The Essentials: The 5 Best Denzel Washington Performances

Sometimes, winning an Oscar seems to change things for an actor. Look at Al Pacino, who’s barely taken anything worth his time since he won for “Scent of a Woman” in 1992, or Kevin Spacey, who starred in a string of dull would-be-heartwarmers after picking up his gold for “American Beauty.” And you could argue the same for Denzel Washington. He’s irrefutably one of the most charismatic screen presences around, with even more gravitas than ever before as he closes on his 60s. But since he won Best Actor from the Academy for “Training Day,” his film roles seem to have been a variation on a theme; thrillers that sometimes work, sometimes don’t, but rarely leave you reeling the way his best work does, with his real energy seemingly reserved for directing work or stage performances like “Julius Caesar” and “Fences” (the latter of which won him a Tony).

“Safe House,” which opens today, is another one of those. He’s entertaining to watch, to be sure, but it’s a meld of most of what he’s done in the last decade. Nevertheless, he’s still the best thing in it, and if nothing else, it served as a reminder of the truly electric turns he’s given over the years. Below, we’ve picked out five of our favorite Denzel performances from across his 25-year big-screen career. Let us know your favorites in the comments section. And hopefully, we’ll see something a little out of the ordinary later in the year when Washington stars as a substance-abusing airline pilot in Robert Zemeckis‘  drama “Flight.”

“Cry Freedom” (1987)
Let’s be honest, “Cry Freedom” is no great shakes. It’s well-meaning enough that it’s hard to dislike, but it’s the model of the black-person’s-struggle-told-through-white-eyes sub-genre, the birth of everything Ed Zwick‘s ever made, and the film suffers for placing so much emphasis on Kevin Kline‘s journalist (although Kline is strong), and the second half suffers for the absence of Steve Biko. But that’s a testament to the fire of Denzel Washington‘s performance in the film. Plucked from hospital drama “St. Elsewhere,” on which he’d been a regular for nearly five years, to play the youthful South African civil rights activist, Washington won his first Best Supporting Actor nomination. There’s a quiet, calm control to him, a passionate decency, and Washington somehow infuses a sense of internal life, even if director Richard Attenborough never lets us see Biko except through the eyes of Donald Woods (Kline). It was the first real demonstration of his pure, natural charisma, the kind that could make a man like Biko a leader, and a man like Washington a star, and that the second half of the film feels so flat is down to his absence (so much so that Attenborough cuts in flashbacks of Biko throughout).