Dunst deserves recognition
It’s taken far too long for the world to catch up to the fact that Kirsten Dunst is wonderful
“Kirsten Dunst could do Once Upon a Time in Hollywood , but Leonardo DiCaprio couldn’t do Bring It On .”
The meme, which made its way around the Twittersphere last week, coincided with an interview on SiriusXM’s In Depth with Larry Flick in which the actress pointed out that, although she’s long paid her dues, it’s rare she receives any kind of recognition.
“I’ve never been nominated for anything,” she said. “Maybe like, twice for a Golden Globe when I was little and one for Fargo. I always feel like…I don’t know, maybe they just think I’m the girl from Bring It On . … Well, remember when Marie Antoinette — y’all panned it? And now you all love it. Remember Drop Dead Gorgeous ? Panned. Now you all love it. … I feel a lot of things I do people like later. I’ve never been recognized in my industry. I am so chill. Maybe I don’t play the game enough. But then I do, I mean, I do everything I’m supposed to. It’s not like I’m rude or like, not doing publicity or anything. It’d be nice to be recognized by your peers.”
It’s true. Dunst hasn’t received the accolades her contemporaries have. DiCaprio began as a child star in much the way she did, while her generational peers — Reese Witherspoon, Michelle Williams, Scarlett Johansson — have all graduated from similar roles to the ones Dunst began with and moved onto larger projects and greater acclaim. Even while they’ve all been able to get producing projects off the ground, Dunst has seen hers passed on (including a Bell Jar adaptation and a Faerie Tale Theatre reboot).
Perhaps the lack of recognition
is due to Dunst’s versatility. As her work has evolved, it’s been hard to nail down a throughline. There was Interview with the Vampire , and then the eccentric comedies (Dick, Drop Dead Gorgeous); the ethereal, Sofia Coppola dramas (Virgin Suicides, Marie Antoinette, The Beguiled); the rom-coms (Wimbledon, Elizabethtown); sort-of-sci-fidramas (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Melancholia) and, of course, Mary-Jane Watson in the original Spider-Man trilogy, the rare time she was limited to the role of The Girlfriend.
Each of these films were, in a way, ahead of their time, whether that was in their dark undertones or the Tumblrification of a Coppola-esque aesthetic. Just look at how many of the original films Dunst starred in — including Little Women, Jumanji and Spiderman — that
are now getting the remake treatment. She certainly had her finger on a pulse.
Having flitted from genre to genre, Dunst’s excellence seems a fit for everything — and therefore it’s hard to consider her a specialist at anything. What she uniquely brings to her work is an offbeat nature, a quirkiness and a sense of gloom. That’s a surprisingly endearing fusion of qualities, and has morphed her into a certified character actress, the type of performer who makes a meal out of cult favourites and gets lost in bigger pictures.
It seems an unlikely career path for a former child actor who graduated into the type of popular teen movies — Bring It On, Get Over It — that can damn actresses to a lifetime of Riverdale-esque roles. It’s likely not a coincidence that Dunst and some of her cast-mates — Jesse Bradford, Gabrielle Union and Eliza Dushku — were still playing teenagers onscreen well into their 20s. But where Dunst differs is that she was also taking on quieter but meatier roles in movies like The Virgin Suicides, Deeply and Crazy/Beautiful. From there, her entire career has gone back and forth from comedy to drama, blockbuster to indie: She played Marie Antoinette (2006) between starring as Mary-Jane in the first (2004) and second (2007) Spider-Man sequels.
Her versatility is such that when she took on the full-on dramatic role of Justine in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011), an end-of-the-world story with little redemption and total dread, audiences and critics seemed unsure of how to respond. The French celebrated her performance with the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival that year. However, Dunst ended up shutout from all other major awards, including the Golden Globes and Oscars. It should have been a career-altering performance, but it was as if no one was recognizing what they were seeing.
Even when Dunst scored her first Emmy nomination and a Golden Globe nomination (only the second since her nod 20 years before for Interview with the Vampire) for her supporting role as a mousy but (accidentally) murderous housewife in Season 2 of Noah Hawley’s Fargo adaptation, critics seemed more enamoured with the performance of her co-star (and future husband) Jesse Plemons.
The narrative might finally change with her new Showtime series On Becoming A God In Central Florida, which Dunst coproduced and stars in as Krystal Stubbs, another sad but sassy housewife, this one the queen of the multi-billion-dollar pyramid scheme her husband leaves her with after he’s eaten by an alligator.
You read that right; where Dunst works best is where she gets to be her weirdest. Take, for example, a bizarre scene in the series’ second episode, where Krystal demonstrates a winning dance routine from her days as a beauty queen. She dances between a row of puppets, smiling wide, eyes forlorn. Is it supposed to be bad? It doesn’t matter; in Dunst’s hands, it feels like a masterwork, a moment where this character gets to shed her burdens and grab hold of a time when she was on top. She can do anything and sell it better than anyone, Dunst’s eyes say, and I believe her.