Is Natalie Portman the Most Overrated Actress in Hollywood?

After May December

I watched May December last night. In this film, just released on Netflix, Julianne Moore plays a quasi Mary Kay Letourneau, who as a married American mother in her 30s, had engaged in a sexual relationship with a seventh grade boy. She became pregnant by him, was jailed, and then married him when he came of age.

Natalie Portman also stars as a completely fictitious figure, Elizabeth Berry, a 36-year-old TV actress and Juilliard graduate, who arrives in Savannah, Georgia to spend time with Moore’s character, Gracie Atherton, 24 years after the bizarre child abuse scandal hit the tabloids, in order to best portray Gracie in a film.

So the actress, as played by Portman, observes and interacts with this woman and her much younger husband, along with their children and friends, like a cat toying with a lizard.

It is not unusual when an actor is playing a living person in a biopic for the actor and the subject to meet. Diana Nyad was even on the set of the also just released Nyad while Annette Bening was playing her. James Franco spent time with mountain climber Aron Ralston, the man he portrayed in his Oscar-nominated performance in 127 hours. Tom Hanks met Charlie Wilson. Morgan Freeman knew Nelson Mandela. Angelina Jolie spent a great deal of time with Mariane Pearl prior to filming A Mighty Heart.

In May December, is Natalie Portman just playing a bad actress or is she acting badly?

The film is not lacking in entertainment value, riffing on movie classics by Douglas Sirk and Ingmar Bergman, with some surprising deft comic moments.

I am a fan of director Todd Haynes, but unlike the stunning performances he has extracted from such actresses as Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara in Carol and Julianne Moore in Far From Heaven (and four other films including this one), Natalie Portman remains an opaque presence. She is playing a very trained performer using all the tricks of the thespian’s trade to get into character, but I never felt anything other than here is Natalie Portman playing an actress. I never believed she was the character.

Yet Portman is an Oscar winner, considered by some as the second coming of Meryl Streep.

The world first took note of her as the child actress in Leon: The Professional, with a haunting performance as an apprentice assassin. And that face. That exquisite face.

She retained her appeal in Beautiful Girls.

And I didn’t blame her for her bland acting in Star Wars, Episodes 1, 2 and 3. She was still a teenager and encumbered with all sorts of elaborate costuming and make-up.

I thought she did good work in Garden State, light and lovely in this piffle of a movie.

But what made me start to look upon her as overrated was her performance in Closer, for which she was nominated for an Oscar.

I had seen Closer on Broadway with Anna Friel in the same role played on celluloid by Portman.

Anna Friel was vulnerable, heartbreaking; I could lose the actress in the character of Alice, a stripper. Friel was Alice.

Natalie Portman’s Alice remained a conundrum. I never believed Portman as a stripper. I didn’t believe she took on that job because she needed the money or had exhibitionistic desires. No, I just believed she was Natalie Portman going through the motions of playing Alice. Her lines were recited perfectly, she hit all her marks, but she was never real; there was no soul emerging.

But again, what a stunning face.

And the brilliant director Mike Nichols seemed smitten with her, championing her, befriending her.

Natalie Portman is known for her sharp intellect, but perhaps that intelligence was getting in the way of her acting. She may have been thinking rather than feeling.

I believed there were then better actresses in her age range, capable of having enlivened the part of Alice with depth. Already, Michelle Williams possessed seemingly limitless range and commendable vulnerability onscreen. Emily Blunt was perfection. Anne Hathaway, Kirsten Dunst and Kerry Washington were all adept young performers. Scarlett Johansson, as movie star gorgeous as Portman, had excellent chops, plenty of range, and probably would have nailed Closer’s Alice.

Anna Friel might also have been cast to repeat her Broadway triumph.

I wouldn’t have minded the idea of Natalie Portman playing Alice, except that after watching her, the Oscar nomination seemed so undeserved.

Was she being anointed by the Hollywood powers-that-be as the great actress of her generation rather than as an average performer with an incandescent presence?

Soon appeared such mediocre work as her Evie in V for Vendetta and her disengaged turn opposite Dustin Hoffman in Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium.

In The Other Boleyn Girl, Scarlett Johansson as Portman’s sister, clearly outacted her. (Johansson has not won an Academy Award.)

Then came Black Swan.

What?

There were two expressions on that beautiful face. There was a look of inscrutable repose as in her mesmerizing Dior perfume ads. And anguish. So much pain! But nothing in–between. And for that she won every possible acting award in 2011.

She and her team had the public believing that she had labored for an entire year to transform into a professional level ballet dancer, that she had executed all the complicated fouettes, jetes and iconic Odile/Odette arm movements (as well as showing extreme anguish).

Yet it was apparent to me that someone else did most of the dancing.

For all her physical loveliness, Portman possesses remarkably short arms, disproportionally short arms. The ballerina doing most of the dancing, while probably the same height as Portman, has the long fluid arms necessary for performing the swans.

Portman unkindly never gave the professional any credit.

I understand the use of hype. And that hype (and concealment) worked to build a winning awards season for the film and its star.

But after Portman won everything else, she ultimately won her Oscar. She could finally share a little credit to the American Ballet Theatre soloist who did most of the dancing, and drop the pretense. But she didn’t.

In her acceptance speech, she thanked everyone, all her agents and managers and publicists, her fellow actors and director, her choreographer and now husband (perhaps estranged), her make-up artists, her hairdressers, her wardrobe people, her producers, her assistant director, the camera operators, and her dance teachers. She thanked Mike Nichols, who had nothing to do with Black Swan. She thanked her parents, saying that they taught her how to be a good person.

She never thanked the dancer, the professional. She didn’t even have to say, “Thank you for dancing for me.”

She could have just said, “Thank you for your help, Sarah Lane.” Or some such thing. But she refrained. She didn’t thank Lane or her other dance double, Kimberly Prosa, in any one of her myriad acceptance speeches.

Lane later come forward and said she had performed most of the dancing. People saw her comments as sour grapes, maybe even untrue.

ABC-TV’s 20/20 asked Black Swan’s editor, Andy Weisblum about the controversy. He said, “There are about 35 shots that are full body shots in the movie. Of those 35 shots, 12 are Natalie, and then the rest are Sarah.”

Too bad that information didn’t come out prior to the awards. I wonder if Portman’s acting would have won the accolades over Annette Bening, Nicole Kidman, Michelle Williams, and Jennifer Lawrence if the voters had known the Oscar winner hadn’t performed most of the dancing.

Natalie Portman continued to be seen as a major thespian.

I admit I enjoyed the Thor movies. Portman didn’t have much to do, acting-wise.

I recall her being not particularly funny in the comedy No Stings Attached.

In Vox Lux, every note from Portman rang false.

But I hereby state that I did very much admire her performance as the former First Lady in Jackie. Although Natalie Portman and the late Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis bear no physical resemblance, there is something mask-like, impenetrable, in both women that makes Portman’s casting work very well.

Natalie Portman is known to be an excellent Ivy-educated student. Here she was able to study the voice, the posture, and the gestures of the real Jackie.

Her performance was an impression, an imitation: she wasn’t truly inhabiting the character of Jackie Kennedy, but I’m not sure that anyone could have done so as Jackie was unusually enigmatic and mannered in her recorded appearances, wary and controlled. Here we have a puzzle playing a puzzle and it works.

Natalie Portman’s bone white porcelain cameo of a face behind its widow’s veil is magnificent.

Perhaps deservedly this time, she was again nominated for an Oscar for playing the former First Lady in the aftermath of the President’s assassination.

Days of Abandonment

I have just returned from Australia where I heard some griping from people in the movie world there concerning Natalie Portman.

During the pandemic when the film industry was shut down in Hollywood, some American stars traveled to Sydney to pursue various projects.

Portman would be producing and starring in a film, based on author Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment. The film was fully financed and cast, the director and crew were in place, locations were booked. They were ready to roll. Then Hollywood opened up again and Natalie Portman left her fellow cast and crew hanging, abandoned them, two days before shooting was to commence.

Perhaps this was just hearsay, gossip.

I just looked it up, Googled it. The Sydney Morning Herald on August 3, 2021, states: “The Oscar-winning star of Black Swan has pulled out of shooting Days of Abandonment, which was written, directed and executive produced by Maggie Betts, who is best-known for the acclaimed 2017 religious drama Novitiate.

“American cable network HBO, which had commissioned the movie, blamed ‘unforeseen personal circumstances’ for Portman’s withdrawal before the start of filming.”

It seems the star of The Professional can be highly unprofessional.

Very inconsiderate, anyway.

Meanwhile the hype machine continues. There are rave reviews for Natalie Portman’s acting in May December.

I don’t get it.

David Rooney in the Hollywood Reporter writes, “An astonishing monologue delivered by Portman into a mirror in particular demands to be seen.”

Really?

I call it mediocre at best. The beautiful empress has no clothes.

Actually she does. It’s another one of those flicks where the woman leaves on her dress during the sex scene. (The male lead is entirely naked.)