Happy Birthday Kate Winslet

I like to make lists. If you also find yourself compulsively fabricating lists of varying arbitrary things, then you will forgive me when I say that from maybe third grade on, I'd make lists of my favorite films, my favorite books, my favorite presidents. I'd make lists simply to make lists. It became an end in and of itself. One of the lists I would revise again and again over the years was my list of favorite actors (male). When I was in third grade, I loved The Fugitive (1993). My exclusive enthusiasm for The Fugitive replaced the previous champion of my enthusiasm, Indiana Jones and my #1 favorite actor, Harrison Ford, lost the title to Tommy Lee Jones. This list fluctuated every year, and Morgan Freeman, Gene Hackman, Tommy Lee Jones, Harrison Ford, Ian McShane (because of Jesus of Nazareth), Laurence Fishburne and Ben Kingsley (because of Searching for Bobby Fischer), Samuel L. Jackson (because of Jurassic Park) would rotate around and around; Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro would be added, as would Al Pacino, Kevin Spacey, and Gary Oldman. Sometimes when sharing this list with my parents, my mother would ask, "Do you have any favorite actresses?" And I didn't have an answer. It simply hadn't occured to me to pay attention to them. As a third, fourth, and fifth grader, my rudimentary appreciation of the dramatis personae was restricted to the men I idolized. The actresses were an afterthought, overshadowed.

I continued to make lists. Eventually I did make a list of Favorite Actresses, but it was only populated by 4 or 5 names, whereas my Favorite Actor list had 40, 50 names. Even to me this moment sounds woefully tardy in arriving, but it was not until 2006, yes 2006, that I finally witnessed a female character that could hold the same platonic fascination for me as the most riveting male cinematic characters. The character's name was, I believe, Sarah, from Todd Field's second film Little Children, and she was played by Kate Winslet, who I had seen in Titanic and a couple other things. But it was not that Kate Winslet was devoid of the same fascinating attributes that held me with this particular character in those other performances where I had watched her without sitting upright; they were there, only casting her in the very suitable role of a former academic (Sarah, we learn, had been working on a doctorate in English when she had to postpone it for wifedom and motherhood) had crystallized them: a woman of profound character, containing universes of substance, highly intelligent without being peculiar, carrying an intrinsic wholesomeness and decency even when being degraded or complicit in prurience.

These are the same qualities I see in my other favorite actresses: you see it in Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett, and Emily Watson. You see it in young Helen Mirren and now. You see it in Monica Vitti and Jeanne Moreau. Substance. Before lust, there is admiration, sympathy, identification. If the first inclination upon seeing an actress is lust, then you have not properly seen her soul, seen her as a person. She is nothing more than a base stimulus - I lust after vapid ciphers as much as the next guy, Megan Fox for example, but lust is the first and only reaction I have towards her, as she shows very little evidence of having what could be considered "a soul." Think about this: Jessica Alba, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Jessica Simpson, Jessica Biel, Olivia Wilde, Charisma Carpenter, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Malin Akerman, Elisha Cuthbert, Evangeline Lilly, Elisha Dushku, Alyssa Milano. These women, some of them even peers of Kate Winslet, are totally interchangeable: generic starlets.

So for a young actress to distinguish herself even slightly is a rather difficult task. That is another reason why all of those women previously mentioned blend together: they all seem young. Kate Winslet (who turns 33 today), like Cate Blanchett (39), has a personality that seems decades older than the youthful age where she resides. I think such individuals are referred to as "Old Souls."


The one role she is most celebrated for is one that I think is sort of unflattering to this conception I have of her: her performance as Clementine in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). She is great in it, but Clementine is a child compared to Sarah in Little Children or Ophelia in Hamlet or Maddy in Quills. Clementine is short-sighted, irrational, quick-tempered, immature, vindictive. She is also often adorable, as when she digs through her purse while slunk on a seat on the train after being exasperated by Joel's (Jim Carrey) repeating of the word "nice." I'm not saying Clementine is a bad character; quite the contrary - that's the way the character must be for the good of the film. But someone who sees her as Clementine and is not acquainted with the rest of Winslet's body of work will have no impression of the elegance and maturity so crucial to the power and gravity of her presence onscreen.

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.

Happy Birthday Edie Falco

She is a chameleon and a vessel: drop her into any diseased milieu and she’ll absorb it like a sponge, her face manifesting pathologies unique to that broken atmosphere. Whether it be the smothering constant danger of the Oswald Correctional Facility or the banal sleaze and empty suburban malaise of New Jersey, Edie Falco is a crucible of anxieties and pathos. She was the standout actress on HBO's very first series, Oz, a steely female presence that is the antithesis of the women on HBO's second series, Sex & the City.

As Corrections Officer Diane Wittlesey, she lives in a sterile Plexiglas subculture of feral, unpredictably lethal inmates. As Wittlesey, her face is as taut and plain and hard as the stretched top of a water drum, while her eyes, feverishly alert, dart in the stone of her face, the paranoid eyes themselves prisoners of her hard vigilant expression. This actress alone, and this character alone already powerfully conveys the claustrophobic frenzy that is the aura of Oz: Seasons 1 and 2. It is also divulged over the course of the first few seasons that she is a divorcee struggling to outrun poverty and, it is not a surprise, as her weary face does not hide her character’s hardscrabble background. This complete and utter lack of glamor is what makes her perfect to play a female prison guard. As Diane Wittlesey, she seemed perfectly at home as the only white female Corrections Officer in Oswald State Penitentiary, her probing face was hard as granite and completely scrubbed of pretty embellishments. She wasn’t a clichéd ballbuster type, either; she was self-effacing in her toughness, a thoroughly layered character, incapable of being insubstantial. People who have only seen her as Carmela Soprano have no idea how much range this woman has.

A character that couldn’t be more the polar opposite of the hyper-alert, ossified Corrections Officer is Carmela Soprano, a spoiled, unfulfilled New Jersey housewife whose face becomes more slack and vacant as her character becomes more used to her materialism and her moral complacency. She’d like to believe she is the unwitting First Lady of the New Jersey criminal empire, but the authority and the poise with which she holds herself in the presence of her husband’s associates’ wives shows, just so subtly, that she knows quite well that she is the Alpha Bitch.

Her first HBO character is often overlooked because of her astonishing work on The Sopranos, but I'm comforted in the knowledge that Carmela Soprano is as rich and complicated as Diane Wittlesey, very likely moreso because we spent twice as much time with Carmela. When thinking about The Sopranos, I often forget how many terrible attributes Carmela has: she is materialistic and has dubious motives when it comes to her relationship with her husband that verge on flat-out gold-digging, but these are trivial considerations when they are being exhibited by someone with as much humanity as Edie Falco. I always forgive her wrongdoings, no matter how selfish or thoughtless. Falco really broke new ground during her time on HBO, resulting in the first truly complex female dramatic television character. In fact, she is the first actress to ever sweep the top three television awards. In 2000, she received the Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series, The Golden Globe Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Drama Series, and the SAG Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Drama Series, all in the same year for her performance as Carmela Soprano.

HBO has introduced me to many great actresses: Molly Parker and Paula Malcolmson in Deadwood, Polly Walker in Rome, Amy Ryan and Sonja Sohn in The Wire, but Edie Falco is the original HBO actress, and just like Carmela among the gangster housewives of New Jersey, she is #1.

Happy Birthday Frances McDormand

I think everybody agrees that Frances McDormand is great. Even people who don't get all warm and fuzzy when watching Almost Famous. In terms of leaving a powerful cinematic legacy, she's got an ace in her deck: her husband. He has a brother who helps him make films now and again, and occasionally, they bring home to work, and cast her in small parts to make her feel appreciated. She had a tiny little part as Jon Polito's secretary in Miller's Crossing.

But seriously, no matter how many terrible movies she makes with Charlize Theron, she'll always have the one-two-three punch of Blood Simple, Fargo, and The Man Who Wasn't There (all three directed by her husband and his brother - their names escape me).

These three punches would knock out most any other actress who got in the ring with her. She was the relatively uncomplicated heroine in distress in Blood Simple, she had a brief cameo in Raising Arizona and Miller's Crossing, and then played the celebrated character of Officer Marge Gunderson in Fargo. Five years later she appeared in her husband's The Man Who Wasn't There, a brilliant, brilliant undervalued, little-seen film in the Coen oeuvre.

She has done good non-Coen work, such as in Almost Famous, Mississippi Burning, and Wonderboys. As Marge Gunderson, I find her mixture of idiosyncracies amusing every time I revisit Fargo; she is part mother-hen, part Colombo, possessing a cunning unshared by the other police officers and locals in Brainerd. She is also sweet, kind, and fearless in the face of circumstances that are not sweet and kind.

However, she can play a fiery bitch when she wants to, as when she plays the unsatisfied, adulterous manipulator of her taciturn husband in The Man Who Wasn't There: "I hate wops" she says about her own family after her brother's wedding party. I've heard her belligerent performance in the movie Friends with Money steals the show from her fellow actresses, Jennifer Aniston, Joan Cusack, and Catherine Keener. And I've read she is fantastic in Laurel Canyon. I will get around to seeing both films eventually, but, it really doesn't matter, as her MVP status has already been cemented in my mind by her tremendous Coen triumvirate.






Previous "My Favorite Actresses" Birthday Retrospectives:

3. Samantha Morton
2. Uma Thurman
1. Judy Davis

Happy Birthday Samantha Morton

Steven Spielberg's Minority Report (2002) has a scene where Tom Cruise's character has brought Agatha (Samantha Morton) with him to see the proprieter of a futuristic virtual reality entertainment place and when he finds the guy, the guy takes a look at Agatha, stares in disbelief, crosses himself, and kneels in her presence. He recognizes Agatha as one of the 3 PreCogs (precognitives) who serve as the bedrock of the Department of Pre-Crime, who use the PreCogs' visions of future murders to prevent them from happening. The film goes to great lengths to repeat that Agatha is the most powerful of the three, the most gifted, so it is understandable if people of the future would look upon her as a sacred deity. You look at Samantha Morton, head shaved, still not acclimated to being yanked out of her Matrix-like pod, cowering against Cruise's character, those big soulful eyes darting every which way, and it's like she is absorbing all things at once like some sort of superconsciousness. There's something mystical about Samantha Morton that just puts her on a higher level than most other actresses of her generation. She has a numinous alien presence that lends well to playing naïfs, such as Hattie in Sweet and Lowdown (1999) but was also employed for her spooky portrayal of Myra Hindley in HBO's Longford (2006).


It wasn't until I watched Lynne Ramsay's Morvern Callar (2002) that it really hit me how singular a personality she has, a weird aura. I've heard people dismiss Morvern Callar as morbid navel-gazing, but if a character is compelling, I'm willing to watch them.

Morvern Callar, set in Scotland, begins with as grim an opening scene as I've ever witnessed. Morvern (Samantha Morton) is lying on the hardwood floor of her flat. A few feet away is her boyfriend's dead body. He has killed himself. On the computer is a note he left while she was asleep: "It just seemed like the right thing to do."

If the dead body had been the boyfriend of any other female character, this scene would have been nothing special, but because the body is the boyfriend of Morvern, Lynne Ramsay gets to explore the alien reaction of one of the strangest characters in recent memory. Any other girl would have done one of two things: 1)panicked and begun sobbing hysterically or 2) numbly stared at the aftermath in disbelief. Both would dash from the apartment sooner or later to get away from the dead body. What at first appears to be the second reaction reveals itself to be not numbness or disbelief, but a sort of eerie curiosity - she strokes the fresh corpse's back, lies next to it, the red glow of the Christmas tree lights flashing in the dark room. She then methodically opens her presents - her boyfriend has gotten her a cool jacket, and a custom mix tape of songs. She listens to the music on her Walkman while smoking a cigarette. She reads the rest of the suicide note on the computer, where he leaves instructions for her to send a manuscript of his novel to a Book Publisher whose mailing address he has provided. She deletes his name as the author and replaces it with her own. She has done all of this with the dead body lying on the floor. I imagine some people would find this young woman to be a sick individual they'd have no desire to spend time with. This might be sick behavior, but I was fascinated by her reaction, or lack thereof. Morvern may very well be insane, but it is a very quiet insane - she has a preternaturally calm demeanor, and it is especially puzzling in the face of such a cruel tragedy. Other than her boyfriend, Morvern has no one but her good friend Lanna (Kathleen McDermott), who works as a supermarket clerk with her. But even Lanna doesn't know what kind of oddness Morvern is capable of - the girl is in her own timezone.

Samantha Morton is the only person who could've played this role. I spent a lot of time wondering what her character Hattie (who is mute) was thinking in Woody Allen's Sweet and Lowdown (1999). What goes on in this strange creature's head? There is something inscrutable about her lovely face; it's a poker face. That's why she was perfect to play Myra Hindley in Longford where the whole driving force of the movie was whether or not she was telling the truth about not being complicit in the Moors Murders with her serial killer boyfriend, Ian Brady. She can seem so innocent, but the next instant, one can see the glassy-eyed malevolence of a shark. She is awe-inspiring, and holds a mystery that more revered actresses like Cate Blanchett cannot match. And besides her tremendous work in Longford, Jesus' Son (1999), and Sweet and Lowdown, it is of my opinion that the crowning achievement of her 18 year acting career is her confounding performance in Lynne Ramsay's Morvern Callar. Check it out.

Happy Birthday Uma Thurman

As I said last week, I've been inspired by one of my favorite bloggers to maintain a regular feature using my favorite actresses' (or female actors')birthdays as an opportunity to celebrate my obsession with them, and I usually have pretty good reasons to be obsessed with a particular actress, considering that I find 75% of them to be either undistinguished or actively bad. Well, despite not having liked a single movie she's been in without "Directed by Quentin Tarantino" attached to it, I am deeply in love with Uma Thurman.

Disclaimer: I have not seen Hysterical Blindness (2002), Tape (2001), Sweet and Lowdown (1999), Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1993) or The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988).

Her filmography is not great, but generally, if she is in a shitty movie, she is somehow able to transcend the shittiness of the whole enterprise. It could be her otherworldly loveliness, her charming sheepishness (witnessed more from interviews with her than from the characters she plays), her very unusual facial features (you'd never confuse her with anyone else), or maybe it's the way the sun shines down on me and I hear birds chirping and a choir of angels when she smiles and laughs. Ethan Hawke is a fucking idiot.

Anyway, the #1 reason she knocks my socks off is her tour de force performance in Kill Bill: Volume 1 and Kill Bill: Volume 2. Even if you don't like Quentin Tarantino or kung-fu movies or spaghetti westerns or kung-fu movie homages or spaghetti western homages or crazy violent swordfights or pure adrenaline-surging badassery, you have to admit that Uma Thurman is SPEC-TACULAR, like a performance that'll make her a Legend, if she's not one already, at the young age of 38! 38. And she's a fucking Legend. Quentin Tarantino can do that for your career.

Despite Quentin Tarantino's waning credibility among film elitist snobs, I still consider his oeuvre a guilty pleasure of mine, and have yet to see a film by him that I didn't like (Yes, I liked Death Proof). He's as smitten with Ms. Thurman as myself, moreso, and it must either be an immense treat or an endless parade of stifled overtures of affection to work with her, talk to her, stand next to her, breathe the same rose-scented air as her...but somehow he manages to not let the magnetic force of her allure distract him.

Yeah, so, um, wow, she's just exceptionally attractive and sexy and wonderful, but I did not find her to be any of these things when she played Mia Wallace in Pulp Fiction. Mia Wallace is the relatively smug, badly-coiffed, sneering, jaded moll of prodigious gangster Marcellus (Ving Rhames) and is not really likeable. Okay, she is sexy, I suppose, despite the hair, and does warm up to Vincent Vega considerably after getting back home from Jack Rabbit Slim's. She seems untouchable and smells of danger. She is also rather insightful when it comes to the mechanics of social exchanges:



The color of her hair seems to play a large part in the chameleon transformation from icy, wicked bad-girl Mia to lovable, sunny good girl (with bad-girl fighting skills) Beatrix Kiddo. I could totally buy that glaring girl with the dark hair getting mixed up in a lurid fiasco involving a hypodermic needle hanging out of her chest. Beatrix, not so much. Despite being a world-traveled assassin who has sliced off people's arms, legs, heads, and scalps, she is a pretty wholesome gal. I could go on and on about how she holds TWO ENTIRE FILMS on her shoulders, strains every fiber of herself, physically and mentally, to play "The Bride," or how she becomes a walking embodiment of pure awesomeness, an Icon of Cool, or I could just show a wild montage of the phantasmagoric fight sequences and color palettes shimmering from the movie, but instead I'll show you a quiet clip from Volume 1, the moment she first meets Hattori Hanzo (Sonny Chiba) after arriving in Okinawa:



The rolled up sleeves, the pony-tail, the smile, the warmth, the playfulness, the lack of pretension, the eyes, the way Tarantino lights her, this was the moment where I fell in love with Uma Thurman, and drooled like a pervert all over my lap. Now that the DVD is available, I can drool in the privacy of my own home.

Happy Birthday Judy Davis

Inspired by one of my favorite bloggers I've decided to christen a new regular feature, namely, celebrating the birthdays of my favorite people, notably the actresses who charm and fascinate me or drive me to consider becoming some kind of deranged stalker.

So, as 2008 unravels, I will slowly reveal my favorite actresses (or female actors, if they prefer) as the dates of their births arrive. And I cannot think of a more fitting woman to start the feature than the great Judy Davis.

A singular female presence, she is peerless at effortlessly conveying cerebral formidability, often playing the wife or lover of an almost equally scary male intellectual counterpart. She plays the wife of Kevin Spacey in The Ref. She plays the muse to not one, but two fictional alter egos of brilliant writers, the girlfriend and typist of the thinly veiled representation of William Faulkner, W.P. Mayhew (John Mahoney) in Joel & Ethan Coen's Barton Fink and the wife of William S. Burroughs author surrogate, Bill Lee (Peter Weller) in David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch. And she played both parts in the same year. She has appeared in 3 Woody Allen films, and is especially memorable in an early scene from Deconstructing Harry, where she confronts Allen's character, her ex-boyfriend, a writer, about a book he wrote in which he mines intensely personal and embarrassing details of their relationship for story ideas:



She is brilliant at playing nervy, tightly wound, fearsome women who can summon a vicious wit when crossed or wronged. She could wither many men with a single glance. But she is simultaneously able to do so without being a hateful bitch, because beneath her contempt, is a delicate vulnerability that has been tragically wounded. My single favorite performance of hers is from Ted Demme's The Ref, an underrated comedy from 1994 where she out-acts both the great Denis Leary and the great Kevin Spacey. Here's a quite humorous clip from The Ref:



Impromptu (1991)
Masters of Science Fiction: "A Clean Escape" (2007)
In the stage play, Victory, in 2004

She turns 53 today.