Nice Guys of Filmland #1-2
I’ve done lists in the past that concentrate on people who do violence and murder: The 50 Biggest Movie Badasses (on dear departed Vox, possibly due for revival), Dangerous Bitches (on hiatus, possibly forever), TV Badasses (lying fallow for now), but here’s a different thing: The Nicest Guys in the Movies, by which I mean the characters, not the actors. The list will go until it’s over, and, as I say every time but nobody ever listens, these are in no particular order. Shall we begin?
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1. Fezzik (Andre the Giant)—The Princess Bride
Sure, the first time you see him, he’s helping to kidnap a woman, and then later he tries to kill the hero. But he never really seems into it, and it’s later revealed that he is in fact the stereotypical gentle giant, who fell into a life of thuggery because there are so few opportunities for a huge, slow-witted man. But he has hidden facets: he loves to make rhymes, for instance, and he is warm-hearted and generous by nature when he doesn’t have a shrill little Sicilian man telling him what to do. This is Andre the Giant’s only significant film role, but so much of the man’s simple charm shows through in his admittedly amateurish performance that you can’t help but fall in love with this lumbering teddy bear.
Nicest moments: Catching Buttercup when she leaps at the end: “Hello, lady,” challenging The Man in Black to a proper hand-to-hand duel because ambushing him didn’t seem “sportsmanlike”, rhyming with Inigo.
2. Ned Plimpton (Owen Wilson)—The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
Ned is a lost little boy, so desperate for a male role-model that he latches onto a sonofabitch like Steve Zissou, a down-at-his-heels once-famous oceanographer who had a relationship with Ned’s mother years ago. When Steve offers him a spot on his crew, Ned takes a leave of absense from his pilot job and joins his maybe-father. Zissou and Ned slowly form a bond over the course of the movie, even though neither one really believes they are related. In fact, (SPOILERS) it is revealed that Zissou is infertile. Ned screws up, he lets pirates board the ship because he’s busy romancing Cate Blanchett’s super-cute (and pregnant) reporter, and he clashes with Willem Dafoe’s Zissou-worshipping first mate, but he remains a likeable, simple, nice guy throughout. When (SPOILERS) Ned dies, in the obligatory Wes Anderson moment of senseless tragedy, the movie feels his loss in a major way, and Steve Zissou himself is changed, for the good, possibly forever. Owen Wilson himself plays against type as this easy-going southern gentleman with not a hint of irony about him, and in doing so creates one of the sweetest and plain nicest characters in the Anderson stable.
Nicest moments: Being read to by the reporter, helping design the new Zissou flag, convincing Zissou to keep going when he’s ready to give up, giving Jane a necklace made with dental floss.


