True and unmitigated success is measured by many – though thankfully not all – that swim in the heady undertows of Hollywood film-makery, by the attainment of a small golden statue. The much coveted Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress was clutched in 1994, in a hand almost too small to grip it, by a then 11 year old Anna Paquin. Stand out seaweed dancing screen daughter to fellow Oscar recipient Holly Hunter, they would together conspire to create in The Piano what is still for many a seamlessly affecting slice of cinematic magic.
Shunning the tendency toward self-destruction that has been known to haunt others who reach such heights so soon, Anna Helene Paquin has instead carved for herself a career and personal life that seems perpetually powered with its own refreshing brand of inoffensive self-determination.
True Blood – Horror Discovers a Whole New Fanbase
Anna Paquin’s forays into horror have been few, but it would be HBO’s much acclaimed True Blood and her complete assimilation into the role of telepathic barmaid Sookie Stackhouse, that again gave life to a genre that at times struggles for recognition. A role that has itself garnered a slew of award nominations, culminating in a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress (Television Series Drama) in 2009.
But Paquin's very first step into the darkness would be quite literal and not so even keeled, as she fronted up for work on Jaume Balagueró’s more than much maligned haunted house misfire, Darkness (2002).
Darkness (2002) Dir. Jaume Balagueró
This painfully convoluted horror from Spanish director Jaume Balagueró (he of [REC] fame) offered little more than a tangled string of half-baked horror tomes and lazily unfulfilled plot points. Add to this the films post Spanish release sale to American distribution giant Miramax; a transaction that resulted in the film being shelved for over a year and its subsequent whittling down to the dreaded horror stifling PG-13 rating, and very little if anything was left here to chew on.
Suffice to say that in such instances as these, where the film itself does not measure up to the talent attached to it, Anna Paquin must be said to have given her all in attempting to breath credence into the heaviness of nothingness that weighed her script to the floor. A film that offered little and gave even less, it is a production that only just passes muster due to its unstable and duly unsettling camerawork (Xavi Gimenez, The Machinist). But, no matter how much its director may protest, very little else in the way of true passion is ever paraded in this most unfortunate of projects.
Cast:
- Anna Paquin … Regina
- Lena Olin … Maria
- Iain Glen … Mark
- Giancarlo Giannini … Albert Rua
- Fele Martínez … Carlos
- Stephan Enquist … Paul
- Fermin Reixach … Villalobos
Trick 'r Treat (2007) Dir. Michael Dougherty
Trick 'r Treat is in fact a treat. It’s the movie that you stumble across and nod silent respect too even though there is nobody else in the room. Laid out as a four part anthology here lays the perfect tonic for that Halloween night ‘anything but Friday the 13th’ conundrum.
Sam (Quinn Lord), is your freaky trick-or-treating sack faced host and it is he that ties all of these wonderfully off-center stories together. Anna Paquin appears in the third of these installments (Surprise Party) as Laurie, a young women whose virginity turns out to be but one of her many stifled secrets.
Cast:
- Anna Paquin as Laurie
- Lauren Lee Smith as Danielle
- Rochelle Aytes as Maria
- Moneca Delain as Janet
Scream 4 (2012) Dir. Wes Craven
Anna Paquin’s appearance in the unnecessary continued beating of a dead horse that is this latest installment of the Scream franchise, was thankfully fleeting. She plays Rachel in a introductory cameo segment alongside friend Chloe (Kristen Bell). They sit watching as Stab 6 (followers of the movies will remember these as the films within a film that sprung from the original Woodsboro murders), appears on their television screen.
Irony of ironies as Rachel denigrates the films as offering nothing new and that they are instead a recycling of the same tired plot points – Ad nauseam. The contrived conclusion and supposed clever twist to the segment comes as Chloe duly stabs Rachel with a very large Scream shaped carving knife. With Rachel incredulous and gurgling her last crimson colored breath Chloe quips that the motivation for her violent outburst is simply because Rachel “… talks too much”. Paquin, like the audience, deserved much, much better.
True Blood (September 7, 2008 – ) HBO
This portrayal of the wonderfully named Sookie Stackhouse is a great example of an actress in full immersion. Drenched in the accent and mannerisms that accompanies this telepathic waitress from Americas Deep South, she has created a character whose popularity shows no signs of waning. This as the show prepares for what will be its fifth '12 episode' season, set to premiere in the summer of 2012.
Based on the series of novels, The Southern Vampire Mysteries by Mississippi native Charlaine Harris’, True Blood has done much to reinvigorate the genre and again make the supernatural, and vampires especially, the latest brand of seething cool.
Addictive in its graphic sex, blood and simmering southern drawl True Blood has displayed, in this most unimposing of actresses, a breadth of talent that is surely yet to be fully realized. In possession of an eclectic and edgy taste in role selection, she has thus far sidestepped the gravitational pull of over-familiarity and typecasting. And with a raft of interesting projects now in production viewers are advised to very much watch this space – and please, don’t forget to tip your waitress.
Sources
- Luke Crisell: New York Magazine Interview: Rogue Star; May 20, 2007
- Michael Martin: Interview Magazine Interview: Anna Paquin.
Hari Navarro - Hari Navarro is Topic Editor for Suite 101's Horror Film section and Editor/ Writer at online horror review site, The Hell Street ...
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