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Feb052008

Hey Jennifer Garner, Where’s Your Nomination?

Posted by Molly in News, Reviews

Looking at the list of nominees for Best Supporting Actress, I’ll assume that all of those ladies did powerful work, but Jennifer Garner should have bumped at least one of them for her performance in Juno. As Vanessa Loring, the suburban professional poised to adopt Juno’s baby, Garner had me in tears halfway through. Noticeably excused from the film’s trademark frenzy of spunky dialogue, Vanessa’s lines are few, measured, even a bit brittle. But in startling bolts of emotion that escape from her tightly clenched persona, Vanessa wrecked me with a wince, a frown, a hesitation. In a performance subtly played out in facial expressions, Garner conveys the sheer desperation of a woman watching what might be her last chance at a lifelong dream of motherhood balanced in the hands of a wisecracking teenager (two, if you count her rapidly-dissolving husband Mark). Without Garner’s winningly believable portrayal (seriously, how many actresses can pull off a non-lame conversation with a pregnant belly?), her character could easily have been unlikeable, resembling just the sort of stereotype screenwriter Diablo Cody so thoughtfully upends throughout the story. Instead, when Vanessa, in her darkest hour, finally chides Mark for his slacker t-shirt, I looked down at my own grubby duds for the first time with a wave of embarrassment.