Happy Birthday Naomi Watts

Naomi Watts. David Lynch put her on the map, and she did not forget that fact, appearing in a 50 minute film he made, called "Rabbits." Some of this footage was later used in Inland Empire. She, along with Laura Harring, voiced one of the rabbits in this sequence (Is she the one sitting or standing?):


When she is upset or in anguish, few actresses come off as explosively wound up (Hope Davis is good at playing tightly wound women on the verge of hysteria too).

As Diane Selwyn, in Mulholland Dr., the ratty robe she wears precisely captures a tangible form of the frayed nerves of her psyche. Even more frayed are her nerves in 21 Grams, where she seems to be carrying around a ticking time bomb in her expression wherever she goes:


...her haggard features lighted so as to seem even paler than usual, damages to her soul gradually surfacing in her face. She scowls a lot, I've noticed, and when she does, you want to cross to the other side of the street to avoid it. She's a fierce actress, and serious, some might say too serious, as if she is displaying pretense to a gravity that she has not earned yet. Though I would not dismiss that objection immediately, I would tell someone dubious of Watts to watch her in several different films (which would not be a hardhsip, considering the sheer number of quality films she consistently seeks out to appear in).

Mulholland Dr. is one of my all-time favorites. I love The Assassination of Richard Nixon, a film her character is in very little. She plays the ex-wife of Sam Bicke (Sean Penn), the pitiable salesman whose deteriorating sanity and repeatedly trampled self-esteem conspire over the course of the film to produce an unhinged, cockamamie plot to fly a plane into the White House. Her character is vital in establishing the momentum of Bicke's despair, and Naomi Watts is devastating in the way she slights her ex-husband, disgusted by his whiny ineffectualism and trying, with less and less patience, to express her utter disinterest in his companionship, despite the fact that they share two children. Naomi Watts is one of those women who could crush a man with one dismissive glance, and her performance mixed with Penn's pathological neediness produces riveting and devastating moments of botched social interactions.

She has worked with three of my very favorite film directors (Lynch, Cronenberg, Haneke), and has a body of work that is unmatched in its commitment to scouting auteurs and in laboring to create substantive work. You don't see her doing Revlon commercials like Julianne Moore and Halle Berry or L'Oreal commercials like Penelope Cruz or perfume ads like Nicole Kidman. She is an artist, not a product. That puts her ahead of those four, as well as many of the rest of the actresses working in film currently.