On Anne Hathaway, One of the Greatest Working Actresses
I’ve seen eight of Anne Hathaway’s films. Of these eight films, I think she’s undoubtedly the best part of five of them, arguably the best part of one of them, and contributes substantial work that ups the quality of the other two.
There’s a point I would like to make about Anne Hathaway and her work as an actress. (You've probably figured it out already, but pretend like I could think of a better title and let me have my fun.) In order to best make this point, let us now go through all eight of these films together!
Part of the motivation behind this article was to to talk about eight very different films, and we’ll mostly be focusing on Hathaway. But in order to do so, we’ll occasionally have to talk about some story beats. In other words:
SPOILERS!!
Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Is she the best part of it: No. This is Heath Ledger’s movie.
Does her contribution make the film better: Absolutely.
Acting in smaller roles is an underappreciated and misunderstood art form. Though I would never say that a performance should be phoned in, these are the characters that are meant to prop up a protagonist, and thus they don’t have as much meat and don’t require a specifically nuanced or special performance. Their work, when done right, should be somewhat invisible. Of course, sometimes a small roll is a larger-than-life character that’s supposed to stick out. (Example: William Hurt in A History of Violence, from the same Oscar year as Brokeback Mountain.) However, nine times out of ten, if we notice the acting in small roles, it isn’t for a positive reason. Example:
(Note: In case there's something wrong with the embed, I'm talking about, "FREEZE!" Second note: I actually love overacting in action movies, but I’m not going to call it “good.”)
Lureen Newsome, the character Anne Hathaway plays in Brokeback Mountain, is a larger kind of small role. She’s a subtilely important part of the story, but she’s also not a mover or a shaker, and thus the same kind of bravado William Hurt brought to A History of Violence wouldn’t necessarily work here. There are, however, two vital elements that any actress who would play this role has to bring to the table.
The first is that they have to sell the idea to the audience that Lureen is an independent person who wouldn’t miss Jack during his fishing trips with Ennis and could conceivably live a full successful life without his help. Lureen comes from a wealthy background, yet she chooses to spend her life with people who are “beneath” her on the social pecking order. (A nice costume decision: When we first meet her at the rodeo, her outfit looks clean and fancy while everyone else’s looks dirty and worn.) Yet she has to come off like her own person, and not just an extension of a rich family.
The second element is that she can’t seem too hokey. “Feisty southern bombshell” is a well-worn trope, and the wrong actress would say her lines with a big dumb over-the-top accent in such a way as to suggest that a loud “YEEE HAAAW” is around every corner of every line. Lureen is a lively character, but she isn’t a caricature. She has to seem like the kind of woman a traditionally straight male is "supposed" to be attracted to, that way, it’s more understandable that Jack pursues her, despite his feelings for Ennis.
Luckily, Ang Lee casted Anne Hathaway, and to me, she does more than enough to sell Lureen. Though the focus of the story is on Jack and Ennis’s relationship, one gets the sense from Hathaway’s performance that Lureen wasn’t necessarily all-in with her marriage to Jack either. Jack’s dissatisfaction comes from his failure to reconcile with his sexuality and his strong feelings toward another man. Lureen’s dissatisfaction comes from the fact that she never got to live a life outside of her father’s shadow. She used to be a fun loving cowgirl who wouldn’t mind leading a steer or two into the backseat of her car. She ends the movie a blond widow running the family business who has to mourn a man who didn’t fully love her and that she didn’t understand. I think she did love him. (See the scene where Jack shouts down her father.) But they never seemed to entirely connect, mostly because of what we know about Jack and Lureen’s private lives.
Hathaway also brings to Lureen a sense of grace. Indeed, Hathaway plays up Lureen’s accent, but not for the sake of exaggeration. It’s more like a prissy accent a wealthy Texan would have, and it’s used effectively to further show the disconnect between her and the cowpokes at the rodeo she bangs in her car before she has to go home to Daddy. She’s a southern bombshell, but a grounded one that we can understand might confuse a man struggling with his sexuality.
Because Anne Hathaway takes an often ridiculous trope character and brings her down to Earth, every decision Jack makes has more weight. We want Jack to be with Ennis, but we also understand that people will be hurt in the process, such as Ennis’s wife Alma and Lureen. It’s not the role that makes the movie, but her work is quietly vital to the film’s emotional impact. If Lureen were a stereotype, she could be easily tossed aside. But thanks to Hathaway’s work, she can’t, and now there’s more conflict in what we, the audience, want for Jack.
If only Jack and Ennis didn’t live in a country where they were constantly pressured to pursue a straight marriage in the first place. Now everyone gets to be hurt.
The Devil Wears Prada (2006)
Is she the best part of it: Yes and no. This is the one I was talking about when I said she’s arguably the best part of it.
No matter who you argue has the best performance, does her contribution make the film better: 1000%.
“Who gives a better performance in a movie?” is a dumb and arbitrary debate in the first place. But on my list of flaws in the premise of this article, it’s a fairly mild one, and this is the petty article where I’m allowed to be petty.
Now, on one hand, Meryl Streep is Meryl goddamn Streep, and the knee-jerk impulse to immediately disagree with any assertion that someone in a movie was better than her is an understandable one. Indeed, whoever’s responsible for getting Streep to play the Anna Wintour-ish fashion magazine editor Miranda Priestly should be showered with riches and praise, and Streep makes the most out of just about every scene she’s in.
However, she’s not the protagonist of the movie, and her character isn’t the one that experiences any growth or change. Andy, Hathaway’s character, starts the story as a dispassionate and reluctant employee, becomes a ruthless social climber as she’s sucked further into the fashion world, and by the story’s end, she regains her humanity and leaves the magazine more passionate about the career she actually wants for herself. Miranda starts the movie as the mythically over-demanding boss, and though she’s willing to give Andy a recommendation in the end, she’s still fundamentally the same person.
Who is actually better? Honestly, I don’t know. But it doesn’t matter, because either way, Anne Hathaway is phenomenal in this movie. Let us, at the very least, praise her for holding her own opposite Meryl Streep.
Now, to me, the brilliance of Hathaway’s performance in The Devil Wears Prada, much like her performance in Brokeback Mountain, comes from her restraint. In the beginning of the story, Andy couldn’t care less about the fashion industry, Miranda’s magazine, or the comments her shallow coworkers make about her wardrobe. As someone who has a similar attitude about the fashion industry, I can certainly relate. But if you do care about fashion, one can still find ways to sympathize with chum in a pool full of sharks. Though some of us may want Andy to rise up to her cackling office mates or her ridiculous boss, Hathaway instead chooses to play Andy as indifferent rather than angry or condescending.
As a result, her seduction into the fashion world is a bit more believable. Personalities don’t drastically change overnight, and Hathaway could’ve played Andy a bit more rude in, say, the scene where Miranda chooses between two nearly identical belts. Instead, she just sees the whole exercise as silly. Thus when Miranda lectures her and she chooses to learn the intricacies of the fashion world and actually put effort into doing her job, we understand that her newfound competency isn’t driven by revenge or the desire to prove a point, but as a natural part of her character.
Similarly, when Andy’s personality and life choices begin to mimic that of Miranda and Emily, Miranda’s other assistant, Hathaway does a great job holding back on that front as well. Let’s take, for example, the scene where Andy snaps at her friends who are playing Keep Away with her ringing phone. How would Miranda act in this scene? I would say that she would give her friends the talking-down-to of their lives. She wouldn’t scream or go into hysterics, but she would break each of them down, calmly, with her words. How about Emily? She would probably start yelling, given that she isn’t in as much control of her feelings as Miranda. Andy simply calls them all assholes and walks out, favoring the people she used to rant to her friends about.
Once again, the key here is grace. She starts to mimic Miranda and Emily, but she never fully becomes them. It’s not a drastic shift in personality so much as Miranda and Emily bring out the worst in Andy, and she suffers as a result.
There are a million ways to screw the Andy character up, but Hathaway doesn’t fall for any of them. She doesn’t play Andy as ditzy. She’s easily overwhelmed, but not incompetent, and she has problems summoning the effort in the areas of her life that she doesn’t prioritize. Under Hathaway’s control, she also never becomes “The woman who is obsessed with her career and is no fun at all.”
Instead, Hathaway plays her as a relatable person with problems just about everyone on the planet has experienced before. I see myself in Andy, and I believe her transformation thanks to Hathaway’s approach to the character. She could’ve played Andy too unlikable in the beginning or too monstrous towards the end. But she keeps her on track.
Rachel Getting Married (2008)
(Sorry about the quality on this video. Turns out not a lot of people have uploaded the scene I wanted.)
Is she the best part of it: Yes.
I think Hathaway’s portrayal of Kym, a guilt ridden drug addict in Rachel Getting Married, is probably the best performance of her career thus far. It’s so effective that I felt like I knew everything about her within her first two scenes.
Of course, part of this is the writing and directing, but as I watched the beginning of the movie, I was immediately reminded of where I was when I was watching it, for you see, I saw Rachel Getting Married for the first time during my junior year of college. Of course I don’t mean to paint my fellow classmates in broad strokes, but certain personalities become attracted to certain institutions and ideas, and I feel like I’ve met Kym many times across many different genders and sexual identities in institutions that practice the liberal arts. Those who’ve had some sort of traumatizing event happen to them or they’ve had to struggle with substance abuse or a psychiatric disorder or any number of large or small problems that affect how they communicate and interact with the world around them.
So when I say, “I felt like I knew everything about her within the first two scenes,” I mean that she’s virtually indistinguishable from a lot of people I met in college in almost frightening ways. In fact, I could’ve paused the movie, walked out of my dorm, and had a conversation with her.
Let’s start with a personality trait or two amongst these people I will now call “Kyms” because I’m an oversimplifying asshole. "Kyms" often have a highly inappropriate relationship with the more contentious parts of their personality and trauma, and they’ll share them with you at the drop of a dime. They make jokes to shine some light on the darkness in, seemingly, a weird attempt to diffuse some sort of implied pre-existing awkwardness that may or may not actually be there. (Usually the latter.) In reality, it comes off more assaultive than they mean, and before you know it, their social awkwardness has somehow become your problem. (Yes, this is a selfish way of looking at it. I don’t mean to sound like I’m putting anybody down. My personality is more in the “extremely closed off” end of the emotional spectrum, and I find it more interesting than something that bothers me or makes me angry.)
In Rachel Getting Married, Kym is constantly making jokes about her stays in rehab or jail or her experiences with drugs. It’s rare that anyone ever laughs at them, and it makes everyone around her extremely uncomfortable. Her pain is very real, as is the pain of actual “Kyms,” but she has a way of unloading on people that made me immediately think of a conversation I had with a girl in one of my classes who made a passing joke about cutting herself, and the casualness with which Hathaway presents these stories was chilling in its accuracy.
“Kyms” also have certain physical ticks, especially the ones that have dealt with substance abuse. Every bit of stimuli that doesn’t agree with their world view seems to physically bother them, and the energy they put into repressing those feelings eventually comes out as a disdain towards everything around them in their general vicinity. I mention this because there’s a scene later on when Kym yells about the wedding band during their rehearsal/jam session on the porch, and I could feel her annoyance on a weird somatic level.
On top of other personality traits common in “Kyms,” Hathaway nails Kym’s sense of remorse. I’m not an actor, but I’ve spent plenty of time studying acting and observing actors, and I think one of the hardest emotions to sell to an audience is guilt. You’re required to bring certain emotions and memories to the surface, but then try like hell to hold them all back. I’m the kind of person who finds it sadder to watch somebody try not to cry than it is to watch them start bawling, and thus I’m always impressed when an actor can sell it.
There’s a scene a little bit before the halfway point, of Rachel Getting Married where Kym tells her AA group about how she accidentally killed her little brother. (It's the one embedded above.) It’s a devastating scene that never dovetails into sobbing. Kym simply has to tell her story, and she tries to do so while holding it together. She doesn’t really succeed, and it’s one of the more nakedly emotional scenes in the film. But Hathaway seems to have complete control in selling a character who has no control of her own. It’s some of her finest work, and she’s brilliant in every second of it.
As I said, this is my favorite performance from Hathaway, but it’s also my favorite movie I’m talking about in this article. Go see Rachel Getting Married if you haven’t, and rest in peace Jonathan Demme. You’re dearly missed.
The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
Is she the best part of it: I think so, yes.
I've never been more back-and-forth with a franchise than with Nolan’s Batman films. At the time they came out, I was in absolute love with them. Then I cooled on them as I watched more films and began to study writing more. During those days, my friends suffered through many lengthy annoying rants from me about how, say, all the dialogue in Batman Begins is the characters constantly blathering their shallow life philosophies at each other or the strangeness of The Dark Knight’s structuring and how it seems to have five or six acts instead of the usual three. Nowadays, I’ve made my peace with them again. But I’ve had one constant opinion: I never liked The Dark Knight Rises.
Mind you, it’s far from terrible. It has a lot of ideas that could’ve been spectacular, but without getting too bogged down in the details, it’s a clunky story that constantly hobbles itself, and add me to the loud annoying internet horde who’ll be more than happy to enlighten you on the lameness of the ending. It’s one of those movies that’s glimmering with potential, but doesn’t reach it, and becomes frustrating because you know half these problems could’ve been solved with a script rewrite or two.
My biggest problem, however, are the characters. The Joker lends a certain weight to the structure of The Dark Knight because he’s an agent of chaos. As such, I can buy that he has these ultra elaborate plans that he seems to be pulling out of his ass. The Joker brings literal disorder, and thus it works for me that the structure’s a bit off.
Bane is just as theatrical, but his process is more structured and thought out. As a result, the rambling nature of the storyline doesn’t work as well for me, and my focus turns to the other elements I don’t like. Mainly that Bane is basically just an accent and a mask and Batman is just plain old overly moralizing Batman.
While part of Nolan’s genius in his Batman films was to step away from some of the more comic book-y elements of superhero movies, I found myself missing those elements in the grizzle voiced oeuvre of Nolan’s take on the franchise. Thus what I needed in the final film was a bit of chaos, or more specifically, what I needed was some actual fun. Enter Anne Hathaway and her turn as Catwoman.
Hathaway’s Catwoman is also theatrical, but the difference comes from what’s being fulfilled inside her. I enjoy characters who have a great time being themselves, and Hathaway brings a certain delight to the moral ambiguousness of Selina Kyle. She loves stealing from the rich but doesn’t like seeing the suffering of the poor. She’s not a violent person by nature, but she doesn’t have a problem hurting people now and then, freeing herself from the strict moral code of Batman. Sometimes the audience wants Batman to kill, and Selina is a character who gives the audience what they want. (My audience cheered when she fired that round into Bane.)
In the end, I don’t think the movie did right by her. Some of the editing choices in her scenes were strange, she only shows up only when convenient, and I don’t think the movie sells her relationship with Bruce Wayne.
However, Hathaway does the most with what she has. Most of this article, I’ve praised Hathaway for her restraint, but in The Dark Knight Rises, she gleefully doesn’t have any. She’s your classic sassy thief with a heart of gold. I loved how she dropped her maid cover in the Wayne house after Bruce catches her. I loved her breaking that prisoner’s hand, even though that’s one of the awkward edits I was talking about. I loved the casualness at which she wants to hurt people and Batman doesn’t.
Nolan’s Catwoman isn’t the most substantive role, but she's certainly the most entertaining. And just so I don’t sound too down on Nolan, Dunkirk is the best movie I’ve seen so far this year.
Les Misérables (2012)
Is she the best part of the movie: Good god, yes.
The 2012 Les Mis is, in the end, a failure. But a respectable failure. Sure, there was some miscasting and some technical choices that didn’t do it for me. (Mainly on the editing end.) But at least it tried new things, even if they didn’t necessarily work.
On top of the experimentation, add the inherent problems of adapting a work from a medium where actors are expected to be loud and pronounced to one where subtlety is often more powerful. Les Mis in particular was written to be performed as big and grandiose as possible, and that element can prove irksome when the director wants an intimate close-up rather than a big booming moment that will rock the theater to its knees.
This, I think, is a small part of Hathaway’s brilliance in the role. She can take the biggest moments of Fantine’s journey in Les Mis and make them intimate. You feel every moment of it, and yet, it’s like the world outside where her john is probably making life hell for some other poor woman doesn’t exist. When Russell Crowe is singing, you’re in a theater with everyone else. When Anne Hathaway sings, it’s just you in a room with a woman whose life is falling apart.
And it’s here where I feel the need to talk about technical singing versus performative singing, because I think there’s an important difference between the two and I know some people in the performing arts who have problems with Hathaway’s performance for reasons that I don’t think I understand that well.
Let us suppose for a brief second that I want to paint you a painting of a flower. On one hand, I could paint you an expertly crafted sunflower that looks identical to a real one. (Actually I can’t paint at all, but this is a hypothetical.) It may look nice, and you may find some sort of enjoyment or meaning in it. But it doesn’t engage. It’s the kind of painting you hang in an area of your house or apartment that you rarely visit but has a wall that could use some artwork. On the other hand, I could paint you something that may not necessarily resemble a flower, but could also be more vibrant and involving. Something you could look at and maybe a brain cell or two could light up somewhere in the back of your mind.
I say this not as an underhanded way of suggesting that Anne Hathaway doesn’t have a nice voice. On the contrary, I think her voice is amazing. I say this to point out that technical skill doesn't always equal "best art." All that really matters in the end is whether or not her voice was effective. Hathaway’s performance in Les Mis works for me because she can make her voice sound overly precious and delicate, then immediately shift it towards raw and unrestrained as her circumstances rapidly grow worse. Fantine’s story involves a proud virtuous (by Christian standards) worker being broken down until she has to turn to prostitution. Anyone who performs her needs to be able convey both the beginning and the end of her journey.
I may want to argue in another article one day that I’m not sure Les Mis actually works in movie form. On stage, it makes sense that a story can work by jumping from song to song to song. But that’s not how effective stories work on film. Still, I have somewhat of a soft spot for this movie, despite some its more bizarre quirks, and I think Anne Hathaway is above and beyond the best part of it. Her version of “I Dreamed a Dream” is the version of the song, and that Oscar was well earned.
Also, shout out to Samantha Barks. Thought she was fantastic as well.
Interstellar (2014)
Is she the best part of it: No.
Does her contribution make the film better: I think so, yes.
Say it with me: Anne Hathaway did not write the love speech. She only did her job in performing it.
Say it again. Reflect on what that means.
Now consider that the substance of her speech actually has plenty of merit even if, I’ll admit, the syntax is far from perfect. (Mikey’s got this one covered.)
As far as her performance goes, I’ll admit that I’m at a little bit of a loss with this one because I don’t really think Interstellar does right by her. I don’t have a full grasp of who Brand is, and I don’t really have a lot to say here.
I just want to make two points. The one thing I can say about Brand is that I totally buy her arc from cynical skeptic to hopeful and willing to do what’s necessary for a more optimistic future. In a way, her character slowly becomes more like Cooper, our protagonist, who remains bright eyed and bushy tailed in regards to humanity’s future because he has to. He’ll be damned if he’s going to let his children suffer on a dying planet.
A little bit before the halfway mark, Brand makes a mistake that costs Cooper decades with his children. She can see what her mistake does to Cooper, and her realization about the transcendent powers of love comes from her feelings that bubble to the surface when she sees what she’s done to him.
It would be an understandable choice to play her as a remorseful mess. Instead, Hathaway plays up Brand’s strength. She doesn’t cower under the covers. She learns. She tries to steer Cooper in a certain direction when it comes to picking the next planet to visit. She now understands that there’s a force driving these people, and instead of cold logic, maybe there’s something to leaning into the emotional impulses that steer their decision making. Cooper rules against her, but eventually, he’ll learn that she was right.
The second point is a simple reminder: Sometimes what we call “bad acting” is actually bad writing or bad directing or even, in some cases, bad editing. Sometimes “good acting” can happen despite of these bad filmmaking and the other way around. If there’s an element to a movie you don’t like, your gut feeling may be to blame the actress playing the character. Ignore that feeling.
I’ve never really clicked with Interstellar, though I do respect the hell out of it. And just to reiterate, I think Christopher Nolan is a brilliant brilliant director. However, characters and dialogue seem to be his weakness when it comes to his lesser films, and Hathaway doesn’t have a whole lot to do here, despite the narrative heft thrusted upon her character.
Still, her instincts shine to me, and her presence made her scenes more enjoyable.
The Intern (2015)
Is she the best part of it: I personally think so, but I also agree with Tarantino that De Niro is fantastic.
The Intern is a severely underrated movie. There are plenty of incredibly dumb pop culture hills I’m willing to die on, and this is one of them.
If all you’ve seen of The Intern is the marketing material, then I understand why you may have read the previous sentences and thought to yourself, “This person is clearly off his gourd." And I'll admit that it's very much the movie you think it is in the beginning, with a lot of "old people don't understand technology" and "millennials are weird" and "white female protagonist works hard and is cold" material. However, that stuff eventually recedes into the background, and the film then becomes a subtly powerful meditation on the role work plays in our lives. What do we hope to get out of it beyond stability? When a mother spends most of her time at her job rather than at home, why do we need to contextualize it as choosing one over the other? What does an older widower from an older world see in a woman who’s essentially built a company in her image, and why does he care so much that it remain in her control?
Anne Hathaway plays Jules Ostin, a young woman running a fashion startup that’s taking off thanks in large part to her management style and her personal touch in every aspect of how the business runs. On paper, she seems like a bit of a cliché. Read that description and I’m sure your mind immediately goes to the overly stressed out spastic woman who drinks too much coffee and never gets off her phone. (She does have the latter problem but.. shut up.) However, Hathaway plays Jules like someone who chose this life, and thus doesn’t freak out when said life dumps in her lap and causes her stress.
When the working day is done, Jules goes home to her husband Matt and her daughter Paige. She understands the effect her absence has on them, and she does feel guilty. (Even though she shouldn’t. My mother worked similar, if not later, hours than Jules and I never felt unloved for a second.) However, there’s an understanding in the house. Of course they rely on her to provide, but above all else, everyone just wants her to succeed and be happy.
Or at least they appear this way, as it’s revealed devastatingly late into the film that Matt is having an affair. On some level, Jules thinks she "deserves" a cheating husband, and thus confused about what she should be feeling, Hathaway plays her as feeling everything at once. Angry, but not ballistic. Sad, but not hysterical. In control, but operating in a crisis.
We all have romantic fantasies of broad over-the-top freak outs when our lives spiral out of control and our loved ones cheat and our jobs stress us out. But most people aren't that strong or immature. Strength, for Jules, comes from the ability to handle problems, not from throwing adolescent tantrums when our problems feel all consuming. Thus, Hathaway plays her as one of us. Not a broad movie character.
Again, the key here is control. To make it seem like you’re close to the edge, but never actually cross it. It’s not the kind of performance that wins awards or gets mentioned when you’re talking about the best performances of an actress’s career because it’s not big earth shattering work designed for emotional devastation or a test of skill. But it’s a performance that adds layers to a normal human being.
One more thing: I know it may be hard to accept the notion that Anne Hathaway did a better job than Robert De Niro, but again, Hathaway’s character is the one with the arc. Unlike The Devil Wears Prada, both learn a significant amount from one another. But De Niro’s character, Ben, ends his story in the same place, whereas Jules’s arc is one of self-acceptance and conquering doubt. Both do incredible work, and the competitive framework I’m using is dumb.
Go see The Intern. Now.
Colossal (2017)
(There aren't really any clips of it up yet, except for the end, so here's the trailer.)
Is she the best part of it: Yes, but Jason Sudeikis does some damn fine work here.
Colossal isn’t a perfect movie. It’s a bit clunky in its conception and I don’t really think it digs deep enough into its characters to be as affective as it wants to be. But it is interesting, and generally speaking, worth your time.
Anne Hathaway plays Gloria, an alcoholic writer. Her boyfriend, fed up with her behavior and her inability to deal with her problems, breaks up with her, and so she moves back to the dead end middle American small town where she grew up. She reconnects with her friend Oscar, who now, of course, runs a bar. They drink. They stay out. They discover that if they walk through a certain park in the middle of town, they can summon giant monsters in Seoul. Allegories for alcoholism and its effects abound.
We’ve seen Hathaway play people who struggle with substance abuse before. However, there are several distinct differences between the way she plays Gloria and the way she plays Kym. Kym, for instance, is an aggressive personality. She’s almost too open about her substance abuse, and she’ll take any excuse she can to cram her addiction down your throat. Gloria, on the other hand, is much quieter. She likes to go out and have a good time, and I think she knows she’s an alcoholic. But you wouldn’t know she has a problem unless you got to know her. Colossal tackles alcoholism from an Iceman Cometh group standpoint, and her demons mostly come out when she’s being enabled. Alone, she’s capable of being honest with herself.
On top of this, they’re at much different points in their relationships with alcohol. Kym is in recovery, and though she still has a monkey on her back, she’s beginning to cope with the soul crushing guilt that her addiction as led to. Gloria isn’t even close to recovery. She realizes the pain alcohol brings to her life, but she keeps drinking regardless. Kym has a more forceful disposition, but Gloria’s the more irresponsible person. On a certain level, it would make sense to play Gloria more like Kym. Instead, Hathaway plays Gloria like someone trying to hide herself, something Kym would never do. As a result, at least for someone who doesn’t like standing out like me, Gloria feels like a more relatable human being than Kym.
However, what impresses me the most about her performance in Colossal is her presence. Oscar, as it turns out, is pure scum, and once he discovers his ability to summon a giant monster, he truly puts the “toxic” in “toxic masculinity.” The more abusive Oscar becomes, the more Gloria, out of fear, submits to his whims. Eventually, Oscar crosses the line, so Gloria flies to Seoul, walks over to the area where her and Oscar’s monsters appear, and she summons her monster back in her hometown to take care of Oscar.
Script wise, I don’t quite think the story has done all it needs to in order to have us fully invested in the moment. But I think Hathaway sells the final fight in her performance. There’s something about the way she performs the scene that makes her feel like a huge badass. (Of course, part of it is the direction.) I don’t really know what that “something” is. When Arnold Schwarzenegger or whoever shows up on screen and they’re about to beat the hell out of someone, there’s a physical thing they’re doing that makes you root for them. I'm running out of steam and I'm having trouble describing it, but whatever that something is, Anne Hathaway is doing it.
Colossal isn’t the most exciting of Hathaway’s roles and the movie, once again, doesn’t do right by her character. But I like the strange place it occupies in her filmography in that there’s a bit of a lot of characters she’s played throughout the years. The destructiveness of Kym. At times, the vulnerability of Fantine. At other times, the strength of Jules. So on and so forth. I'm writing this jet lagged.
That Point I Talked About Earlier
Though I saw The Dark Knight Rises in theaters, my first "holy shit" moment with Anne Hathaway was Les Mis. I watched a screener of it at family friend’s house during Oscar season, and after her rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream,” she immediately became one of those actresses I’ll see in anything because she’s in it.
I shared my newfound enthusiasm with a few friends of mine, and all began to immediately shit talk her. “Why?” I would ask. “She’s just sort of annoying.” They would respond. Or something to that effect. “…but WHY!?!” I would yell back, increasingly frustrated. Whatever they said after this, I’ll never know, because I was already in a blind rage and wasn’t listening.
I wondered if anyone else felt this way, so I did some googling, and it turns out, um… yes. People do.
My point then is this: Of all the actresses we had to randomly throw scorn on for no particular reason, why did it have to be one who’s so obviously talented? What specifically about Anne Hathaway makes her worthy of your ire, except for the fact that she's a woman?
And don’t give me that bullshit about her “vibe.” Nine times out of ten, when someone complains about not liking a certain woman’s “vibe,” what they’re really saying is, “She doesn’t remind me of my mother” or “Some girl was mean to me in kindergarten once” or “I’m a fucking dumbass and I can’t express my thoughts good.”
If you were looking for a rational reason from me as to why people don’t like her, I don’t have one to give you because there isn’t one. It's misogynist bullshit. It's lizard brained cavemen bullshit. It's all the bullshit of every subcategory of bullshit you can think of. It might be counterproductive to fight pettiness with more pettiness, but when you’re one person and you confront an entity as vast and hopelessly irrational as the internet, you can’t help but feel overcome with a sense of awe, and you let it take you in, the remnants of what used to be your ability to reason melting in your hands.
So, yeah, the bias against Anne Hathaway is fucking stupid. Logic dictates that I can’t tell you that you’re not allowed to dislike Anne Hathaway. You are entitled to your opinion. But I’m saying it anyway. Because fuck you. Anne Hathaway is awesome.
"Oh great, another article defending Anne Hathaway!" shouts some prepubescent cow fucker in some deep corner of the internet. Yes. Another one. May they never stop. Go fuck yourself.
