The New York Times Magazine (Sept. 3) spotlit an excellent profile of the rising young film actress Vera Farmiga, whose career I've been following with interest for some time now. [Think Anne Heche without the celestial personalities, though I don't wish to file her away her in a career cubbyhole with other performers she sort-of reminds me of.] "Trying to follow" might be more like it; as the article, by Lynn Hirschberg, notes, many of her independent credits fly below the radar, and I missed her award-winning turn as a recovering addict in last year's Down to the Bone, which I'll be sure to catch when it hits DVD on the 26th.
It's one of the richer Times Magazine performer profiles I've read, if not as "juicy" as say, their classic Julia Ormond piece in 1995, which helped end her US career when she had a few unkind things to say about her Hollywood overseers. What piqued the Times' interest was her heightened visibility, similar to Ormond's breakout, in her two fall releases, Martin Scorsese's The Departed and Anthony Minghella's Breaking and Entering, for which she got nice notices at the Toronto film festival. She's not too crazy about her role in the Scorsese film, a testosterone-dripping boys' club movie if there ever was one, and wasn't afraid to say so, nor was she shy about assessing scripts, her own ability, and fellow talent in an honest, non-judgmental way.
What really got me on her side was this quote, though, about the promotion of the film Running Scared, one of the year's livelier pictures. Its website allowed you to toy with her image, rendered as a cartoon, as she has sex with co-star Paul Walker in a scene from the film. Circumspect at the time, she told Hirschberg, "it can be impossible to preserve a noble image in this industry. I gave them a very respectful portrait. It was reduced to pornography for the sake of marketing. And I thought it was shameful."
Well-put. So I feel a little protective of Vera Farmiga, a bonafide Jersey girl, and must disagree with a letter about the piece that appears in this Sunday's magazine. The writer, Jon Pollack, is from the Pacific Palisades, and from Googling I suspect he's a TV producer, with credits that include the short-lived series Joey and Father of the Pride. [It's just a guess.] "Is it possible that Farmiga just isn't that great?" he writes, after rattling off the names of "wonderful contemporary actress" including Nicole Kidman, Catherine Keener, and Annette Bening, all A-OK--and all of whom have felt quite keenly the same frustration that Farmiga has (it shows in their haphazard credits as they negotiate the same mindfield toward better parts). I can't really blame Pollack for not having seen any of her films, but it was the Times that was comparing her to Meryl Streep, not herself--and while I often disagree with dispatches from their cultural desk I think it might be right to do so this time. We'll see.
In any event, indulging in the kind of easy putdown the actress would abhor, I would say to Pollack that she's clearly more gifted than Matt LeBlanc or a bunch of talking cartoon lions.
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