Happy Birthday, Robin Wright
Friday, April 8, 2016 at 9:39PM 
Tim here. Robin Wright turns 50 today, and it's my good fortune to wish her a very happy birthday on behalf of the Film Experience. She's entering the decade of her life that generally finds actresses facing the worst odds they ever get from the powers that be in Hollywood (there's that infamous stat that only two women have ever won a Best Actress Oscar in their 50s), but for my tastes, she's never been more interesting than in the past few years.
Indeed, it's been only in this decade that Wright has gotten some of her best-ever movie roles, on top a key performance in the Netflix hit House of Cards, and really gotten to show off as an actress. Some of her best film work, sadly, has been in underperforming movies that most people have never seen or heard of; what better excuse than a birthday to go out and track one of these down?
In 2010, Wright appeared as the title character in The Conspirator, director Robert Redford's story of an idealistic young lawyer defending Mary Surratt, whose boarding house sheltered John Wilkes Booth and company as they devised their plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. It's hard to go to bad for the movie as a whole, which wants very badly to be a history lesson rather than a piece of cinematic entertainment. Certainly, Redford's very prim and precise direction of James D. Solomon's research paper-feeling screenplay turn this into a social studies diorama rather than a living, breathing character drama.
But!...
In the midst of a generally solid cast made up of some thoroughly impressive names (James McAvoy and Kevin Kline are in especially fine form), Wright easily takes best in show honors, blasting apart the archness of the production with a performance of remarkable stolidity in the face of misery. It's a fairly clichéd portrait of suffering motherhood in a lot of ways, but Wright makes the clichés her own, and turns out a tremendously rich performance in the face of costume drama claptrap.
A few years later, Wright got an even better chance to show off: 2013's The Congress doesn't just star Wright in its central, never-offscreen role, it is about Wright herself. Or anyway, about the version of Wright that writer-director Ari Folman could best use to tell his story about the ugly way that the media industry preys about actors' ego and vulnerability. Wright plays a barely-working middle-aged woman with two kids and a reputation that's mostly based on the role she played in the beloved fantasy comedy The Princess Bride a quarter of a century earlier, who is convinced to sell her likeness rights to a company making entirely digital avatars of all the celebrities it can acquire. Things go into bonkers sci-fi territory from there; this is a loose adaptation of legendary author Stanislaw Lem's The Futurological Congress, and Folman's main interest lies in transforming the live-action world of the opening into a phantasmagorical animated brain-twister. It's hard to say that any of this is tremendously successful, though it's appealing in its total fearless commitment.
The quality of the movie notwithstanding, Wright's performance as "herself" is astonishing, a hugely undervalued piece of acting that dives deep into the most terror-stricken depths of the insecurity of the celebrity psyche. The film explicitly indicts the toxic mindset of producers who regard any performer, but especially women, as disposable and worthless once they hit a certain age, and that would be impressive enough. But Wright's performance is especially great thanks to how she plays out the way that the same performer might come to believe and internalize that sense of valuelessness; the horror of The Congress isn't that it shows how a talented actress is diminished by the industry, but how she can be pressured from inside to believe that the industry is right. The word "brave" is thrown around for a lot of reasons, but this is about as brave of a performance about the condition of being middle-aged in the public eye as I can name.
As I write this, Wright's next project looks like it might hopefully push her back into the mainstream in a big way: she's got one of the main roles in the Wonder Woman film set to premiere in summer of 2017, and the rumor mill has her coming close to signing a deal to appear in the upcoming Blade Runner sequel. Of course, either one of those might turn out to be terrible (in fact, it is perhaps likely that will be the case), but Wright as a popcorn movie action star? Yes, please. It would be a fascinating late-career reinvention for an actress who keeps becoming more compelling and challenging with age.
Reader Comments (11)
Adore her. Glad she is getting recognition. Does great work.
This has some typos but those are easily fixed. Yes to her accession.
It still feels kind of amazing that she hasn't gotten any Oscar attention yet. There was some "She is due" chatter for The Conspirator when it first came out.
How come no one mentions her work in The Private Lives of Pippa Lee? She is phenomenal in that movie and should have received more attention than it did....
Okay, but let us not act like her performance in NINE LIVES wasn't anything less than spectacular.
Pretty obvious it's HOC that helped this resurgence as in demand actress,she's notorious for turning big stuff down like Jurassic Park and Batman Forever.
She turned down work for Penn's career, saving face that motherhood was a bigger priority.
Her performance in The Congress is sublime.
Love her! I think she's incredibly talented and beautiful. We actually share a birthday. Also born on April 8th--Patricia Arquette.
Her performance in Nine Lives is AMAZING!!
Her performance as Diana is incredible!! The chemistry between her and Jason Isaacs is very strong and natural