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Winona Ryder, The Age of Innocence by Shawn Levy Poor Winona! At 26, with her last hit nearly four years behind her (Little Women), she's no doubt heard the cutting little whispers: "She was just a teenage wonder," "She's only a pretty face," and, worst, "She could never really act anyway." Well, some of it's true: she was a teenage wonder, and she is a very pretty face. But hey, evidence of her acting talent is ample. Ryder can play impetuous and sincere, lightly comic and drolly baroque, delicate and spirited. She's self-conscious in the way every actor should be, savvy to the contrast between her porcelain features and her cat-quick reactions. She's still the actress under 30 likeliest to dominate the movies: she's got the looks, the versatility, and, yes, the skill. For proof, watch The Age of Innocence. Martin Scorsese's admittedly suffocating melodrama of manners is built primarily of tortured dialogues between Michelle Pfeiffer (as a fallen lady) and Daniel Day-Lewis (as a socially proper lawyer), would-be lovers whose union is continually pre-empted by Ryder, who plays Pfeiffer's cousin and Day-Lewis's fiancee and eventual bride. In the arithmetic of the film, Ryder's character, May, is a socially sanctioned wet blanket who breaks into her man's reveries waving a flag of propriety. With a wasp waist and an ear-to-ear smile that borders on the grotesque, May is a symbol of everything precious and stifling in upper-crust New York, a girl born to privilege and cultivated to maintain her station through marriage. She is, in effect, a decent, chaste, devoted, pretty, blameless, angelic villain. Perhaps this is why some people bridled when Ryder was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, the sole performer in the film to get a nod from the Academy. It looked like just another case of the Supporting Actress prize as Ingenue Award. PAGE 1 | 2 |
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But those complaints make it clear just how good Ryder is in The Age of Innocence. For she creates a young woman who is duplicitous and honest at once, a vibrant emblem of all that is good and bad in her world. Ryder plays May as a calculating vixen wrapped in a sunny skin, feigning innocence so effectively that her beau (and some of the audience) thinks her sweetly shallow. She ingeniously lifts May's facade in little flashes, letting the schemer within show only fleetingly. Watch her twist Day-Lewis to her will without ever stepping outside the bounds of decorum, snooping into his secrets with an inocuous air. By discreetly, only now and again, letting the camera catch her with her eyes hooded and her wiles fully deployed, Ryder is extraordinarily good at showing us that May is merely playing the naif. She contrives for May a precise sort of Janus face--plain and loyal and simple as far as her man can see, coy and scheming just outside his ken. May's husband never suspects her--he even wonders if she's a complete blank. Ryder's doubters are no more apt. Seeing only the dazzling surface of her face, they overlook the calculating skill of her craft. She's young. She's good. And however many Crucibles and Alien Resurrections she has in her immediate past, she'll be back. What did you think of this performance? Sound off in the Movie Forum. PAGE 1 | 2 |