Third place:
Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Linings Playbook [122 points / 21 votes]
Second place:
Jessica Chastain, Zero Dark Thirty [138 points / 22 votes]
And your winner...
Rachel Weisz, The Deep Blue Sea [186 points / 28 votes]
"How can a woman be with THAT GUY?!
It’s a question I’m sure a lot of us men (and even many women) have asked at some point. What drives a woman head-over-heels in crazy, stupid love with someone who not only doesn’t seem to reciprocate her extreme affection, but goes out of his way to let her know that he’s never going to feel the same way she does about him? I mean, seriously, what the hell makes women always chase after the wrong dude? (If you’re a Rihanna fan, you probably ask these questions every day.)
In The Deep Blue Sea, Terence Davies’s stunning adaptation of Terence Ratigan’s play (which was already adapted into a 1955 movie with Vivien Leigh in the lead role), Rachel Weisz goes about explaining that with her haunting, heartbreaking performance. As aptly-named adultress Hester Collyer, she breaks up the happy home she shared with her husband Bill (Simon Russell Beale, in an amazingly understated performance) in order to have a torrid, tumultuous romance with former RAF pilot Freddy (Tom Hiddleston, who, along with this role and villainous turn in The Avengers, has became the go-to guy for charming tools) in post-WWII London. For those of you who ever wondered what Brief Encounter would’ve been like if Celia Johnson did run off with Trevor Howard, this movie certainly gives a worst-case scenario.
We follow Weisz’s Hester throughout the entire movie. We follow her from the beginning, when she attempts suicide by downing pills and turning the gas on in her London flat, right up until the sad but optimistic end. We even follow her inside her own head, as she replays the memories that brought her to this unfortunate state while she quietly sits on her couch, chain-smoking and taking long, contemplative drags. (Man, it’s been so long since I’ve seen people smoke in movies, I’ve forgotten how much interpretive power a performer can wield onscreen by just smoking.)
Right from the get-go, both Davies and Weisz make the audience understand the conflicting emotions she’s going through. She’s a woman who thought escaping her comfortably comformist existence and shacking up with a dashing airman would give her life the jolt of passion she so sorely needed. It does, but that doesn’t mean she’ll live happily ever after. The birthday-forgetting Freddy is definitely not the knight in shining armor she envisioned. Hell, when he learns of Hester’s suicide attempt by reading the note she was going to leave for him, the boozy boor heads to the bar, gets drunk and cruelly shuns her. And, yet, for reasons we can only assume is more lustful than logical, she still loves the asshole. This is where Weisz truly shines, giving us a portrayal of a woman who’s fully self-aware of her wrongheaded choices, loathing herself to the point where she opts to kill herself just so she doesn’t have to face them anymore, and still continues to make them because – and even though I hate to use this much-ridiculed Woody Allen line, it’s very true in this case – the heart wants what it wants.
In a movie year that was filled with cheating female protagonists (Keira Knightley in Anna Karenina, Michelle Williams in Take This Waltz), Weisz’s performance stands out because she shows the complex range of emotions one goes through when a person – man or woman -- is hopelessly, helplessly in love. Hester is such a pitiable heroine, it’s difficult to view her with scorn or contempt because, quite frankly, who hasn’t gone through what she’s gone through? Who among us hasn’t had relationships that were painfully one-sided and, yet, we continue on with them in the hopes that mutual affection will actually exist?
Love is strange, if I may quote a Mickey & Sylvia song. Thanks to Rachel Weisz’s sympathetic performance in The Deep Blue Sea, she reminds us of that – and we’ve all been there." – Craig D. Lindsey
See the full results.
No comments:
Post a Comment