2007 Goaties: Best Supporting Actress

StinkyLulu has prompted me to get a head start on my 2007 awards with the second annual Supporting Actress Blogathon. Check over there for more Supporting Actress goodness.

Ellen Page's much-lauded lead performance left me cold—anything she did, Thora Birch did better in Ghost World—but what saved Juno for me was the veritable cornucopia of supporting work from such people as Michael Cera, Jason Bateman, J.K. Simmons, Allison Janney, and, especially, and especially unlikely, Jennifer Garner. I'd previously dismissed Garner as a low-talent pretty face that, in fact, isn't all that pretty. (I believe that I wrote a blog post about how unattractive she is. I believe I quoted, with approval, someone calling her a "Picasso guppy.")

But my god, I take it all back: Garner is brilliant, or at least she's brilliant here, with the right part. She gives the best supporting performance of 2007, slyly toying with our impressions of a character who starts out as an easy mark: the baby- and decor-obsessed frigid suburban yuppie housewife. Cue the guffaws, especially as the film presents her as little more than a Baby Gap monster, a comic foil for the thwarted ambitions of her wanna-be rock-star husband (Bateman). But the screenplay's finest quality is its ability to take these easy marks and flesh them out, making us gradually discard our first, or even second or third, impressions. Subtly, and slowly, Garner opens Vanessa up, turning the joke inside out.

The film first introduces her through shots of her hands, smoothing coverlets and arranging flowers; if the shot had opened up to reveal that the hands belonged to an employee in a particularly high-end home furnishings store, it wouldn't have been surprising. Garner's obsessed with creating the perfect household: anything untidy (like everything Bateman brought from his former life) must be hidden. When things don't fit her domestic fantasy ("You found us in the penny saver?"), it throws her, and we see the anxiety that knits her life together. Most of that anxiety comes from her desire to have a child; Garner helps us, over the course of the film, to understand her obsession with outward perfection—her wholesale purchase of the American suburban dream—as a manifestation of her thwarted desire to have a kid. I can't have this one thing that would make me whole, she reasons, so I'll take all of these other things that give the illusion of wholeness.

It's when that anxiety becomes apparent that Garner really shines. I felt little a twinge at her reaction to Juno's careless "Lucky it's not you" comment; that twinge grew sharper during the scene at the mall when, at first, the baby won't kick for her (she interprets this, in an instant, as confirmation of the cosmic curse against her), and then the uncertain "do I deserve this?" joy when she finally feels something. And that twinge turned into a punch in the heart at the end, when, still anxious and uncertain, she asks Janney "How do I look?", her new baby in her arms.

So Jennifer Garner has demonstrated incredible range here—an ability to play the part for laughs, and then to gradually flesh out the screenplay's skeleton. She succeeds, better than the woman in the spotlight, in selling the film's underlying heart.

Runners-Up: From Todd Haynes's messy I'm Not There, there's the obvious choice of Cate Blanchett, so gawky and adolescent and androgynous that she was the best Dylan imitator of the bunch, but there's also Charlotte Gainsbourg, so adept and moving as the thankless and unthanked deserted wife in the "this is the part of the biopic when there's domestic strife" part of the film. And let's not forget Tilda Swinton, elevating her role in Michael Clayton above the casual misogyny of the part and letting us watch her going through the process of building a character as the film progresses.