DERN CLOSE TO IDEAL
Two vastly different roles illustrate depth actress brings to the screen
LOS ANGELES Now streaming on Netflix, Laura Dern is Nora, the cutthroat divorce lawyer in Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story. Beautiful but spiky, heartless but hilarious, the role is the culmination of a career full of fierce feminists and rebels. Midway through the film, she stops texting for a moment to rail against the misguided, Judeo-christian double standards that western society holds against mothers.
But in the (metaphorical) cinema next door, Dern is Marmee, the ever-patient, ever-loving matriarch in Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Women. Buttoned up in the finery of a proud poor woman in 1860s New England, Marmee is the radiant, nurturing nucleus of a house spinning with four rambunctious girls, led by Saoirse Ronan’s Jo.
“It’s interesting to have these two women, two characters, who have, honestly, the greatest feminist writing ever — in two completely different worlds,” Dern said recently. “Between some of the lines I say to Saoirse — that are directly from the book, these lines that Louisa (May Alcott) wrote in the 1860s — about ‘I’m angry nearly every day of my life,’ and to talk about what it is to be an artist, and what it is to be a woman, and not to need to marry, and to love who you choose to love. I mean, it’s some really radical thinking.”
“And then, enter Century City divorce lawyer,” she laughed, “and to have this monologue — that’s absolutely accurate, you know, how mothers are measured differently than fathers — and with such sass, but also this sort of modern poetry of Noah’s writing.”
There was something “almost divine” about getting to play these two connected but wildly different roles in the same year, written by the two halves of a real-life couple (Gerwig and Baumbach have been married since 2011).
“They really have a very similar rhythm in how they hear language,” Dern said. “The words are so precise, but the mess they want to bring them forth, and the rhythm they need, is really amazing.”
Baumbach and Gerwig are the latest filmmakers dying to work with Dern after watching her chart an adventurous and calibrated career over 40 years with such directors as David Lynch, Peter Bogdanovich, Robert Altman and Alexander Payne. Before her 25th birthday, she had played a pregnant teenager, a blind girl, a wide-eyed innocent and an outlaw’s libidinous lover.
“What she was doing felt dangerous to me, in the best way,” said Gerwig. “Because it felt like it was always at the very edge of what we can consider to be in good taste — which is the most wonderful acting and art of all. She was so committed to the truth of the thing that she completely stopped worrying about how she, Laura Dern, was coming across. It was just completely committed to the character, and committed to the extremities of the character.”
Dern, 52, has been patiently planting a garden of great roles, coupling with auteur collaborators — but she has often been taken for granted.
“She’s just now becoming a movie star,” said her father, actor Bruce Dern, who noted both he and Laura’s mother, Diane Ladd, toiled without stardom for years. “I’m somebody who has finally got to a place where I have opportunities to do things with my abilities. And Laura is finally getting that. She got it before, but in supporting kind of roles.”
“Careers are long, and complicated,” Laura Dern said. “There definitely were periods of time where I either wasn’t working, or wasn’t getting offered things that I wanted to do.”
Her connection with film quite literally goes back to the beginning: She was conceived on the set of The Wild Angels, a 1966 motorcycle movie in which her parents both starred.
Dern grew up in the heart of Hollywood, rubbing shoulders with Alfred Hitchcock as a kid, and felt she was destined to act after Martin Scorsese complimented her ice-cream-eating endurance as an extra in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.
She grew up fast, finishing high school early and being legally emancipated from her parents when she was 16 so she could have grown-up working freedom. (Her first roommate was the family’s “street minister” friend, Marianne Williamson.)
When Dern was 18, Lynch cast her in his twisted suburban nightmare, Blue Velvet, as the almost painfully innocent Sandy, who dreams of robins in a world gone to hell.
“I always thought she was wise beyond her years,” said her co-star, Kyle Maclachlan. “She was just very intuitive and thoughtful and very aware. And she’s never lost it.”
Dern and Maclachlan, who dated for four years, reunited on camera more than 30 years later for Lynch’s Twin Peaks revival in 2017 — which cast Dern as Sandy’s polar opposite: the almost painfully acid-tonged Diane.
“She was working with Nicolas Cage, who is kind of the No. 1 fearless actor,” said Lynch. “But Laura’s got that in spades as well. She’s pretty much fearless. She won’t, I don’t think, cut all her hair off. But I’m not positive about that.”
Dern worked with another director hero, Steven Spielberg, in a part a few years later that would prove defining.
As Dr. Ellie Sattler in the 1993 blockbuster Jurassic Park, Dern was fearless in a different way — rummaging through dinosaur droppings and casually taking down sexist comments. She’s noticed, in light of the #Metoo and #Timesup movements, various organizations using Sattler’s quote from the film about “woman inherits the earth” as a rallying cry.
“She’s been on T-shirts, and there have been dolls,” Dern said. “I guess I hadn’t clocked how much it meant to girls, at a time that they weren’t seeing that regularly in giant action movies.”
It’s the main reason she agreed to reprise the role for Jurassic World 3, which begins shooting this year.
It’s maybe a curious choice, given how Dern has curated her career, taking risks to avoid being typecast — “and even typecast as an ‘actress for hire,’” she said, “versus someone who wanted to learn and grow from great filmmakers.”
So where does a new chapter in a big-budget franchise fit into that equation?
“There’s hesitation, in that you want it to feel right. You want them to honour all the characters. You want there to be a real, valid reason they’re all coming back — I think we can all imagine what that might be,” she laughed.
“It’s complicated,” she said, “to figure out how to do it right.”
The Washington Post