½way mark - part 4 of ?
Here's Lynn Lee on 2015's Most Ubiquitous Actress
In the act(ress)ing world, there are rising stars and then there are rockets – the ones whose careers lift off so high so fast it leaves us all blinking a little. Think Jessica Chastain in 2011, or Jennifer Lawrence in 2012. 2015 looks to be a rocket year for young Swedish actress Alicia Vikander, who’s attracted favorable notice here at TFE and by critics and directors on both sides of the Atlantic, though she’s yet to achieve mainstream moviegoer recognition.
If she keeps going as she’s begun, she may soon have that, too.
I first took note of Vikander in 2012, the year of her breakthrough role in the historical drama and Oscar best foreign film nominee A Royal Affair, as a young queen who helps bring the Enlightenment to 18th century Denmark, and a supporting turn in Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina. Nathaniel nominated her for a Film Bitch Award that year and she’s worth watching in both films, especially the former. But it wasn’t until I saw her back to back in this year’s Ex Machina and Testament to Youth that I really got what the fuss was about.
And what is it about, exactly?...
At first glance Vikander looks like a perfect ingénue; she could be Emily Blunt’s more fragile, docile sister. But as with her screen characters, there’s more to her than meets the eye initially. Whether she’s playing a novice wife or an alluring android or a student turned wartime nurse, she starts out as a seeming blank slate only to peel away one layer after another, revealing emotional depths and a strength of will that one would never have guessed from that delicate, limpid surface. Most impressively, she does it so imperceptibly that you don’t notice quite when or how your impression of her is changing.
This is especially true of her two most recent performances. In Ex Machina [SPOILERS] Vikander’s Ava is first presented as an unknown – and literally unfinished – quantity, at once human and not-human. The exact measure of her humanity is to be tested by a naive software programmer (Domnhall Gleason). But as he becomes better acquainted with her, or rather as she becomes better acquainted with him, she quickly and smoothly molds her personality and affect for maximum appeal to his sensibilities: she becomes, before his eyes, winsome, girlishly dressed, flirtatious, and above all, a victim in need of rescuing from her tyrannical creator (Oscar Isaac).
It all turns out to be a deliberate projection of her tester’s fantasies, masterfully calibrated to achieve Ava’s twin goals of escape and revenge. He seems to sense that she’s manipulating him, even before he’s explicitly warned as much by her inventor, yet in the end the poor sap isn’t able to resist her. And neither are we: the act is too good, too beguiling, making Ava’s inevitable turn on both men all the more chilling. In her final scenes, she reinvents herself again, this time choosing for herself her own dress and look. There’s something more truly virginal about her than when she was playing a part, that’s reflected right down to her expression as she embarks on her new journey: wiped free of both charm and anger, her face, as she turns it towards the larger human world, is at once open and closed, human and not human, quietly probing and taking it all in—for what ultimate purpose undetermined. [/SPOILER]
Pretty much the opposite trajectory happens in Testament of Youth, an adaptation of Vera Brittain’s memoir of World War I. It’s a memoir of wrenching loss, as Brittain witnessed firsthand and suffered directly from the terrible carnage of a war that – unlike the second World War – would never be justified by its causes or vindicated by its outcome. As wartime dramas go, this one is fairly stiff and clunky, despite a cast that includes, in addition to Vikander, Dominic West, Emily Watson (underutilized yet again, alas), Miranda Richardson, Hayley Atwell (playing refreshingly against type), Taron Egerton (The Kingsmen), and "Game of Thrones” heartthrob Kit Harington as Vera’s love interest. In the end, it’s Vikander who elevates the movie to something genuinely poignant, even heartrending.
It’s a story we’ve seen before, sketched here in overly broad strokes – the bright, independent-minded girl who defies her father’s traditional views, only to fall in love against her will and then see her love, along with all the other young men in her life, shipped off to the front. She goes to the front, too, as a nurse and continues to defy expectations—and we’ve seen that before, too. Still, Vikander does a remarkable job capturing both the toll the war takes on Vera and the steely resolve that ultimately powers her through. One of the movie’s most effective scenes is one where she simply watches from the window of a house and waits for the telltale ring of the doorbell. Dread gives way to agony, inhabiting every inch of her body and her eyes. She doesn’t crumple or cry, but something in her dies – only to be replaced in time by a new resolve. By the time Vera charges into a post-war debate to speak movingly about her own experiences and why she can never support another war, I was putty in her hands.
I’m not the only one, apparently. Vikander has no fewer than six major feature films coming out later this year: the documentary Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words (Vikander does the narration), The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Tulip Fever, Adam Jones, The Light Between Oceans, and The Danish Girl[ She's also been cast in the next Bourne movie, due out next year. As if that weren’t enough, she’s apparently dating Michael Fassbender, her Light Between Oceans costar. It’s a good time to be Alicia Vikander – and maybe even a better time to watch what she does next.
Which of her upcoming films are you excited to see?
Previously at the Halfway Mark
pt. 1 Oscar Chart Updates - Acting
pt. 2 10 Best Leading Performances
pt. 3 Best & Worst in Animation