Are Jessica Chastain’s Career Choices Too Cool for Her Own Good?

Judging actors’ careers by the Academy Awards is the wrong way to look at Hollywood; it places too much importance on who wins Oscars and consequently makes the ridiculous pageantry surrounding the Oscar race less fun to follow along with. With that caveat out of the way, though: Shouldn’t Jessica Chastain have an Oscar by now? Yes it’s only been five years since Chastain made her big 2011, going from total unknown to acclaimed performances in The Tree of Life, Take Shelter, Coriolanus, The Debt, and The Help, the last of which nabbed her a Best Supporting Actress nomination (she lost to her co-star Octavia Spencer). She was the most exciting new actress in Hollywood, a grown-up in a land of girls, able to play a variety of roles and temperaments and styles. She worked as hard for auteurs like Terrence Malick as she did for potboilers like Tate Taylor and John Madden. An American actress who might be able to rise up to the level of a Winslet or a Blanchett? Jessica Chastain had the chops to make that a reality.

And she still does. This isn’t a piece about how Jessica Chastain has lost her fastball. With Miss Sloane opening in theaters this week, she’s got yet another opportunity to shine in a role as a high-stakes lobbyist taking on the gun industry. She’s re-teaming with director John Madden, for whom she worked on The Debt, and while the movie is getting mildly positive reviews, almost everybody agrees that Chastain is great. But she’s almost certainly going to end up on the outside looking in on the Best Actress race this year. After following up The Help with a Best Actress nomination for Zero Dark Thirty in 2012, her ascent in Hollywood has seemed to level off. Part of this is surely that the number of great roles for actresses isn’t close to what’s available for men; part of it is that Jennifer Lawrence leapfrogged her in line to claim those roles.

But part of it is that the roles Chastain has been taking have been one of two types: lead roles in adventurous projects that are probably incredibly fulfilling on a personal level but which don’t move the needle with the mass moviegoing public and supporting roles in big movies where the other movie stars hog all the attention. It certainly looks like the filmography of a woman who’s going by her heart, picking the cool, fun movies regardless of whether or not the role is up to her standards. But is that kind of caution-to-the-wind approach serving her well?

A quick tour through Chastain’s post-Zero Dark Thirty roles:

Mama

ROLE: Annabel, a rock musician thrust into an uneasy parenting situation when she’s saddled with two girls haunted by a monstrous poltergeist.

Mama isn’t a great movie, and maybe not even a good one, but it’s tough to fault Chastain for putting the requisite horror movie under her belt before moving on with the rest of her career. At least she didn’t end up saddling herself with a whole franchise like Naomi Watts (The Ring) or Vera Farmiga (The Conjuring) did.

The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby

ROLE: Eleanor Rigby, whose rocky relationship with her husband gets viewed through her eyes and then his.

Here’s where the troubles start. It’s not that Rigby is especially bad, and in fact Chastain is rather good in it. But it’s a project she did for the director, her real-life friend Ned Benson, and it ended going through quite a few iterations on the festival circuit, and by the time it finally made it to mass audiences, it landed with a thud.  The dual-perspective narrative was first made into two separate films — Him and Her — then combined into one super-long film, and then distributed in either format. It was a huge mess, and whatever strong performance Chastain was delivering got completely lost in the mess over how to distribute the movie. A giant missed opportunity.

Miss Julie

ROLE: The titular Miss Julie, daughter of Irish aristocrats who gets mixed up in sex and class politics with her father’s valet.

The less said about this one the better. In interviews, Chastain comes across as incredibly literate and enthusiastic about cinema, so it’s not a surprise that she (and Colin Farrell, and Samantha Morton) would jump at the chance to act for Liv Ullman, legendary Norwegian actress and muse to Ingmar Bergman. But Miss Julie is a hysterical mess from which no one escapes alive. Nobody saw this one after it was nudged into theaters at the end of 2014, and so much the better for that.

Interstellar

ROLE: Murph (though since Mackenzie Foy is credited as “Young Murph” and Ellen Burstyn as “Old Murph,” shouldn’t Chastain be credited as “Middle Murph?) (related question: where does “MiddleMurph” rank on the list of great 19th century English literatire?)

The new Christopher Nolan movie about space? YES. Absolutely. Great job picking a movie. So does Chastain play the lead? No, it’s Hollywood; women don’t get to play the lead in movies about spaceships unless she stays on Earth. So, okay, Matthew McConaughey is the lead; at least Chastain gets to play the female lead! …Or, no, okay, that’s Anne Hathaway. No, Chastain ends up waiting for half the movie before showing up as McConaughey’s adult daughter. She’s wonderful once she’s there, but it is decidedly and by no means her movie.

A Most Violent Year

ROLE: Anna Morales, steely, capable, and fearsome wife to immigrant family man Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac).

Okay, THIS one should’ve worked. Chastain got a plum, showy supporting role as an against-type Lady Macbeth who made vague threats to law enforcement and looked impeccable in her severe bob wigs. A Most Violent Year started off strong in the awards race; Chastain got a Golden Globe nomination out of the deal. But the fact that she was the surprise 6th-place finisher on Oscar nomination morning (part of a complete shutout for AMVY) mutes whatever gains Chastain made with this movie. It’s only been two years, yet it seems wholly forgotten.

The Martian

ROLE: Commander Melissa Lewis, who decided to turn that spaceship right around and go retrieve left-behind botanist Mark Watney.

Much like with Interstellar, Chastain ended up hopping onto a great big success of a project … in a role that nobody was talking about. Matt Damon’s lead character is the whole show here, and when he’s not the show, the team at NASA scrambling to find a way to get him home in the show. Chastain and her crew finish a distant third.

Crimson Peak

ROLE: Lady Lucille Sharpe, suuuuuuuuper weird sister living in a giant gothic mansion that LITERALLY BLEEDS

Guillermo Del Toro’s ode to production design was a divisive movie, as was almost every single element of it, from those bleeding walls to the CGI ghosts to the plot twists to, yes, the acting choices. Chastain is playing Lady Lucille to the HILT in this movie, and her over-the-top choices are perfectly in line with the heightened … well, everything in this movie. But the sheer divisiveness of the film and Chastain’s place in it kept the public largely at arm’s length.

The Huntsman: Winter’s War

ROLE: Sara, warrior princess in obvious love with Chris Hemsworth’s Huntsman, because who wouldn’t be?

The bad idea here wasn’t cramming this sequel with high-end actress talent (Chastain joined Emily Blunt in addition to Charlize Theron); the bad idea was making this movie at all. A bad CGI blockbuster isn’t always a bad idea, even for an actress with such clear designs on important work. Just don’t let your CGI blockbuster be the one that bombs with critics and audiences.

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And so now there’s Miss Sloane, a movie for whom the verdict is still out, but which would be a surprise if it ended up cleaning up at the box-office or the Dobly Theater. When is it all going to come together for Jessica Chastain? America deserves a Cate Blanchett. She could be our Cate Blanchett! (Blanchett, by the way, also went through a career period after Elizabeth where she bounced from supporting roles in big movies to leads in movies that didn’t deserve her; it look her until The Aviator in 2004 before she started being the flawless creature we know and love. Chastain is both young and talented. She’s going to be FINE. Most likely. She could just use a level-up at this point?

What’s next? Her 2017 slate includes playing an 1800s painter who gets caught up in a Lakota land dispute in Woman Walks Ahead; she’s the lead in Aaron Sorkin’s directorial debut Molly’s Game; she plays a member of the Polish resistance to Hitler in The Zookeeper’s Wife. Hope springs eternal.