“Kate Winslet is great in everything she does but in Mare of East Town (sic) she is utterly brilliant”, tweeted celebrated British television actor Sanjeev Bhaskar. “I’d watch her watch paint dry. I’d ask her first though,” he adds at the end of that post, mirroring a sudden outpouring of love that has seemingly taken over the web in the past few days.
Now that the show is over, social media just cannot seem to get enough of Mare and the genius who plays her. This is despite a lot of chatter in the beginning about ‘yet another’ HBO miniseries featuring a small-town protagonist dealing with personal angst in the middle of a full-fledged crime investigation (True Detective 1, 2 and 3, and Sharp Objects). The big difference, most would agree, was the presence of Winslet, who did not bring just the X-factor that is the expectation from the headliner on a show like this; she brought the proverbial kitchen sink.
Winslet has gotten the highest of praise for the realism with which she has portrayed Mare, a detective living in small town Pennsylvania. Mare was the toast of the town, and star of a winning high-school basketball team 25 years ago. She is now in her mid-40s, divorced, and has lost a son who died by suicide. She also has a grandson whose custody she might now lose to her recovering-heroin-addict daughter-in-law.
Mare has this air of exhaustion about her — it is an emotion that could so easily slip into defeat and cynicism but does not because it’s balanced by an indescribable toughness under the exterior. You do not see it; you just know it is there. Like she knows life is going to throw yet another a curveball at her, but she will find some way to deal with it. Winslet, in a conversation with The New York Times, spoke about being “bowled over by how audiences have fallen in love with this wildly flawed, messy, broken, fragmented, difficult woman. I loved her marks and her scars and her faults and her flaws and the fact that she has no off switch, no stop button. She just knows ‘Go.’’”
It is this personal interpretation of the character that makes Winslet modern-acting royalty.
When she is flawed, she is flawed all the way — scars, wrinkles, flab and all, vanity be damned.
She reportedly refused to let director Craig Zobel edit a sex scene that unflatteringly showed her belly bulge. She then sent the poster back for corrections because she knew exactly how many lines she had around her eyes and wanted them all back. And it is not just the physical attributes as well. Winslet is known to slip into character and literally start living her roles, something that her husband Ned is probably used to. So when she balked at the idea of Mare having a one-night stand, her husband had to intervene and tell her that she was probably choosing to do it. Winslet eventually saw that he was right, but ensured that the scene was clumsy and befitting an out-of-practice grandma.
When social media seemingly ‘rediscovered’ her this past week, one cannot help but wonder whether it is a case of Winslet being out of the public eye or the public living under a rock.
There are those, of course, to whom Kate Winslet is still the 17-year-old Rose in Titanic (1997). The adulation from those quarters has been mostly triggered by shock at seeing her in this depressed and dressed-down avatar. It is amusing, it really is. Then there are those who discovered her with Titanic, and watched her grow for a decade-and-a-half post that.
Her Oscar-nominated role as Rose was followed just a few years later with another Academy Award nomination for her performance as the famous British writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch in the eponymous biopic, Iris (2001). There was that unforgettable role as the wonderfully unhinged Clementine Kruczynski, who chooses to erase the memories of her boyfriend in the cult classic Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (2004). Her role as Hanna Schmitz in The Reader (2008) landed her her first Oscar, and she dropped another one for the ages that same year with Revolutionary Road (2008), a role that saw her reunite with Titanic co-star Leonardo DiCaprio.
But these are all big-budget, big-studio films — the kind that are not easy to miss for those who follow mainstream Hollywood. These are also the folks who have been wondering where the seven-time Academy Award nominee has been hiding for the past 10 years or so, and one cannot really blame them. As someone who has always believed in doing roles that satisfy her soul, it is almost like Winslet finally decided to flip the switch about a decade ago.
2011 saw her doing mainstream fare like Contagion but she also did Roman Polanski’s Carnage, a film she has regretted doing post the #MeToo movement. None of that can take away from her unforgettable performance though, as a drunken type-A mother battling it out with another set of parents over a schoolyard kerfuffle between their kids. 2011 was also when she made her first foray into television as the titular character in Todd Haynes’s five-part adaptation of film-noir classic Mildred Pierce (HBO, 2011). She picked up the Emmy that year because that is what she does.
The decade since, though, has been fairly quiet for a combination of reasons. After a hectic 2011, Winslet took some time off to spend with her children. While she did some amount of mainstream fare in the Divergent series (2014-15) and Steve Jobs (2015), none of her performances really stood out. While indie films like Labor Day (2013), The Dressmaker (2015), and A Little Chaos (2015) garnered praise for Winslet’s performances, these films sank without a trace. And then there were films like Collateral Beauty (2016) and Triple 9 (2016) where both the film and her performance failed to hit the mark. It was almost like Winslet had lost her mojo.
It is Ammonite (2020,) an achingly tender period love story where she’s paired her with Saoirse Ronan that really signalled a return to form for Winslet. The film, based on the speculative romantic life of the fossil collector and paleontologist Mary Anning, has been hailed by critics as ‘one of the best of her career’ and found place on multiple ‘Best of 2020’ lists.
To those who have followed her career, and seen her immerse herself in every role that she has ever done, Winslet’s performance as Mare of Easttown hardly comes as a surprise. As early as her debut playing Juliet Hume in Heavenly Creatures (1994), Winslet had reviewers gushing at her abilities; and she was just 17. A Washington Post review of the Peter Jackson film describes Winslet as “a bright-eyed ball of fire, lighting up every scene she’s in.” Three decades later, she is still doing it.
Mare of Easttown is streaming in India on Disney+ Hotstar Premium.
source https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/kate-winslet-is-being-rediscovered-with-mare-of-easttown-oscar-winning-actress-was-never-lost-to-begin-with-9683471.html
