Best Villains of All Time: Stansfield in Léon: The Professional (1994)
Gary Oldman’s big bad character might not be the most developed, but boy is he entertaining.
That slack-jawed, tilted-eyebrow expression. The periodic and visceral, almost wet sounding neck cracking. The unexplained green-and-yellow pills. The tan suit. The shaking, fidgeting, spasming, groaning Gary Oldman plays an unbelievable character in Big, Bad Norman Stansfield.
A brown dress shoe steps loosely into a tiled hallway. A pair of stubby, white hands opens a small and purple velvet-lined pillbox, inside of which five green and yellow pills are snugly packed. Oldman places one in his mouth and gyrates back, his eyes pointed towards the sky and his facial and body language similar to that of someone who’s rolling super hard on molly. His teeth gnash, his face gets red, and forehead veins bulge. His eyes get clear, and his faces relaxes — it looks like hes experiencing something divine. After a few seconds of writhing and cracking his neck, he slowly rolls his head back down and calmly, expressionlessly, says straight to the camera, “I like these quiet little moments before the storm. I reminds me of Beethoven”.
We first meet drug kingpin and medium-level gangboss Norman Stansfield in connection to Matilda’s father (Michael Baladucco), a cog in Stansfield’s operation. Stansfield confronts Matilda’s father about a certain delivery being light — potentially accusing Matilda’s father or skimming some off the top (I mean, who among us hasn’t). He says Matilda’s dad’s got until noon the next day to come up with something. Our first look at Stan shows us a squirmy, sweaty weirdo — but his energy is like that of a rabid dog off the leash. Matilda’s dad doesn’t seem too freaked out by this predicament — things are normal until the next day, when Stansfield climbs up their dingy apartment stairs, busts into the family’s apartment and murders everyone inside-including a 4-year old child.
It’s this scene where the audience gets a good look at Léon’s main antagonist. Breathy speech rambling about Beethoven, wagging a finger in their air to a nonexistent song, Stansfield says to his henchman, “I’m gonna play you something”, cocks the shotgun, and fires through the family’s door. Stansfield moves swiftly through the apartment, his jaw hanging open, gunning down indiscriminately. His movements become light and dance-like as he moves into the bathroom to murder the woman of the house (Ellen Greene). His violence is frilly and pleasurable — Stansfield throwing pots and pans around in the kitchen and miming playing violin along to the (presumable) tune in his head is menacing, and he’s the only character in this scene (including his gang of thugs) not absolutely shitting their pants.
Oldman’s character, aside from murdering a family in cold blood and wearing a tan suit, is terrifying because he’s so unpredictable. Sniffing people mid-convo, incoherent ramblings, and weird body movements are all ways that Stansfield throws norms to the wind in favor of doing whatever le fuck he wants to. Stansfield treats the world like it’s his in totality — which is why we start to get the feeling as Léon progresses that Léon and Matilda are avoiding an inevitable. Moreso, Stansfield is utterly ridiculous — his weirdness borders on almost comical, buy is anchored more towards unsettling when combined with the intense violence he commits. The placing of silliness and insanity so adjacent makes Oldman’s character truly unique — kind of like a Joker situation, but less comical (ha ha). Despite oozing pure rage and filling every scene with uneasiness, Oldman’s Stansfield is only featured opposite the protagonists- he doesn’t stand alone and isn’t developed beyond his connection to Matilda.
But I would argue: Stansfield doesn’t really need development. A one-dimensional Stansfield works perfectly in Léon, because the main focus of the film is not the external conflict of Stansfield’s take-no-prisoners warpath — it’s Matilda and Léon’s strange, endearing, and tenderly sad relationship. Stansfield is a simple antagonist for the plot — as such, it’s pretty appropriate that Oldman’s character is relegated to “villain” and not much else. It would take away from the entire idea, the heart, of the movie if runtime was taken up by Stans chilling at home or buying more ̶E̶c̶s̶t̶a̶s̶y̶ pills.
Stansfield’s one-dimensionality, truly, enhances his villain. The scariest bad guys are the ones you can’t identify with, the ones you can’t humanize, the ones that — physically or metaphorically — hide in the shadows. The Blair Witch isn’t shown one time during The Blair Witch Project (1999) and she’s one of the most iconically scary Big Bads of all time (people like to write edgy thinkpieces about how TBWP isn’t scary but like ? They literally get lost in the woods and then murdered. What the fuck is “not scary” about that??). The fact that Stanfield is a brutal murderer with a seemingly unbridled bloodlust and a volatile temper makes him a purely malevolent force, which matches the harshness of the film’s overall reality. Just the name “Stansfield”. Unexplained. By not explaining details or giving us a back story, Léon: The Professional (1994) forces us to accept that Stansfield is real, and gives his evil a feeling of omnipotence in reality. His ambiguity moves him beyond a fictive individual, and suggests that Stansfields abound.
