Do many-voiced ensemble movies generally have a most-important characetter?

Somebody who's got good thoughts on Sin City please weigh-in?

It's actually kind of a structural necessity, actually, for books or movies or whatever else. You can sustain evenness for the whole thing, but there comes this point in plotting a climax and resolution where it tends to become apparent where your focus is, even if it's in something as subtle as, well, who gets the last word. Something comes up where you have to give the thing a bit of shape, and when you do that, you wind up giving hints about where you think the spine might be.

(Alternately there are self-conscious "it's all equal" endings: say, four equally-weighted characters all converge in the town square and are swept up in the riot, oh the sea of humanity etc. -- but that takes something pretty formal to pull off, and it only really works if the thing is kinda symbolic or allegorical and not actually about the individual characters-as-characters.)

Ha: it's like when you get to pick your character in a video game, and none of the characters are necessarily given precedence over one another, but there's one obvious normal-looking boy-character, and you know that's the "main" one, the "plain" one.

Sin City is slightly-different because it's less of a woven ensemble and more just episodes. Also I don't remember it that clearly. But the arc and the timeline make the whole thing read as the story of Bruce Willis's character, in the end; he bookends. (Well, Josh Hartness bookends, really, but that's just intro and outro.)

I would say Mickey Rourke's character was the most memorable. I don't know if it was intentionally structured that way or if that's just something related to the acting, makeup and all of that.

That's eloquently stated, and much in line with what I'm thinking. I'm coming to see that it's common for the 'scheme' or 'about' or 'theme' of an ensemble story to be vocalized as the sort-of agglomeration of all the different threads, but the focalization to rest in the plight/plot/arc of a single character.

I don't remember Short Cuts that well (though I've seen it a dozen times in the past five years), but in my head the Lily Tomlin / Bruce Davison story is very much the one that gives the piece its emotional center. I wonder how emotional resonance plays into determination of the structural center?

nabisco otm on most of that stuff. sin city's not an ensemble film at all really in the way you mean; the episodes all have pretty clear protagonists.

is the answer to this question the most un-inflected character, the one you're supposed to identify with? like what nabisco said about the "plain" video game character?

the funny thing is that clive owen probably comes closest to that in gosford park!! (funny only if you've seen the movie)

Don Cheadle in Crash?

Yeah, there are issues of plainness and identification. I'll put it his way: if someone makes a film in which the main characters are a black city teenager, a middle-aged immigrant woman, a gay man in a wheelchair, and a twenty-something white guy, you can make pretty safe bets that the last of those will wind up being the structural center.

Alternately there's "moral" plainness -- the character you identify with because he/she is basically decent and standup, whereas the others are flawed variants whose problems and reactions you're not expected to empathize with quite as much.