I don't care who won the Oscar or the Golden Globe this year....the best performance by an Actor in a 2011 film was Michael Shannon in TAKE SHELTER. He plays Curtis, a 35 year old man living in Ohio with his wife and hearing impaired daughter. Curtis has a mother who at the age of 30 was institutionalized for schizophrenia and he has spent the last 25 years of his life feeling ashamed of her and fearful that the recent dreams and hallucinations that he's been having mean that he is slipping down the same rabbit hole. He begins seeing visions of storms with the impact of something out of Revelations. So he begins spending all of the money they have and money they don't have to build a tornado shelter in their back yard. Jessica Chastain plays Curtis' wife and shows again that she just might be this generation's Meryl. Kathy Baker has a beautiful cameo as Curtis' mother. But the movie belongs to Michael Shannon. It is inconceivable to me that he was completely overlooked for the major awards in 2011. His performance is masterful in it's subtlety when so many lesser actors would have simply "overdone" it. TAKE SHELTER is not a fun movie, by any means. It is unsettling and filled with an ominous sense of dread. But it is absolutely not to be missed. This one will stick with me.
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