by Cláudio Alves
When looking at the 94 performances which have conquered the Best Actress Oscar, some jump out as weird anomalies. It's not so much a question of the actor's work as it's an issue of character type. Good people are rare. Not those who are idealized icons or martyred by nightmarish cruelty, but the few that are just regular decent folk. That's one of the reasons Emma Thompson's Margaret Schlegel from Howards End seems so out of place, for instance. She's an average person who seems intrinsically decent but whose goodness isn't simplistic sainthood. More importantly, she's all that but isn't boring to watch.
That's a rare feat and few actors can accomplish it. In screenplays, such roles tend to look simplistic and lacking in substance. Just think of how insufferable Cosette tends to be in Les Misérables or how unconvincing Jane can be in Pride & Prejudice adaptations. Tom Hanks is one of those rare performers who can take such a role and play it to perfection, bringing humanity to decency and making ordinary kindness interesting to watch. Emma Thompson is another. And, in a delightful surprise, so is Ana de Armas…
In Knives Out, she plays Marta Cabrera, the full-time nurse, and confidant of Harlan Thrombey, a rich writer of intricate whodunnits. He is also the dead man whose demise propels the film's central mystery, but Marta is the heroine of the piece. She's the one who we, as an audience, ally ourselves with and the resolution of her fate is what anchors Johnson's twisting plot in emotional reality. As the overused saying goes, Marta is the heart and soul of Knives Out. That is an often-thankless role, but this mystery's script adds sufficient details to flesh out Marta as a character and not just a moral backbone.
One of her quirkiest idiosyncrasies is the inability to lie without exploding into bouts of uncontrollable vomiting. When there's secrets to hide and millions at stake, being a human lie-detector is an unfortunate situation, not to mention a ridiculous character trait. Daniel Craig's eccentrically accented Benoit Blanc, on the other hand, sees this as the perfect tool for mystery-solving and nominally makes Marta the Watson to his Sherlock. Nothing could be more appropriate for Dr. Watson is another one of those good person roles that are so often tedious to observe.
Rian Johnson's script gives Ana de Armas a lot to work with, that's obvious, but the excellence of the performance is all on the actress. She's stupendous as Marta, perfectly telegraphing her character's thought process with expressive transparency and humorous exaggeration. More importantly, she conveys Marta's most important attributes and makes them seem natural. Not so much her regurgitating proclivities but her inherent goodness, the consummated competence of a good nurse and the kindness that makes her choose potential penury and jail time instead of risking another's life. Whether Marta wins or loses in this game of deceit, she plays by her rules and her rules alone.
A moral code of decency and utmost kindness isn't something that's easily followed or dramatized. Ana de Armas' genius is the way she doesn't hide that effort. In many pivotal scenes, we see how Marta struggles to do the right thing, how she gets irritated by her boss's antics or enraged at a rich prick's threats towards her mother. When a teary phone call reveals its Machiavellian purposes, there's a flash of disgust in the actress's features. When her fate seems sealed and Marta has nothing left to lose, we see a sardonic smile and the dejected humor of someone smart enough to understand the full consequences of her actions and the absurdity of her situation.
It's brilliant work, full of little details sprinkled over what could have been a caricature of the perfect immigrant. Through Ana de Armas' work, Marta isn't a mere plot mechanism, she's a fully tridimensional person we can fall in love with and cheer on. Better yet, she has great chemistry with every single one of her co-stars. There's the jovial repartee she has with Christopher Plummer, the tense allyship with Daniel Craig and Chris Evans, the cautious friendliness with Katherine Langford and even the swallowed anger and rigid posture when she receives a dirty plate from Don Johnson. She's just wonderful and Knives Out is her perfect "a star is born" moment.
These types of performance, especially in genre pictures, rarely get recognized by awards bodies. That said, I hope the Globes remember Ana de Armas' excellence tomorrow. Do you?