Countdown to the Oscars: Best Supporting Actress

Alicia Vikander is the frontrunner for Best Supporting Actress at the Oscars for her performance in The Danish Girl.

Welcome to Last Cinema Standing’s Countdown to the Oscars, our daily look at this year’s Academy Awards race. Be sure to check back every day this month for analysis of each of the Academy’s 24 categories.

Best Supporting Actress

The nominees are:

Jennifer Jason Leigh for The Hateful Eight

Rooney Mara for Carol

Rachel McAdams for Spotlight

Alicia Vikander for The Danish Girl

Kate Winslet for Steve Jobs

We can quibble all day over the meaning of “supporting actress” – or more specifically, as this award is officially known, Best Actress in a Supporting Role. I have written a few times throughout this season that while category fraud is common, this year, it has felt rampant, resulting in nominations in this category for two actresses who are unequivocally co-leads in their films.

Anyone who has seen either Carol or The Danish Girl could be forgiven for wondering whom exactly Mara and Vikander are supporting. The same question could be posed, however, for Leigh in The Hateful Eight. The movie is essentially about her, and there is a scarcely a scene in which she does not appear. Each of these actresses has delivered a tremendous performance, but every one of them should have been considered for Best Actress.

Oh, well, no turning back now. It is a campaign strategy that sometimes works and sometimes does not. Marcia Gay Harden (Pollock), Jennifer Connelly (A Beautiful Mind), and Rachel Weisz (The Constant Gardener) all have supporting Oscars for leading roles. However, the first actress we will discuss today can tell you about what happens when the season has its own plans, campaigns be damned.

Kate Winslet for Steve Jobs – Winslet, a seven-time nominee now, earned her only Oscar win for Best Actress in The Reader, this despite master awards campaigner Harvey Weinstein pushing Winslet as a supporting actress. He and many others thought she might have a better chance at the win in the supporting category. There was also some consideration of her clearly leading performance in that year’s Revolutionary Road costing her votes. Ultimately, the Academy nominated her in the proper place for The Reader, and she won because the work was deserving.

This time around, there is no question of category placement. As Joanna Hoffman, Winslet is among the people swirling around the vortex that is Steve Jobs at the center of this film. She is his right-hand woman, his confidant, and his moral center. When he loses his way, she is there to tell him so, and while she cannot always correct his course, she is never afraid to tell him he is wrong.

Most of the other characters in the film are there to be bowled over by Jobs – either awed by his brilliance or cowed by his power. Hoffman is there to stand up to him, and Winslet gives the character a unique blend of inner strength, personal ethics, and business savvy that makes Hoffman memorable and effective. Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay does not always give her the best material, but Winslet takes all that muddled dialogue and creates a real person to whom we can relate and for whom we have sympathy.

Alicia Vikander for The Danish Girl – I said back in April last year when I reviewed Ex Machina that 2015 would be a coming-out party for Vikander. Ten months later, I feel safe in saying I was correct. Apart from stunning work in Ex Machina and her nominated performance in The Danish Girl, she also delivered standout turns in Testament of Youth and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Next year, we should see her in Justin Chadwick’s Tulip Fever, Derek Cianfrance’s The Light Between Oceans, and Paul Greengrass’ Jason Bourne. It seems she is just getting started.

Holding nothing against Eddie Redmayne’s commendable work, The Danish Girl belongs to Vikander. As Gerda Wegener, the wife of someone going through a major life transition, hers is the experience through which the audience understands the story. We understand her confusion, frustration, and hurt over losing the person she thought of as her husband. As Lili’s transition takes over their lives, Gerda’s life and work is put on hold. In showing this pain and struggle, Vikander shoulders as much of the success of the film as Redmayne but has received much less of the credit. An Oscar win would go some way toward righting that perception.

Rooney Mara for Carol – Make no mistake, Carol is about Therese (Mara) as much as if not more than it is about Carol (Cate Blanchett). There is definitely more politicking involved here than with Vikander’s category misplacement as the film’s awards team likely believed Blanchett and Mara would split votes in the lead category. So, Blanchett – the veteran, a seven-time nominee, and two-time winner – was pushed for lead while the young ingénue, herself a previous nominee for David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, was shoved aside in supporting. In any event, the work is highly deserving of any recognition.

Over the course of a love affair, Mara takes Therese from a shy, innocent girl to a confident, world-weary woman. Therese is never more or less than quiet and reserved, but Mara makes us feel the inner turmoil she wrestles with as she experiences thoughts and feelings she never knew were inside her. Early on, the film seems to be about Carol’s influence over Therese, but as the story progresses, we come to realize it is really about what Therese wants out of her life and what she feels about Carol. Mara sells Therese’s dilemma beautifully with stoicism, grace, and tenderness.

Jennifer Jason Leigh for The Hateful Eight – Not one of those three adjectives could be used to describe Leigh’s unhinged performance as Daisy Domergue, but the work sure is something to behold. Leigh plays Domergue like a woman possessed, but behind the bitterness, sarcasm, and yeah, hate, there lies intelligence, cunning, and strength that let the audience know why so many people are concerned with taking this woman to hang. She takes insult after insult, beating after beating, and she still stands up to spit blood and bile back at her captors.

It is an entirely different look for Leigh, who to this day probably remains best known for her early role in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. She has spent her career carving a niche in the independent and art film world, and she has excelled in such films as eXistenZ, Margot at the Wedding, and Synecdoche, NY. Here, she lets loose with the rage and demonic force of someone who cannot help but fight, no matter how dire her circumstances. The Hateful Eight is a film about villains, and she may be the biggest villain of all, which just makes her the most fun to watch.

Rachel McAdams for Spotlight – A bit of a surprise nominee, though not wholly out of thin air, McAdams’ nomination seems like evidence of Spotlight’s overall strength with Academy. She plays journalist Sacha Pfeiffer, who is smart, determined, and empathic in the pursuit of the most difficult story of her career. In keeping with the general theme of Spotlight, her work is not flashy but effective. She knows that no matter what she is going through, the story is not about her. It is about the victims and survivors whose suffering she is trying to bring to light.

McAdams shines most in the one-on-one interviews she conducts with survivors, particularly the first, which takes them from a coffee shop to a walk in the park, past one of the many Catholic Churches that litter Boston’s streets. McAdams is expert at showing how Pfeiffer gets the source to trust her and open up about things he has told almost no one in his life. Her heroism comes from the fact that she is not using this man for her own gains. She genuinely wants to help him and all others in his situation the best way she knows how – with the power of the truth.

The final analysis

At the beginning of the awards season, when it looked as though Vikander and Mara would end up in the supporting category, most pundits had this down to those two with a slight edge to Mara for appearing in the more popular Carol. It was not an unreasonable assumption, and most of that has come to pass, except Vikander has really started to run away with things. It is not exactly cut and dry, though, as Winslet won both the Golden Globe and the BAFTA for her performance, while most of the early season critics’ awards went to Leigh and Vikander but for Ex Machina.

The trouble with predicting Winslet, who would be a good bet based on those two major awards, is that she was not nominated against Vikander’s The Danish Girl performance, which was considered a leading performance by both organizations. The only major place they were nominated against each other was the Screen Actors Guild Awards, which Vikander won. I expect that ultimately to be more predictive of the Oscars and for Vikander to win on the strength of her performance, the fact it is a leading role, and her overall body of work this year.

Will win: Alicia Vikander for The Danish Girl

Should win: Jennifer Jason Leigh for The Hateful Eight

Should have been here: Günes Sensoy for Mustang

Tomorrow: Best Supporting Actor

Carol: The predicament of looking

Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett star in director Todd Haynes' sublime new romance Carol.

You see someone across the room, and you instantly feel a connection. You do not have the words to express what you feel, but you know you are changed by this moment. Your image of this person is filtered through your past, your present, your vision of the future, your expectations of this person, and the other thousand things that can come between the two of you. You must fight through all these filters until you are face to face with this other person, and only then can you truly connect.

So goes the love story at the center of director Todd Haynes sumptuous new film Carol. The film stars Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara as Carol and Therese, two women who fall in love but whose romance is complicated by the prevailing social norms of the early 1950s. Haynes was in attendance Wednesday night at the Lincoln Center in New York City for a screening of Carol and an extended conversation to kick off the Film Society’s retrospective “Todd Haynes: The Other Side of Dreams.”

Dennis Lim and Haynes at the Lincoln Center.

The series, which runs through Nov. 29, will feature all of Hayne’s feature films, several of his shorts, and the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce. Each screening will be paired with a film hand-picked by Haynes and cited as either a direct or indirect influence on the filmmaker’s work, and Haynes will be on hand to introduce and discuss several of the films.

With its post-World War II setting and gay love story, Carol is sure to remind viewers of Haynes’ earlier film Far from Heaven, but while the two share certain similarities, Carol is much grittier and more intensely focused. Rather than try to encompass the malaise of an entire generation as he did in that previous work, Haynes narrows his focus to the specific experiences of Carol and Therese. The script, written by Phyllis Nagy and based on the Patricia Highsmith novel The Price of Salt, makes us a part of this world and shows us life from the perspective of two stoic but vulnerable women.

“For me, it was an opportunity to explore the love story in a way that I felt like I really hadn’t done in movies,” said Haynes. “On the one hand, it made me think of how I felt when I was in Therese’s shoes, as many of us have all been, falling in love, maybe when we’re much younger, maybe not, where you feel completely like you are inventing a language, like no one has ever experienced this before, like you’re completely at the mercy of the power of the person who you’re obsessed over and reading the signs and indicators of how they feel about you.

“But what’s interesting about this is it’s both universal, and it’s intensely historically specific because that’s really true about lesbian representation at this time, even more than gay male representation. So it has both very specific historical relevance and accuracy, but it also speaks to a feeling that we’ve all had when we don’t have that historical specificity to support it.”

Therese is a Manhattan shopgirl who first meets Carol when the older woman is picking out a doll to give to her young daughter for Christmas. Therese is instantly struck by this woman but has no frame of reference for her feelings. Haynes pointed out that in the novel, Therese says she would “call it love, except Carol is a woman.” It is this discrepancy between raw emotion and social convention that drives the narrative, and Haynes and his two lead actresses play off this cognitive dissonance wonderfully.

In a way, both women are forced to fight who they are. For her part, Therese barely understands this strange new experience of falling for a woman and tries to rationalize her actions to her friends and ersatz partner Richard. While Carol has carried on relationships with women before, she is in the midst of a messy divorce and still must learn to navigate the murky waters of female sexuality – let alone female homosexuality – at a time when women who stepped outside the norm were perceived as mentally unbalanced.

Blanchett and Mara are perfectly keyed in to this struggle, and though about half the movie depicts each character’s separate life, the central romance is so engrossing that everything else seems to fall away – as it would for two new lovers. Carol’s seduction of Therese is quick but not easy and takes place in a series of exchanges full of silence and anxiety, which Haynes took from the novel but did not find in the first draft of the script he read.

“I felt when I first read [Nagy’s] first draft that there was something – and she immediately agreed with me when I talked to her about it – that had been defanged in her treatment of the novel,” said Haynes. “The novel has such great disquiet and anxiety between the two women, and in the script, the first draft I read, there was a kind of congeniality between them right away. It felt like this has been adjusted for financiers. This had been eased along the long, arduous process of trying to get it made, and when I talked to Phyllis about that tension and that disquiet, she was like, ‘Yes! Great! Let’s get that back in the script.’”

Haynes’ instinct was correct, and the heavy silences, during which neither Therese nor Carol knows what to make of the other, are among the best moments in the film. In these seemingly blank spaces, Blanchett and Mara are tasked with conveying a range of complex emotions with a single glance or furrowed brow, and Haynes was quick to point out the actresses’ contribution to the success of the film.

Lim and Haynes speak after a screening of Carol.

“It is all in those silences and the lack of dialogue and the gestures,” said Haynes. “Some of those moments are very clearly marked and described in the script, but it’s also I think that really great performances like Rooney’s, which sort of conducts the way we look at both her face reading Carol and what she’s seeing in Carol, it’s so cognizant of the proportions of film as a medium and how much trust it gives to the viewer to invite interpretation and that if she did any more, it would be like, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa.’ It’s indicating too much. It’s telling too much. If she did any less, it would feel maybe vacant or unengaging or uninteresting, and it’s just walking that really delicate line.”

The director had similar praise for Blanchett, particularly with regard to her awareness of the camera and its meaning. At different points through the film, Blanchett must keep track of where her character is both emotionally and in relation to how Therese feels about her. She must project her true self and the image of herself that Therese is seeing at various moments in the story. Blanchett, who was instrumental in getting the film made in the first place, has a facility for this kind of nuanced character acting that is simply stunning to watch.

“The amazing thing about this performance of Cate’s is that Cate is aware of her proximity to the viewer so acutely and basically has to depict the image of Carol through the eyes of Therese and then various shades of a closer proximity to the real, complicated, and often ambivalent woman behind that image,” said Haynes. “If she wasn’t aware of that and almost always aware of where the camera is and what it’s doing when it’s photographing her – whose point of view it’s assuming at different times in the movie – the language of the movie wouldn’t work.”

The language of the film is its imagery as we almost always view these characters through windows or mirrors or curtains or some combination of factors. The visual narrative then becomes the stripping away of these filters standing between Carol and Therese but also between the audience and the characters.

“The interest in filtering and creating barriers between us and the objects we’re looking at just reveals the predicament of looking and maybe at some level stokes desire because when there’s something in the way, you want to get around it, and you’re aware of the act that you are looking,” said Haynes. “When there’s nothing in the way, you don’t even have to think about looking as a predicament, but this continually puts something between us, so it is filtering. Cate and Rooney also participated in that visual language. Just as the way I was describing Cate’s sensitivity toward where the camera was and how she was being depicted through these filters, that visual language was a starting point for everybody involved.”

Haynes skillfully holds the viewer at a distance throughout the film, mirroring for us the experience Therese has with Carol, until finally there are no more barriers to overcome, no more filters to remove. It is at this moment for the characters and the audience that everything becomes clear, and once it is, we are truly able to connect.

Lovers and Lollipops

Haynes chose to pair Carol with Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin’s 1956 romantic comedy Lovers and Lollipops, which follows the story of a single mother introducing her 7-year-old daughter to her new boyfriend. The film is a funny, honest snapshot of its time and place and captures a version of New York City that heavily influenced Haynes’ portrayal of the city in Carol.

Lovers and Lollipops

“Lovers and Lollipops was a discovery because I didn’t know about it, and I was really interested in evoking natural light and natural settings in New York City at this time, but I wasn’t finding great examples of that from Hollywood at the period,” said Haynes. “Well, Ruth Orkin and Morris Engel were partners, as I mentioned earlier, and they made these films together, and Lovers and Lollipops, unlike Little Fugitive, which is about a little boy who runs off to Coney Island for the day, this one really took place in a lot of the locations that are relevant to Carol, including a scene in Macy’s toy floor.

“Macy’s in Lovers and Lollipops is like a disaster area. There’s trash on the floor and kids rolling around and tired shopwomen and pegboard walls, and [production designer] Judy Becker and I were like, ‘Pegboard, yes! We’re going to put pegboard all over Carol.’ People are always saying, ‘Carol is such a stylish-looking film,’ and I’m like, ‘What?’ It’s dingy and distressed, and I love that about it. I mean Carol is stylish, and the clothes are great looking because people dressed that way in the ’50s, but I love the distress of it.”

In addition to the photography, Lovers and Lollipops was a tremendous influence on the depiction of Carol and Therese as women of the period, and Haynes said Blanchett and Mara took great inspiration from Lori March’s central performance.

“The woman represents a kind of lost example of femininity that you don’t see in actresses from the period and we haven’t seen since – maybe you see glimmers of it in your grandmothers – and it’s a kind of poised, slightly mannered version of a woman that is just kind of a lost iconography,” said Haynes. “It was just so interesting to both Cate and Rooney in looking at how to build these characters, who are both very different kinds of women in Carol, but this central character in Lovers and Lollipops was instrumental in that development for both actresses.”