Forest Fire

Forest Whitaker looks all wrong for a movie star. He's huge and bulbous, and that lazy left eyelid gives him a sleepy air that his laid-back screen presence does nothing to dissipate. When one first sees him, loitering in the background of movies like Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Platoon, The Color of Money, and Good Morning, Vietnam, one scarcely notices him at all—he seems big and slow and dismissible. But Whitaker is a resource moviemakers don't like to waste, and when they finally pull him into the foreground, you see why: he can build menace and ingratiating humor into a single line, can push a character from stifling shyness to dangerous shrewdness within a beat. During most of his six-year acting career, he's specialized in gentle giants, but now he's found his plummiest role as a ferocious one. Starring in Bird, Clint Eastwood's impressive biography of Charlie Parker, Whitaker portrays the seminal bebop saxophonist as a rueful Faustian genius, a night creature all too aware that he has traded his soul—to heroin, not the Devil—for the talent that will transform American music forever.