Jennifer Lawrence is one of the best actresses in the world
Jennifer Lawrence has joined the Parnassus of Hollywood actresses such as Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn who have bewitched audiences for generations. In mother! she shows us another side of her personality – what it’s like to be absolutely terrified
Jennifer Lawrence has become such a hot property in Hollywood that it only took her name to be attached to mother! for this mystery box of a movie to be green-lit.
She remains the most interesting actress in the world, and surely one of its most beautiful.
So far, the combined box office take of the 27-year-old’s 19 movies has reached nearly $5.5 billion, which partly explains why she is the highest-paid actress in Hollywood. Indeed, the makers of the X-Men franchise re-crafted the series around her character mystique once they realised how audiences were fascinated by her.
Lawrence was always Darren Aronofsky’s first choice to play the unnamed young mother whose home is invaded by a creepy older couple. “The thing is, there’s so much ability there that, somehow, she can summon it again and again,” Aronofsky told the Vulture website. She won an Academy Award for Best Actress playing a depressed widow in Silver Linings Playbook, becoming the second-youngest person ever to win the award.
Unlike most leading actresses, many of whom came through to movies through modelling (she turned down work as a model to pursue acting) Lawrence has range. There’s the determined, action-adventure princess of The Hunger Games, the hysterically funny turn in American Hustle – who can forget husband Christian Bale’s look of consternation as Lawrence tells him that really, he should be thanking her for setting fire to their kitchen, having blown up the microwave (or new-fangled “science oven” as she calls it) – and now, in mother!, she plays abject terror as a vulnerable young woman at the mercy of undefined forces.
Indeed, Lawrence threw herself into the role with such gusto that she dislocated a rib as a result of hyperventilating so hard while shooting the movie’s climax.
Like the other great actresses, Lawrence does not play cardboard cut-out characters; she has the rare ability to act as if a thought has just occurred to her up on screen. Even better, she listens to what other characters are saying before she reacts. It’s a rare gift and one to be cherished.
The Kentuckian came to most people’s attention in dark Appalachian backwoods drama Winter’s Bone, playing a daughter investigating her father’s disappearance. She was a standout in this small indie film, journeying by boat up river as if it was the river Styx, and she was bound on a very grisly quest indeed.
Like Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn, there’s something ineffable about her – a mysterious quality that means you cannot tear your eyes off-screen – although the classic Hollywood actress she most resembles is Carole Lombard, another great beauty who combined poise with a salty earthiness. Indeed, many actors who have worked with Lawrence remark on just how funny she is on set.
However, it’s her face that bewitches, which is why Aronofsky keeps her in such tight focus in mother!. The film is almost entirely composed of Lawrence or her immediate surroundings and Aronofsky restricts himself to filming either her face, her point of view or over her shoulder. It’s as if the director wanted to keep the cinemagoer inside her goose-fleshed skin for two increasingly unsettling hours.
