For Feisty Feminists

Andrew Garfield is getting a lot of end-of-year awards attention for his work in The Social Network, and while he does solid work in that movie, it’s his role in Never Let Me Go that really breaks your heart.

Garfield plays Tommy, a young man who is curiously child-like - mature in certain ways, but never fully grasping the limitations of  the situation that these young people find themselves in. (Spoiler: they’re clones and their organs will be harvested once they grow up). He has been protected from the world, but he also knows a few things. His body language is childish - he jumps in puddles, and in the scene pictured at left (from L-R Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley, and Garfield) he stares in wonder at the menu at a diner, and later you see him sitting backwards in his chair, his body language perfectly capturing that of a child fascinated by the world around them. Yet he also offers comfort and security to Mulligan’s Kathy, and has an emotional maturity around certain issues, including sex.

But seeing it slowly dawn on Tommy that there are no ‘deferrals’ - that being in love does not mean he can delay his donations - is the most heart-breaking part of the movie, a flawed film that nevertheless packs an emotional punch. Unlike Kathy, who takes the news with grace, almost nonchalance, as if she knew that the answer would be no, Tommy looks legitimately horrified. Garfield makes the ensuing emotional breakdown, extreme as it is, true to this sad, innocent character. Though all the performances in the movie are good, it is Garfield that worms his way under your skin and stays there.

In The Social Network, Rooney Mara plays Erica Albright, the young woman who opens the film by breaking up with our anti-hero Mark Zuckerberg, and comes back halfway through to cut him down to size for the things he wrote about her online. It’s a great, full performance in two short scenes, but Mara does a lot with her screentime. She adeptly handles Aaron Sorkin’s rapid-fire dialogue; she shows the transition from admiring and being interested in Mark to being fed up and wanting nothing to do with him, in a few minutes time; and she handily provides the movie’s moral center and the best entry point to the film for the audience, her dismissal of Mark in that second scene giving the audience permission to think he’s kind of a dick.

A lot of reviews have boiled down the character of Erica to ‘Zuckerberg’s Rosebud‘, and while that may be putting a bit too fine a point on the Citizen Kane/The Social Network comparisons that have been floating around, Mara never reduces her character to something so simple as ‘the one that got away’.  She never defines her character in terms of the impact she has on Mark, but instead shows why Erica would make the choices she does for her own sake. She presents Erica as the kind of whip-smart, likable woman that would be interested in someone like Mark in the first place, but would have enough self-respect and intelligence to abandon him when he becomes condescending and even insulting. It’s sharp, clear, film-defining work, doing so much with a very small amount of screen time.

This is part of Stinkylulu’s Supporting Actress 2010 Blogathon, a Tribute to Actressing at the Edges.

Now we turn to what is likely the funniest performance on television: Sofia Vergara on Modern Family.  Vergara glides through the comedy, the secret weapon of a show that has been a bit over-praised. (Yes, I said it. It’s funny, but not the only good comedy on television. It’s 20 minutes of cruelty and mockery towards its characters, followed by 30 seconds of sappy voiceover about how they love each other.) Vergara’s character, Gloria, is possibly the least developed. What do we know about Gloria? Not much that isn’t given to us as wacky backstory or comedic support for another character’s plotline. The show is slowly giving her a bit more of a story, but they seem not to have noticed for quite sometime the goldmine of comedy they have in Vergara. Her inner life is explored the least, and usually she is a comic foil, rather than a subject of the plot. But she consistently makes the most out of the moments given to her, and does the funniest line-readings of anyone on the show while fleshing out an underwritten character.

Here are three clips from the Halloween episode of Modern Family, showing how funny Vergara is. She goes from being understandably wounded at her husband’s criticism of her mistakes in American idiomatic speech and accented pronunciation; to putting on an affected version of flat, Midwestern American English; to trying to take the family’s mocking of her style of speech. (Note that I think these clips show both Vergara’s comedic talent and the unnecessary cruelty of the show towards her character.)