Yeesh. You lost me on this one.
Tell me how someone like John Preston wasn't hollow and one-dimensional? He was, thanks to drugs, devoid of all emotion. He couldn't feel anything. He couldn't react to anything. He had to be a rigid and soulless.
Or what about good old Patrick Bateman? A yuppie so bored with life that he loses his humanity, he loses any emotional core he could possibly have and instead turns to murder and psychopathic acts to gain some remnant of human feeling.
Trevor Resnik? A man who's repressed guilt strips him of all other emotions save for mental, emotional, and physical exhaustion. He forgets his guilt, blocks it out, and is left with nothing but a hollow nothingness. He can't sleep because he can't feel, because he can't give himself peace.
Even Batman - where Bale does exhibit the most emotion - is, through most of the film, emotionally repressed and has a forced emotional hollowness in hopes of escaping the pain of the loss of his parents.
Notice the
similarity between this characters? With all of them, Bale didn't have to breath any life into them. Because they are so emotionally troubled, he can play them as if...they're not real. As if they have no soul, no deep emotional backing.
Great actors, talented actors, breath life into characters. Interject emotion and passion and give their characters a soul. They might not always do this. Some characters are soullness and need to be played as such. But they can do it. Maybe Bale can do it too, I don't know. But why on earth would he continue to play the exact same archetype if he could interject emotion into a character? What does that say about his range as an actor if he is, essentially, playing the same character over and over again in different scenarios and scripts?
