Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Kate Winslet

by Jennifer Xu

Kate Winslet has been a tour-de-force in Hollywood ever since Peter Jackson discovered her on the set of Heavenly Creatures fourteen years ago. 2009 promises to be a lucky year for her as she not only got nominated for two Golden Globes in her star turns in Revolutionary Road and The Reader, but also won both awards at the ceremony. For someone who had been nominated five times before and lost every single time, January 11 packed quite an emotional punch for Winslet.

In addition to her Golden Globe victories, Winslet has set the record of being the youngest actress, at 33, to not only be nominated for five Oscars, and also for four, three, and two in the years previous. She has not disguised her desire to finally take the win this year, and I strongly feel she could take the big statue home come February 22.

I myself am a huge Winslet fan, proud of the intricate nuances she brings to every character she plays, managing to nab a variety of different accents in different periods of history. Winslet is that rare combination of healthy beautiful and scandal-free celebrity, a throwback to the classic beauties of Deneuve and Bergman, with personality and versatility to boot. She was the first celebrity I truly admired inside and out and still remains one of the few "classy actresses" existing in Hollywood today. I have since made it a point of seeing every performance she has been nominated for. From the beginning:

Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility: the role that introduced the nation to her, and we embraced her sweet, flighty Marianne with pleasure. At an early age Winslet was already aware of the interactive dynamics between her character and others: how she had to embody someone both infuriating and adorable, how she served as a foil to Emma Thompson's sensible, logical Elinor, how she had to remain flaky and romantic but all the same three-dimensional. With very little experience Winslet managed to open up the heart and soul of Marianne Dashwood to the audience, and we never forgot it.

Rose in Titanic: the role that solidified her status as a bona-fide star. Millions of teenagers flocked to the theaters to watch the searing romance between Jack and Rose aboard the doomed ship Titanic. Kate plays a well-bred Victorian woman with feminist ideas of her own, unwilling to sacrifice herself to one she didn't love, able to look beyond class distinctions toward something earthier, something realer. But at root she is still aware of her limitations as a woman. We deeply feel her struggle between what is expected and what she really wants. Although Titanic isn't exactly an intense character study, something about Winslet's performance chiseled Rose into something finer than just a conventional romantic heroine.

The younger Iris Murdoch in Iris: Vibrant, lifelike, and dominating, Iris Murdoch is a force to be reckoned with. She writes with a passion, swims with a passion, makes love with a passion. Truly the only adjective to describe the woman is “alive”. And Winslet’s small role is the necessary lynchpin for the eventual emotional impacts of the movie. Looking at how powerfully Iris drank up life only makes the slow destruction of the older version to Alzheimer’s that much crueler.

Clementine Kruczynski in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind:

Sometimes harsh, sometimes gapingly vulnerable, sometimes sunshine sweet, Clementine is ever aware that she is a human and thus has a limited time in the world to make a mark. Often individuality is foisted upon us, a scream of idiosyncrasies and knowing quirks, but the great thing about Clementine is that she's aware about the irony of it all. As she says, "I apply my personality in a paste." Winslet manages to grasp upon every subtlety etched upon Clementine's face, the past wrongs and the fear of future ones, her maternal instincts, her insecurities, her willingness to love. Without the memorable, impetuous character of Clementine, there would be no movie.

Sarah Pierce in Little Children: She's a middle-aged mother insanely aware of her diminishing sexuality inside her suburban jailbox. She begins an affair just so she can feel alive again, but her low self-esteem encumbers her to the jaws of stagnant suburbia. Despite her strong will and fierce devotion to her child, she is stuck. Winslet manages to manifest in a performance the paradox of becoming an adult and how you can never truly stop being a child.

This year Winslet is up for another Oscar: as lead actress Hanna Schmitz in The Reader. Originally Harvey Weinstein marketed her as a Supporting Actress in his For Your Consideration ads, but enough Academy members voted her as Lead to secure a nomination in that category. And she’ll probably win too.

But the performance of hers that really impressed me this year was as April Wheeler in Revolutionary Road. True, her portrayal of a prideful, slightly confused, curiously sensual Nazi is integral to the enjoyment of The Reader as a whole, but I found her performance in that film only predictably masterful. Revolutionary Road, on the other hand, is a veritable soap-operatic mess, but Winslet brings a level of truth to the film rare in this type of manipulatively dramatic film. Although the lines are stilted and the scenes uncomfortable, her performance is what Michael Shannon's psychotic prophet was supposed to be - the sole voice of crazy-reason among the facade of normalcy. She alone feels the deceptiveness of the comfortable suburban lifestyle, the unattainability of the American Dream, orbiting around a sea of hopelessness and habit - and yearns to escape. It’s an extremely femininely empowering performance in a flawed film, and the rightful role for which she should have been nominated.