3. Allie Fox - The Mosquito Coast (1986)
Allie Fox is likely the darkest and most atypical role that Ford has ever played, and it's a strange coincidence that one of his finest, most successful performances is wrapped inside of a film that is, itself, not entirely successful. Screenwriter Paul Schrader and director Peter Weir certainly bit off a task when they set out to adapt Paul Theroux's novel about the paranoid corruption of the American dream. In fact, there's so much hypnotic poetry in Theroux's work that at times it hovers between satire and magical realism; converting that kind of prose in the vein of a mostly realistic and very literal film ultimately flattened some of its power. There's one arena where this wasn't the case; Ford's Fox, an idealistic inventor that abandons an America he sees as sinking in its own excesses to head into the jungles of the fictitious Mosquitia and build his own little haven, selling the natives there on his own extravagant contraptions. Ford regularly plays characters who are simply in the process of being, and then suggests subtle gradual change. Fox is a guy who's headed to cuckoo-land on the crazy train, even though he's not always aware of it. If you need to see an outsized, colorful turn in order to be reminded that Ford can be a terrific actor, then Mosquito Coast is the one for you. Ford runs the character through all perceivable facets; the man as he sees himself in his own delusional mind, the man as his family sees him, and the man as the world he's rejected sees him. There's a sinister undercurrent of dread that courses through this guy, but its always softened by Ford's reminders that Fox still loves and wants to do right by his family, even if they are always coming in second to his prideful vanity.