THE ROLES THAT GOT AWAY

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What parts might Cate Blanchett have landed if she had been available for more than cameos over the past few years? David Thomson speculates...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, March/April 2012

Since we’re talking about a great actress, she would surely have been considered for the best female part of the last few years – Carrie Mathison in the TV series “Homeland”. She’s a bipolar CIA fanatic who thinks an American soldier just returned from imprisonment in Iraq may have been turned by al-Qaeda. So she gets so close to him she has an affair with him. But we know this part is so good now because Claire Danes (above) is phenomenal in it. Who has done a smarter, more emotional, or more disturbed woman in a cockpit of suspense? Cate Blanchett would have been ecstatic and nerve-jangling, but Danes went beyond that by being such a surprise.

Tilda Swinton played the mother of a teenage serial killer in Lynne Ramsay’s “We Need to Talk About Kevin”, and she was remarkable. No one relishes a contest with Tilda. But if you’d seen the novel or the script in advance and been asked who you thought was right for it, Cate Blanchett would have been an obvious answer. And she has something in common with Swinton: they can go from posh to trash, and smart to dumb, with ease.

If I were Lars von Trier (and it’s a relief that I’m not), my only indecision over “Melancholia” would have been which part to offer to Blanchett – the stunned victim of depression (played by Kirsten Dunst, who won the acting prize at Cannes) or the other sister who is worrying herself sick over the end of the world (played by Charlotte Gainsbourg). Cate could have done either part – she could have done them both. Suppose the sisters are twins. Now, for the first time, I wonder if I wouldn’t mind being Lars von Trier, finding ways to make Blanchett manic as well as depressive.

As you play this game, your thoughts become a little wilder at every step. How about Blanchett as “The 40-Year-Old Woman with a Dragon Tattoo”? After all, no one is ever going to stop Lisbeth Salander, so one day she’ll be 40 and just as tough. Blanchett might need three months in the gym to get ready, but she’d be a knockout with that tattoo draped across her body, and we know she can do alienated, insolent and don’t-mess-with-me: the evidence is there in “Elizabeth”, “Veronica Guerin” and “The Missing”. Any actress in her 40s would jump at the challenge of creating Salander at that age, and getting to ride the motorbike. Meryl Streep could play her tattoo artist, with Max von Sydow as the journalist Mikael Blomkvist.

Remember that Blanchett has already played one of the Bob Dylans in “I’m Not There”, as well as “Richard II” on the Australian stage. So it’s a logical next step to cast her as George Smiley in “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”. Didn’t we always know that some of the fellows in MI5 weren’t quite what they seemed to be? So how about a trans-gender? It would explain why Ann Smiley was so bored with “George”. Can’t you just see Cate with horn-rim specs, a civil-service haircut and the dry-as-toast impassivity that Gary Oldman took from Alec Guinness? That off-centre point of view is exactly what le Carré’s stuffed men’s club needs. And just this once, Smiley could smile.

David Thomson is the author of "The New Biographical Dictionary of Film", which has reached its fourth edition

Picture credit: IDS/Capital Pictures