Natalie Portman’s Fearlessness Has Been a Gift to Cinema

This weekend, in select cities, peering out into the world like a rip in the fabric of space and time, comes the movie Vox Lux. Directed by Brady Corbet, an actor you might know from his small roles in daring movies (or daring roles in small movies) like Mysterious Skin, Melancholia, and Martha Marcy May Marlene, the film stars Natalie Portman as a pop star in the vein of Lady Gaga, Sia, or Katy Perry who came to prominence via a tragedy and whose family, public, and professional lives are suddenly colliding and converging around her. It is a singular, complex, and often strange movie — and it doesn’t always work — but there is a high-wire act going on where Corbet tries to tie together the public’s fascination with both pop stardom and violent crime that is audacious at times and bordering on tasteless at others. Love it or hate it, you’ll have no time remembering it. And that goes double for Portman’s performance, which she renders in a thickly applied “Staten Island” (scare quotes very much intentional) accent, amid so much posturing you think she might just tip over. It’s an off-the-rails delight of a performance, and while you’d think it would flirt with being too much, you never get the sense that Portman isn’t fully in control.

Which is funny, because you could probably say the exact same thing about her performance in Jackie, the 2016 film where Portman played the grieving Jacqueline Kennedy. With a vocal inflection that sounded not of this universe (but which was, if you look it up, frighteningly true to life), Portman put forth a woman whose guardedness was a weapon against pain and aggression. It was a performance you had to sit with for a while, to acclimate yourself to. Jackie is a film — and Portman’s a performance — that couldn’t be farther from the usual standard political bio-pic; it risks disaster at every turn yet still manages to stay up on that high wire.

Portman’s Oscar nomination for Jackie was her third, and she might have actually won for it. But she’d already gotten her Oscar, for playing obsessive ballerina Nina Sayres in Darran Aronofsky’s Black Swan. Aronofsky got a lot of attention (and not all of it good) for the paces he put Jennifer Lawrence through in mother! That movie puts its lead actress through a remarkable wringer of physicality and extreme emotion, and by the end, you just want her to rest. But it’s not like this was new for Aronofsky. The demands on Portman in Black Swan, from the dancing to the bifurcated character — much like Nina herself, Natalie had to play the dark and the light — to the film’s tendencies towards body horror, were a huge part of why her performance so impressed the Academy.

The thing about Natalie Portman is that, among the class of A-List American actresses she’s ranked with — including everyone from Reese Witherspoon to Emma Stone to Julia Roberts to Jennifer Lawrence to Charlize Theron — she is the most outwardly daring. Which isn’t to say the others aren’t. But when you take Vox Lux together with Jackie and Black Swan and Annihilation, and even the failed Jane Got a Gun, there isn’t a safe choice to be found.

When your film debut at age 12 is the Luc Besson assassin film The Professional, it should maybe come as no surprise that Portman grew up to be such a risk taker. But it is a little surprising. Portman is an actress with the kind of personality that could easily coast in middling thrillers and wan romances. She’s already won her Oscar. She’s got, one imagines, a pile of Star Wars money in the bank (not to mention a just-for-kicks Harvard degree). There’s nothing about her career that requires taking the lead role in an Alex Garland movie about a woman who enters an alien realm and ends up dismantling her entire sense of self, both psychologically and physiologically. Nothing that requires working with directors like Aronofsky, Terrence Malick, Xavier Dolan, Milor Forman, and Wong Kar-Wai. A few of those collaborations didn’t work. V for Vendetta was probably a better idea than a film. But right now, in a year that started with Annihilation and is ending with Vox Lux and at some point in there she called out the all-male directors’ lineup at the Golden Globes, it’s good to have a Natalie Portman around.

Where to stream Annihilation

Where to stream Jackie

Where to stream Black Swan