2020: Essie Davis in "Babyteeth" and "True History of the Kelly Gang"
Thursday, April 8, 2021 at 2:25PM
by Nick Taylor
Been a lot of chatter about this year’s supporting actress race. You can check out the comments section of any given post on this site over the past year and probably find this category poking its head into an entirely unrelated conversation. Can’t imagine why! To give a quick word on the race, I think this is a remarkably strong lineup, boasting five incredibly talented women who tangibly elevate their films. The sheer number of contenders popping up at other ceremonies makes these nominations feel truly earned - no one coasted to their slot, and the variations of genre, roles, career trajectory, and screen time are delightfully eclectic. A film or two may be sketchy, but the work isn’t, and every one of those actresses would make a fine winner.
As per the tradition of my companion pieces to the Supporting Actress Smackdown (coming in a week!), I’ve decided to bypass anyone with visible buzz in favor of an actress whose work I loved and wish had gotten more attention than it did. This category‘s already had plenty of airtime lately, so I’m sticking to just one write-up. Luckily, my favorite supporting actress of the year gave two performances worth talking about...
I am of course referring to Australian treasure Essie Davis, who delivered two of the year’s most memorable turns in Babyteeth and True History of the Kelly Gang, going unabashedly big in both films without forgoing layered portraiture or railroading her very skilled costars. Of the two films, Babyteeth holds slightly more critical favor at home and abroad. The film won seven awards from its eleven nominations from the dubiously prestigious AACTA awards last year (where Kelly Gang took home two prizes), and Shannon Murphy’s lone Director nomination for Babyteeth at the BAFTAs is one of my favorite nominations from a loopy, exciting awards season. (Also, bless everyone who nominated her and Mendelsohn for this year’s Team Experience ballot, A+ stuff). Still, both films and especially performances are worth gushing over, and I'm more than happy to share the good word.
Babyteeth
First and foremost, Babyteeth is centered on Milla Finlay (Eliza Scanlan), a 16-year-old high school girl whose outlook on life has considerably dimmed after being diagnosed with cancer. Standing dangerously close to the rails of a metra train, she meets a newly homeless 23-year-old crook named Moses (Toby Wallace) after he accidentally crashes into her. The two become fast friends, though the qualifications for this companionship (her instant crush on him, his not entirely clear intentions) are present from the out, and only become more complicated as the film progresses. They spend the rest of the day together, with Moses giving her ¾ of a haircut, and Milla bringing him home for dinner with her parents. And as you can imagine, they have a strong response to their daughter showing up for dinner with some shifty-looking, barely-clothed, slightly older guy after she bails on all their after-school plans with no warning.
By this point we’ve already met Milla’s parents, Anna (Essie Davis) and Henry (Ben Mendelsohn). Burly, mustachioed Henry is a therapist, which means he has a solid grasp of his family’s behavior and that he can afford an expensive house with glass walls and lots of plants and a huge pool. Tan, chestnut-haired Anna is a musician, and one of her husband’s patients, which mostly means that he’s constructed a very intricate schedule to keep her medicated throughout the day. The goal is keep her mood stable so that she can be a functional human being for their sick daughter. This dinner is not one of the moments Anna is functional. Anna is high on the combined effects of a Xanax and another pill she can’t remember the name of, and Davis does wonders balancing how zonked out she is with the genuine emotions her character is trying to express. She’s fantastic with physical comedy, grabbing ice from her glass of water and wolfing down several bites of it, or clapping her slightly cupped hands to mirror a forcep being used. One line reading about waiting for Milla to show up at the hairdresser is made infinitely funnier by her running out of breath at the end of the sentence. The divine camerawork, editing, and other performances are strong enough to balance Davis’s carefully modulated excess, showing us plenty of details about all four characters, but Davis herself gives a wildly entertaining performance that never feels like empty cartooning.
She’s equally articulate in close-up, medium, and wide-shots, using her face and voice to tremendous effect throughout but relying just as much on this posture, this movement, this flex of her neck muscles to express what Anna is feeling. As funny as she is, she doesn’t overreach for laughs; there’s not so much comedy that we don’t take Anna’s pain and desires seriously. She’s legitimately spooked by Milla’s sudden ardor for Moses, but can’t help indulging it, partially because it’s waking Milla out of her sullen disinterest in life following her diagnosis.
Davis has a remarkable ability to keep hold of multiple character threads as artfully as she attends to the required beats of an individual scene. Murphy’s direction and Rita Kalnejais’s script are so invested in all four principle players that Davis is given a lot of material to work with, and some of that material is more reliant on the actor’s performance to keep that story thread an active part of how we respond to their actions. Late in Babyteeth, Anna reveals the re-emergence of an old superstition that not playing her piano will keep her baby healthy, and at a certain point it's not really mentioned again. Yet Davis carries this anxiety for the rest of the film. It's mostly down to the way she looks at Henry and Milla that we're aware of how much this fear has held on, culminating in a duet with Milla for her 17th birthday.
She’s also a fantastic scene partner, especially as we learn more about Anna’s relationships with her husband and her daughter. She and Mendelsohn achieve a rapport that conveys decades of familiarity, affection, and aggrieved exasperation that allows her much larger performance to fully interact with and complement his quieter turn. Their scenes together are some of the best in Babyteeth’s endless repertoire of excellent scenes, like a small argument about water pressure that turns into a different conversation altogether about them needing to keep themselves in check for Milla while she’s still alive. Davis also shows us a mother who feels distanced from her child even beyond the looming spectres of her pill-induced fogginess and her daughter's flagging health. Her push-pull with her daughter's new boyfriend is excitingly hard to pin down - she's not quite as resistant to him as Henry, but she rebukes him plenty when he oversteps. Still she has several scenes of unexpected emotional intimacy with him, like an odd, lovely scene late at night where she recounts Milla's childhood habits.
I think Davis's highwire, mercurial characterization is my favorite element of Babyteeth, though the fluid cinematography, sharp writing, incisive direction, and the interplay between the four principle players are just as creative and exhilirating to watch. It's the nuanced turns from its main players, in ace communication with Murphy's finessing of tone and imagery, that constitute the film's most vivid achievements. Davis goes the farthest to inhabiting and heightening Anna's predicaments, without seeming out of place from this spiky, intrepid film. As far as I'm concerned, she's the class of the category.
True History of the Kelly Gang
Where Babyteeth keeps a fine hold over its complex tonal modulations, True History of the Kelly Gang is far more anarchic in letting narrative, aesthetic, and historical missions crash together in ways that are just as productive for the sparks flying off their dissonant angles as for their moments of vicious harmony. The story of bushranger and outlaw Ned Kelly (played by George McKay as an adult and Orlando Schwerdt as a child), one of the last and most famous bushrangers of British-occupied Australia, Kelly Gang focuses inordinately on the events of Kelly’s life that led to his becoming a gang leader. The film covers his destitute youth and his apprenticeship with Harry Power (a charismatic Russell Crowe) to his immediately doomed friendship with a Victorian constable and his marshalling of his brother’s band of robbers into a legitimate threat against the colonizing bastard English. Just about the only thing missing are the scenes of him robbing banks and inspiring other Australians, which are elided as fully as United States vs Billie Holiday leaves out all the hubbub “Strange Fruit” is causing in that nascent civil rights movement. The national fervor he’s causing is mostly evident in the efforts to annihilate him.
Ellen Kelly (Essie Davis), is not the figure who resolves that absent space, but she is who director Justin Kurzel largely credits as the origin point for her brood’s ethnic pride, ferocious conviction, and unapologetic criminality as means of both survival and rebellion in harsh circumstances. Even before Harry Power teaches Ned how to commit highway robbery, before his brothers tell him about the Irish nationalist group they’ve joined, the Kelly family is already a snarling and unrepentant lot, no one more than Ma. Davis sinks her teeth into the role with as much gusto as Ma sinks her teeth into Nic Hoult, and though part of me wonders what her reaction was at being offered this part by her husband Kurzel (“you’re gonna look awful, shoot a horse, and do an Irish accent, it’ll be fun!”), she takes to it fantastically. Having seen all of Kurzel’s films save Assassin’s Creed, I've never seen his directorial style this loose and excitingly messy, and Davis synthesizes that energy into a truly mighty performance.
Ellen is introduced by the camera peering through an opening in a wall, continuing an arrangement of prostituting herself to an English officer in exchange for keeping the law off her family’s backs. Her sex work appears to be the sole source of income for her house, while her alcoholic husband piddles his life and their money away gambling, lost in some past involving a scarlet dress that has seemingly ruined him. Pa’s failure to bring home beef one night inspires Ned to slaughter someone else’s cow and drag a leg home for the family. When Ma sees her blood-covered boy dragging his prize to their porch she bursts into a giant grin, anointing him the man of the house at dinner and serving him the biggest chunk of meat at the table before dishing herself - “the woman he loves most in the world” - while her husband gets nothing. Yet when her husband dies shortly afterwards in prison, Davis renders this is a genuine tragedy, not just Ellen losing someone who once meant a lot to her but also leaving her family vulnerable to the ill will of men who would seek to own them.
Nathaniel is right to describe Ellen as “a sociopathic virus, with bloody pride in her destructive contagion and reach”, and Kelly Gang reflects this notion visually. The makeup team shears her of all of Anna Finlay’s modern cosmetics, trading in her well-kept tan and chestnut locks for dry hair and weathered skin. Ari Wegner’s cinematography occasionally plays up Ma’s gauntness, letting bone-white lighting outline her sternum and wrap around her skull, though Wegner frames Davis even more frequently using the glowing fire of a hearth. Davis fully plays into the elemental qualities of this woman - it’s all but required in scenes like her interrogation with Nic Hoult’s bastard Englishman, sneering through every one of his questions until she decides the best way to respond to him claiming he isn’t afraid of her is to leap onto his body and bite him. I praised her precise physicality with Babyteeth, but Kelly Gang places even more overt demands on her body. She's such a potent force that I remembered her being in far more of the movie than she was, but she's such an influential force that she never feels too far away from the action.
Davis is legitimately scary, uncorking a deep, animalistic ferocity in her gestures and expressions, but she keeps up Ellen’s innate ferocity without reducing her to some fiery lioness, dialing back on scenes that easily invite grander showmanship. She refuses to overplay a scene of Ellen refusing some bougie Englishwoman’s offer to give young Ned a real education, managing to be prideful, rude, and self-confident - she even mockingly offers herself to the woman by the end - but speaks her truth quietly so as not to wake her kids. It’s unquestionably evident that Ellen loves her children. Her love is muscular and proud if toxic, colored by the knowledge that her boys can fend for their family, can fight for each other if need be. This is never more evident in her final scene, saying goodbye to Ned in his cell before his execution. She’s given them the tools to survive in a world that aims to destroy them regardless of their actions, and what could make a mother prouder than the knowledge her sons have learned what it means to die with honor and dignity and with every breath remind the oppressors that the laws of men have no sway over honoring your land and family?
Reader Comments (7)
Sad to say I have not seen either of these movies (yet) but every and any time (sadly almost never) Davis gets anything resembling a showcase I'm totally here for it. IMO she should have been up for serious supporting actress contention all the way back in 2003 for Girl With the Pearl Earring. She really deserves whatever great things comes her way.
She's on my personal list for Babyteeth. Underrated gem from this year. Can't wait to see what Eliza Scanlen does next.
Love this! She truly deserved a nomination for either of these stunning performances.
I adored her in Babyteeth. Perfect performance that shoulda been a contender.
Thanks for writing it up so beautifully.
She's twiCe as talented as Ben Mendelssohn and shoUld have broke out bigger than he has in Hollywood if there is aNy jusTice.
Essie is magnificent in both movies and I seriously can not understand why she has not received the recognition that she so clearly deserves.
Thanks for writing such an in depth piece on Essie Davis, a fabulous actress who always gives interesting performances no matter what she is in.
I haven't yet seen these films, but she deserves to be better known. I think "The Babadook" is the only film where she got some real critical and awards attention.