Like a lot of the truly great performances, even an actor as recognizable as Bridges, playing a character arguably similar to The Dude, completely disappears almost immediately into the running time of Crazy Heart. He becomes Bad Blake, as he has become so many fascinating characters in the past. He'll finally get his Oscar. And he'll deserve it.

 

The list may not be as long as the one for Best Actor but the quality at the top is just as remarkable. What I find most intriguing about the list of Best Actress performances from 2009 is the blending of new faces on the list including a few names in the final five and runner-ups like Paulina Gaitan (Sin Nombre), Jess Weixler (Alexander the Last), and Sasha Grey (The Girlfriend Experience) with more recognizable stars like Gwyneth Paltrow (Two Lovers), Charlotte Gainsbourg (Antichrist), Amy Adams (Sunshine Cleaning), Saoirse Ronan (The Lovely Bones), Maggie Gyllenhaal (Crazy Heart), and Penélope Cruz (Broken Embraces). And then there's the most recognizable face of all, arguably the best actress that ever lived and the Meryl Streep one-two punch of Julie & Julia and It's Complicated. Neither performance is strong enough to crack the top five for me but both will add to the tapestry of great characters on her already amazing resume. These five were just a bit better.

Working from one of the best screenplays of the year and under the direction of a filmmaker (writer/director Jane Campion) who recognized the power of the poetry in the story of Fanny Brawne and John Keats, Abbie Cornish gives an emotionally raw and moving performance that has been relatively snubbed during awards season. Cornish gives one of the most three-dimensional performances of the year, bringing to life Brawne's amazing blend of innocence, confidence, passion, and purity. The highest praise I can pay to Cornish, or perhaps any performer in a piece like Bright Star, is that I honestly started to care about her character. And when she's emotionally shattered in the final act of the film, I was emotional not because I knew what she felt or related it to my own life but because I cared that this woman was feeling so much heartbreak. To create that genuine a reaction in a moviegoer is what any actor or actress should try and accomplish. There was only one performance better than Cornish's in all of 2009 and I can’t wait to see what this talented young lady does next.

 

Always one of the more interesting performers in her era of Saturday Night Live, I had a sneaking suspicion that Maya Rudolph was capable of making the jump to dramatically-tinged comedies like Away We Go. I have significant problems with a lot of Away We Go, including the script and nearly all of the supporting performances, but every single decision made by Rudolph makes those easier to overlook. In a film of exaggerated stereotypes, Rudolph grounds her impending mother in a remarkable humanity. When I think about Away We Go, it's Maya’s face, the emotion that it both hides and what it displays in the film's remarkable final scene that I most vividly remember.

 

The momentum for Precious seems to have scaled back to a more reasonable and appropriate level but let's not allow that to stop the praise for what is easily the best thing about the film, the lead performance by Gabourey Sidibe. The complaints about Precious – most of which come from the belief that it's too exaggerated and unrealistic – are off-set for me by what Sidibe does with her character. You can watch this stolid, overweight, emotionally bottled young woman come out of her shell as she realizes that not everyone in a position of control is out to hurt her. Precious is a girl who has been abused to the point of distrust of everyone and it's crucial to the arc of the film that each new encounter with an authority figure – teacher, welfare worker, nurse – slowly brings her to the realization that she can take control of her adult life and leave the awful one she had as a child behind. Sidibe nails every single emotional beat. Almost the entirety of what I like about Precious can be traced back to a decision made by Sidibe.

 

Arguably the most daring performance of the year was in probably the least-viewed film of this entire feature. Isn't it remarkable that a recent Oscar winner can do such amazing work shortly thereafter but if it doesn't have the right producer, studio, or co-star, no one will see it? Julia isn't a perfect film – it stretches on too long and somewhat falls apart in the final act – but Tilda Swinton's work in the film is flawless. She fearlessly puts herself on the line playing a woman who not only doesn't have her sh*t together but can barely remember the last time she did. Julia is an alcoholic with questionable moral values who has turned self-pity into an art form. She always blames the world for not giving her a break, and when she sees what she thinks is her chance at happiness, she makes some very bad decisions. Refusing to play Julia as a redemption story, Swinton never asks you to understand or like this woman, merely to believe her. And you do.

 

Very few performances are compared to Audrey Hepburn's debut in Breakfast at Tiffany's and fewer still actually deserve the comparison. Carey Mulligan gives one of the best debut, star-making turns in the history of movies in An Education. The entire ensemble of Lone Scherfig's film deserves praise but it's Mulligan's choices that drive the film and every single one that she makes isn't just the right one, it's a better one than most actresses would have considered. The overall character choice that distinguishes Mulligan's performance is that she refuses to play Jenny as a standard naive ingénue. She's not some wide-eyed girl who gets seduced by an older man. She's a smart, charismatic, beautiful young lady who falls for David because she knows she's destined for something better than the boring kid down the street. It's tough to play a character that's been written as lovingly as Nick Hornby wrote Jenny but Mulligan was not only up to the challenge, she delivered a performance as notable as any in 2009. Every few years, a star is truly born. This was one of those years.