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Chris Cooper could have been forgiven for thinking that 2003 would be his year, since that's when he won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Adaptation. and brought his trademark blend of secret sensitivity and un-showy machismo to yet another Oscar contender, Seabiscuit. But neither the role he'd won an award for nor the one he may have thought would earn him his next caused him to stick in the public mind.

And then 2004 probably looked pretty good, too, as he took the role of Dickie Pilager in Silver City. Not only did it re-team Cooper with his frequent director John Sayles, but the movie -- a satire about a Colorado gubernatorial race -- was coming out just before the hotly contested U.S. Presidential election and Cooper was playing an extremely thinly veiled version of George W. Bush. But Silver City gave Cooper's career less of a bump than Kerry got after the Democratic convention.Looking back now, the idea that anyone could honestly believe that a one-sided indie film even liberals found heavy-handed, playing in fewer theatres than there were crooked voting machines in any one county in Ohio, could have affected the outcome of the election. But then, back then, we also thought the election was "hotly contested" and not "rigged." It was a simpler time.

But did our Coop give up? No: latter-day Marlboro Men don't do that. But Cooper also didn't attempt to raise his profile -- make 2005 his year, at last -- by getting himself cast in bigger, showier roles; you can't imagine him on the phone with his agent demanding, "Where's my Sideways?" No, Cooper just kept plugging away, as he's been doing since he made his feature debut in Sayles's Matewan, some twenty-two years ago: he landed smallish but crucial character roles in Capote (as a Kansas lawman), Jarhead (as a straight-talkin' colonel in the first Gulf War), and in the upcoming Syriana (as...we're not sure, though he's probably going to be great in it; the movie's "oil is running out!" premise requires us to watch the trailer through our fingers while leaving a small, warm puddle under our cinema seats).

The fact is that it may never "Chris Cooper's year" in the way that 2002 was John C. Reilly's, because the reason we need a Chris Cooper is that some American men are still the strong, silent type, and someone needs to play them. A classic Cooper role finds the man working in uniform (so many Army guys), on the beat (cops aplenty), or in a stable (Seabiscuit + The Horse Whisperer = Someone's trying to improve his Q rating in the 9-14-year-old girl demographic). Cooper is so strong and silent that one of his most memorable roles -- as retired Col. Frank Fitts in American Beauty -- hardly required him to speak at all, and even then he managed to out-act the supremely annoying Kevin Spacey. We're still not entirely sure what was going on in that movie -- just because a sweater's hideously ugly doesn't mean you want to take the time and effort to unravel it -- but Chris Cooper got the thankless task of portraying a homophobe-cum-homosexual-cum-murderer and committed to it whole-heartedly, which is more than many movie stars have done with much less objectionable roles, John Cusack.

The downside of playing a strong, silent type is that screenwriters seldom give you a big old showcase scene you can use as your Oscar clip later -- and sure enough, when Charlie Kaufman did, Cooper went ahead and won that Oscar, even though few people who'd seen both would say that his Adaptation. performance was better than the much more understated one he gave in Lone Star. And when it comes down to it, as much as we enjoyed Cooper's John Laroche, we're grateful that Cooper's given us twenty Sam Deedses to counter-balance it. Anyone can play a toothless eccentric, but the graceful, self-assured authority of a decent man is tougher to sell. Horses know if you're faking that shit, and Chris Cooper never is.

Plus, the guy's got as many Oscars as he's had nominations. Meryl Streep wishes she had that batting average.