Is It Not Too Late For Bryce Dallas Howard to Happen?

By Joe Reid @joereid
Published Aug. 12, 2016, 5:12 p.m. ET

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Twelve years ago, Bryce Dallas Howard showed up on American movie screens with her first lead role in a movie poised to be a big summer blockbuster. There were a lot of reasons why The Village didn’t make it happen for her, some involving the film (which boasted one of M. Night Shyamalan’s most reviled twists), some involving herself (as Ron Howard’s daughter, the air of nepotism was thick around her), but her own performance wasn’t one of them. Howard’s performance showed a lot of promise, with an ethereal charisma that you could easily see being harnessed by any number of directors. It just never happened. Certainly not in a way that resonated with audiences.

Over the following ten years, there were a lot of very good reasons for this to continue to be the case. A lot of it had to do with hopping onto projects that looked good on paper but turned out to be disasters of one kind or another. She got cast as Gwen Stacey in Spider-Man 3 just in time for Sam Raimi’s spider flicks to run out of gas. And then there was the failed reboot attempt Terminator Salvation. And then she signed on to the Clint Eastwood-directed disaster Hereafter. Even the good movies she starred in, she ended up in the most thankless roles. Like the bad girlfriend in the Joseph Gordon-Levitt cancer movie 50/50. Even in The Help, Best Picture Oscar nominee, Howard got the single most thankless role in the film, playing one-note villain Hilly Holbrook who ends up on the shit end of a shit pie.
And then it was four years before she was in another major motion picture. It seemed like Bryce Dallas Howard was going to be yet another failed It Girl experiment. A Gretchen Mol or Kate Beckinsale with a glitzier last name. The thing was, Howard wasn’t a bad actress. As limited as that Hilly Holbrook character was, Howard sold the hell out of it. If we were supposed to cheer when she at that shit pie and swell up with satisfaction when Viola Davis asked her “Ain’t you tired?” Howard made sure that we really had a villain to root against. But those four years did pass, and when they were up, it seemed like it was back to more of the same with Jurassic World, an impossible, maddening character who runs away from dinosaurs in her high heels. Critics didn’t like the movie and really didn’t like her character. But $400 million domestic is a really nice pillow for your tears to fall on. If nothing else, Bryce Dallas Howard was the female lead of the summer’s most massive hit in 2015.

Bryce Dallas Howard won’t be the female lead of the summer’s most massive hit in 2016. Pete’s Dragon won’t beat out Finding Dory. It probably won’t beat out the execrable Suicide Squad. Hopefully it will beat out Steven Spielberg’s similarly-themed The B.F.G. But the good news is that, for once, Bryce Dallas Howard is starring in a movie that people like, and she’s getting praised for it.

Pete’s Dragon currently sits at 85% on Rotten Tomatoes. She’s finally hopped onboard with a director (Ain’t Them Bodies Saints helmer David Lowery) at the right time. The L.A. Times called her “spot-on.” It took a dozen years, but she’s finally found her a movie that can do both: get people to like the movie and her in it.