2009 is the year of Kate Winslet with Revolutionary Road and The Reader
Posted on January 4, 2009
Filed Under East meets West, MOVIES, NEWS | Comments Off
2009 is going to be Kate Winslet year. This month, she has not one but two films out — Revolutionary Road and The Reader — that have already earned her a pair of Golden Globe nominations. But her extraordinary performances (and, in The Reader), will take your breath away. The Reader, features an eye-catching performance by Ralph Fiennes and the first of two Oscar-worthy turns by Kate Winslet. Her second is in Sam Mendes’s sour period romance, Revolutionary Road (Jan 30), where Winslet is reunited with an older, meaner Leonardo DiCaprio. It’s partly that, at 33, she is now in her primetime of youth and maturity and desire, associated with probably Princess Diana in the mid-1990s.
The Reader is a look at the emotional and psychological damage done to a generation who, in the 1960s, woke up to the war crimes of their parents. (The Germans even have a therapeutic-sounding term for this struggle to come to terms with the past: Vergangenheitsbewältigung.) The film poses the question: how do we react to those we love when we discover their dirty secrets? That is the question that haunts the lawyer Michael Berg (Ralph Fiennes), who had an affair with an attractive older woman, Hanna (Winslet), when he was a 15-year-old schoolboy.
Kate has the perfect look for now, which is toned and shapely enough. Yes, there was the recent retouched (probably) Vanity Fair shoot, but we see her naked from 10 angles in The Reader, so it’s not as if she hides behind retouchers as a rule. And there’s no denying that her breasts are her own, and her bum, which can’t be said of many A-listers. The attitude has also changed with no dinners at Nobu with Katie Holmes, or photo ops with Mr Armani. No Kabbalah( Madonna). Or Scientology(Tom Cruise or Katie Holmes). She has grown up, but still has that down-to-earth quality we like to think is essentially British. We can’t prove this, but she lives in NY rather than on the West Coast. She’s happily married to Sam Mendes and it feels like a solid, mutually rewarding match. At a screening of The Reader, Marion Cotillard broke down when she was introduced to the star — and Kate couldn’t have been sweeter. She has been nominated for an Oscar five times, and we could see an Academy Award winner soon.
