It's about damn time

I just wish that Kate Winslet, with an extraordinary body of work behind her already at the age of 33, didn't have to, as she quipped in that infamous episode of Extras, make a movie about the Holocaust -- a clip that will now live in infamy. It's true that to some degree, Winslet has played a variation of the same character in every film in which she's starred. She's always the free spirit battling the Forces of Authority and Expectation. But aren't most good roles for women some variation of this character? And if you have a choice between playing Woman Triumphant or, say, Sophie in Sophie's Choice or Leticia Musgrove in Monster's Ball, who are YOU going to want to play? The fact of the matter is that women who buck societal expectations are far more interesting as cinematic fodder.

When Winslet's body of work is discussed, it's always in the context of That Boat Movie and the films she's done since. But to get a sense of just how talented this woman is, you have to look back at the work she did before anyone knew who she was.

Here's Winslet at the age of seventeen in Heavenly Creatures, directed by a guy named Peter Jackson:

In Sense and Sensibility at eighteen:

And in Jude at nineteen:

And all this BEFORE the boat movie.

Say what you will, the woman has talent. She has talent, she's built her career the way SHE wanted it, not the way others might have; dieting down to a size zero and exercising her way into a column of sinew and gristle. She swears, she smokes, and doesn't mince words. And women everywhere adore her. But in the industry and the press, there's been this undercurrent of Katehate for the last decade, with endless articles about her weight, her personal life, and this year, her unabashed longing for the golden statue. Does the entertainment press really believe that any of these people believe that "it's an honor just to be nominated"? Do they really expect us to believe that disappointed losers don't spend a little time in the ladies' room fixing their mascara after a few unbidden tears crept out?

Perhaps it's that women aren't supposed to openly want anything. The obsession with Winslet's weight (and is there anyone left on earth who still thinks she's fat?), the fact that her characters are all women who WANT -- they want love, they want sex, they want to LIVE -- all contribute to the impression that this is a woman with APPETITES. And perhaps that's terrifying to an industry in which anything over a size zero is considered to be an elephant. And she WANTED to win an Academy Award, which seems to be some kind of heinous covetousness instead of refreshingly honest.

This is a woman who, like the characters she plays, lives her life on her own terms. Perhaps the entertainment press found her unseemingly covetous in recent weeks. But for those of us who admire the gift of being able to draw us into the inner life of a character on screen, last night was a recognition that is long overdue.

(UPDATE: God knows there's plenty about which I disagree with Melissa on a regular basis. But about this post? Word. But I think I like this photo better.)

From the "It's about freakin' time" file

In a country that eats celebrities for lunch, even those who are famous for nothing other than being famous, the resonance that Kate Winslet has for women in this country is a curious phenomenon. It isn't just that she is possessed of a tremendous talent that has been evident since her chilling portrayal of Juliet Hulme at the age of seventeen in Heavenly Creatures, directed by a guy no one ever heard of named Peter Jackson. At eighteen she set the industry on fire as Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility. At nineteen she brought Thomas Hardy's Sue Bridehead to heartbreaking life in Michael Winterbottom's unrelentlingly bleak and nearly unseen adaptation of Jude the Obscure. And that was all before being old enough to drink in this country.

And it went on. Hamlet. That Boat Movie. Iris. Little Children. Award nomination after award nomination, with nothing to show for it. Camille Paglia is STILL angry at Helen Hunt for stealing Kate's Oscar®, even after all these years. Until now.

But for those of us for whom this actress is something akin to a goddess, it's about more than talent. It's about that certain intangible something that some celebrities have that makes us think they're Just Like Us. Of course they aren't, no matter how hard they try. But while someone like Angelina Jolie displays a certain "Yes, I am a goddess" hauteur who may deign to rain a few pennies upon your unwashed head, Kate Winslet displays the accessibility of someone who'd happily go off with us for a spot of tea if you accosted her on the street and mentioned something interesting.

But while Winslet's talent shone long before That Boat Movie, it was said Boat Movie that catapulted her from mere Great Actress into Goddess on Earth. There are two reasons for this. One is that while James Cameron can't write dialogue for shit, he managed to create the Free Spirit Woman Triumphant to end all Free Spirit Women Triumphant. It may very well be that the frenzy about that film revolved around its male star among the teen set, but for us grown-ups, what resonated was that montage of photographs at the end -- not just the romance of a young girl but the entire life of a woman. And to some degree, Winslet has been playing a variation of that character ever since.

But the second reason we rallied around Kate back in the late 1990s was because of the "W"-word: weight. At a time when the willowy Gwyneth Paltrow was on the rise as The Perfect Female, there was Kate, with breasts and thighs and arms that had some heft to them. And they called her "fat." And we rallied around her as if she were our sister, being picked on by the world. Her battle was our battle, and we embraced her as one of our own. Even last night, with nearly all traces of that womanly figure toned down to a media-acceptable level, she still seemed to be Our Kate. And the fact that the only person in the room thinner than she was last night was the horrifically emaciated Sally Hawkins seemed not to matter: Underneath we know she's still our girl, and the female blogosphere is ecstatic at the double win. Chrissy at All My Jiggly Bits exults, "Kate Winslet is my Homegirl!" Mo Pie at Big Fat Deal notes how Winslet credits DiCaprio for telling her she has to "let the fat girl thing go." Melissa has the photo that's worth a thousand words. Carolyn Robertson asks, "Was I the only one bawling during Kate Winslet’s Revolutionary Road acceptance speech?" (Answer: No.)

So I'm not sure what it is about Winslet that makes us adore her so; even cynics like me who are all too aware that the image you see of people on television has nothing to do with what they're like in real life. Perhaps we see her as Cinderella made real -- a girl with body issues who decided that talent is the best revenge -- and turned into a swan anyway. Perhaps it's the characters she plays, or at least the ones who don't end up in jail or punishing themselves for the rest of their lives. But whatever it is, yes, Kate is our homegirl. And maybe now Camille Paglia can forgive Helen Hunt.

(And just for the record: My second favorite moment last night was Colin Farrell's win for the delightful In Bruges. I happened to catch this on New Year's Eve, and I'd forgotten how great Farrell can be given the right material and the right director. His acceptance was curiously subdued and possessed of a sweetness reminiscent to his character from A Home at the End of the World -- and it gave me hope that perhaps Farrell has avoided succumbing to Mickey Rourke's disease. For while Rourke may hae won an acting award last night, who the hell would want to take that circuitous a route?)

Fat Actress????

Kate Winslet in "Revolutionary Road"

If it's November, it's Oscar® season, and if it's Oscar® season, the chances are pretty good that Kate Winslet is going to be in the thick of it. This year, as in 2004, she's in not one but two Oscar-bait films -- The Reader, directed by Stephen Daldry of The Hours fame, in which she plays a German woman on trial for war crimes, and a film that would be dismissed as a gimmick were it not an adaptation of Richard Yates' "Revolutionary Road", a 1961 novel that is on the Time Magazine "All-Time 100 Novels" list.

The gimmick is that Yates' squabbling couple puts Winslet on screen with Leonardo DiCaprio again, the two of them having decided that a decade has offered sufficient time since That Boat Movie for them to appear on screen again. That they portray a squabbling suburban couple longing to break free from the expectations and roles into which their 1950's timeframe has thrust them by going to Paris gives an added frisson of synchronicity that I have no doubt some of the then-young audience for That Boat Movie will find amusing as they too are now a decade older.

Those of us who were movie buffs were familiar with those two crazy kids long before Titanic came out. DiCaprio had already shown he had The Right Stuff in This Boy's Life and The Basketball Diaries, a terrific film that unfortunately has become identified with the Columbine massacre but that is definitely worth seeing. Winslet was already familiar from Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility, which combined girlcrush-object-in-training Winslet with the divine girlcrush-object-already Emma Thompson, and threw in the Thinking Woman's Sex Symbol Alan Rickman, and the gorgeous Greg Wise, now better known as Mr. Emma Thompson. But for those who weren't aficionados of even this most mainstream of arthouse flicks, this on-screen pairing was like dynamite. Of course if you were Winslet, and if you were in a movie where you were being forced to marry as bad an actor as Billy Zane, you too would want to run off with the feline-faced DiCaprio, even if he did look fourteen at the time.

But it is ten years later, DiCaprio's career has finally escaped the shadow of the iceberg and he has aged into a credible male star, while Winslet has spent the last decade cranking out masterpiece after masterpiece, so it seems to be time to bring these two most talented actors of their generation together again.

But if it's Winslet Season again, it's time for endless ink to be spilled about her weight.

Why is it that every time this healthy size six is in a movie, she never gets to talk about her character, or what it's like to work with Geoffrey Rush (Quills) or Judi Dench (Iris)? Why doesn't anyone ask her what it's like to play an intense role opposite the star with whom she's most closely identified, a star with whom she's close friends, all rolled together into a film directed by her husband, Sam Mendes? Why is it that every time Kate Winslet is on screen, there is only one topic anyone wants to ask her about -- her figure?

China Daily: "Kate Winslet's body is 'errific'to work with"

Fametastic (UK): "Kate Winslet: my body isn’t perfect but it’s who I am"

Digital Spy (UK): "Winslet dismisses dieting 'fads'"

RTE Entertainment, Ireland: "Winslet says she doesn't believe in diets"

Javno (frickin' CROATIA): Kate Winslet Says She Has `Crumble Baby Belly´

What the hell?

Kate Winslet is a gorgeous 32-year-old who's had two kids, doesn't diet, and doesn't spend her every waking hour working out. She's married to a guy who used to be one of the industry's most notorious serial monogamists and held onto him for seven years. She's had two kids. Most straight women would happily switch teams for her. She's one of the most admired women in show business by other women BECAUSE she's unapologetic about her body, and yet every fucking time she's in a movie, we have to go through this. Is the press going to keep doing this until she has the common decency to become an anorexic, so they can get on her case about that?

When Titanic became a phenomenon, the press all claimed that the audience was teenaged girls who went to see it over and over again because Leonardo DiCaprio was then what Zac Efron is now -- the 'tween dreamboat. I don't know about teenagers, but the women I knew were enthralled by the character that Kate Winslet brought to the screen, a character that she has arguably played to one degree or another in every film in which she's ever starred: a woman trying mightily to find her own way in a society fraught with expectations that just don't fit who she is. For all that James Cameron couldn't write dialogue worth a damn, that much got through.

Perhaps the reason Winslet always plays this kind of character, and does it so well, is that she lives it every day of her career. In a world that demands its women be so thin that they might as well disappear, Kate Winslet dares to take up space.

Introducing the new B@B program, "Entertainment Every Now and Then"

Tonight on EENT:

Henry VIII as Elvis
If you're a Tudor England buff, or if you just like ripsnorting costume drama, then don't miss The Tudors on Showtime this Sunday night at 9. I wrote about it a bit here after watching episode 1 online. If you haven't yet had a chance to catch it, you can whet your appetite here. Showtime is showing episodes 1 and 2, but they are Flash files that are for some reason just unwatchable. Presumably their servers are getting hammered. Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, the Irish actor who won a Golden Globe for playing Elvis Presley, portrays Henry VIII as a combination of Elvis and Alex deLarge in A Clockwork Orange. It's truly bizarro stuff, complete with a gay subplot and strange compressions of time that have a young, hot Henry pursuing Anne Boleyn instead of one already on the cusp of middle age. But if you, like me, have been finding yourself reading Philippa Gregory's turgid and clunky Tudor novels and being unable to tear yourself away from them, this is right up your alley.

And Straight Guys All Over America are Groaning
Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the movies; now that Kate Winslet is a thirtysomething mother of two with five Oscar® nominations under her belt and Leonardo DiCaprio finally looks old enough to order a beer, the Titanic stars, crows-feet and all, are reuniting on the big screen in a film directed by Kate's hubby, Sam Mendes:

Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet are teaming for the first time since "Titanic" to star in DreamWorks' "Revolutionary Road."
Sam Mendes will direct the pic, based on the acclaimed 1961 novel by Richard Yates about post-war disillusionment.

John N. Hart, Scott Rudin, Bobby Cohen and Mendes, who's married to Winslet, will produce in association with BBC Films.

Yates' heart-rending and bleak tome, celebrated for its storytelling style, follows a seemingly happy suburban couple with two children in the mid-1950s who find themselves caught between their true desires and the pressure to conform -- with explosive consequences.

Mendes begins lensing this summer from an adapted screenplay by scribe Justin Haythe, said DreamWorks chair-CEO Stacey Snider.

Paramount Pictures has worldwide rights.

"As one of the most venerated post-war American novels, it is both fitting and thrilling that it's come together with this extraordinary group of artists," Rudin said.

The idea of the most hyped on-screen lovers of the 1990's portraying an unhappy married couple is so delightfully twisted it's downright inspired. Color me psyched.

And finally, with next Sunday's premiere of the final season of The Sopranos you should note that the building that has portrayed Satriale's Pork Store throughout the series is being torn down and turned into condos and a parking garage. No word on whether demolition contractors expect to find any of Richie Aprile's body parts.

(Apologies to ModFab for treading on the turf he always handles so much better.)