Leo DiCaprio has never been a favorite actor of mine. To me, he has always straddled between uninvolved "star" acting and actually absorbed-in-the-character, focused method acting. Still, most child stars stop maturing as actors by their first hit movie. Some are damned by an early fame (i.e. Jake Lloyd - the little Anakin in "Star Wars", McCauley Culkin, the kid from "Jerry MacGuire"). Leo has gotten more involved in the craft and discipline than any of his ilk. He has slowly forged a thespianic identity for himself, instead of leaning on his natural charisma to carry his performances. Occasionally, he has even been faced with a major task. In Gangs of New York, he shared the screen with Daniel Day-Lewis, a master. In The Departed, he had to battle for position and attention with Jack Nicholson, while granted a lazy Jack Nicholson. So, even if something about him doesn't quite do it for me, I can still appreciate how far he's come and the quality of his production.

1) "The Wolf of Wall Street"

DiCaprio is required to break the fourth wall constantly in this movie, and while he could easily have fallen back on what I described above as his "natural charisma", he actually as a character with a damaged charm and nuance of his own. Leo is rarely asked to play a pathetic character. He's like the anti-Steve Buscemi: his characters are almost never slimy (until very recently, which I'll get to later). In this movie, however, he allows us to see him as not only a person repulsive in his character and behavior, but in his appearance. We see him red-faced and frothing at the mouth. We see an ugliness to him that many who swoon for him could not have foreseen as he fights Jonah Hill on the floor. We see him break down, and because the last third of the movie is so similar to Scorsese's "Goodfellas", we get to see how much more emotionally revealing he is than Ray Liotta gets to be in "Wolf".

2) "The Revenant"

This is another completely unfamiliar role for Leo. Yes, he's our hero, but as a hero, he is thinly characterized. This is a major break from form. In "Titanic", for instance, we're introduced to Jack as our hero and are given a big scroll of reasons why he is heroic. In "The Revenant", he's a hero in the sense that he's saving the day and defending the lives of innocent others. In fact, his involvement in the trapping trade could be pinned for his son's death. However, we are forced to sympathize because of how grotesque, paining-to-watch, and righteous his cause is. And talk about ugly. We see his lips chapped raw, his body torn asunder by a grizzly, his hair knotted by grease and the labor of his very long, suffering days. That is an incredibly tall task for a heartthrob to arrive at.

3) "Django Unchained"

There's a thread here. For the third time in as many movies, Leo's character does not endear himself to us in the way a Jack or a Howard Hughes or a Gatsby might. Sure, for "The Revenant", we are at least in his corner, and to some extent, we even root Jordan Belfort simply because he is an engaging narrator. But none of these characters are beloved. In Django, he does a great job of playing Calvin Candie as a casual racist. The sophistication he carries himself with is almost that much more crass than his core beliefs are. It is almost creepier that he seems to take the idea that slaves are inherently inferior as something that should go without saying. Because he plays this very self-composed monster so well, when he shatters that composure with a flash of anger - like during the monologue where he breaks a glass with his hand - it draws you in in a big way.