Best Supporting Performances of 2014: The Women

Over the next couple weeks, I'm going to be posting lists of the best performances of 2014. I'm starting today with best supporting actress.

Honorable mentions (in no order):

Agata Kulesza, Ida

Emma Stone, Birdman

Katherine Waterston, Inherent Vice

Joaana Newsom, Inherent Vice

Patricia Arquette, Boyhood

5. Tilda Swinton, Snowpiercer

Tilda Swinton has been one of the most consistently great actresses for years now, but she keeps proving that she has plenty of unused tricks up her sleeve. In 2014, she played a vampire lover, an AI therapist, and a wealthy 84-year-old woman who regularly had sex with Ralph Fiennes. Even among such tough competition, her performance in Snowpiercer is something special, and certainly among the most purely entertaining performances she’s ever given. As Mason, the spokesperson for the Snowpiercer train, she’s a weird combination of slimy politician, mad scientist, and rich snob. It’s a gloriously over the top performance that feels right at home in a gleefully genre-blending film.

4. Teyonah Parris, Dear White People

There’s not a single performance in Justin Simine’s Dear White People that I would consider anything less than great, but Teyonah Parris still manages to stand out. She plays Coco, a college student who hopes to become a reality star through a successful YouTube channel. She’s a sensitive young woman who desperately wants to be seen as indomitable. Throughout the film, Coco transforms herself to conform to desires of the society around, making herself more appealing to the audience she wants while denying the parts of her character that she considers less marketable. Parris inflects her performance with an agonized quality that makes her struggle that much more affecting.

3. Emily Blunt, Edge of Tomorrow

Few actresses working right now are as versatile as Emily Blunt, who somehow manages to bring humanity to roles you wouldn’t expect. Edge of Tomorrow is the perfect example of this. Blunt plays Sergeant Rita Vrataski, a soldier who once had the same power Tom Cruise’ character now possesses to relive the same battle over and over again, allowing her to perfect her skills and end up a war hero. However, this also forced her to witness the death of a loved one again and again, and the effects of this trauma can be seen on Blunt's face. It’s a poignant female performance in the last genre you’d expect there to be one, and only Blunt could pull it off.

2. Krysten Ritter, Listen Up Philip

Listen Up Philip is a deeply cynical portrait of the artistic ego, and not the sort of film that you’d expect to break your heart. Nor would you expect anything in the way of surprises from the character of Melanie (Krysten Ritter), the bitter daughter of the well-respected but incredibly self-absorbed author Ike, whose treatment of his daughter borders on hostile. We’ve seen this sort of character before, and we think we know where it’s going. But Ritter underscores all of Melanie’s bitter words with a pain, hinting at how much damage the years of neglect have caused. The resentment eventually transforms into a heartbreaking vulnerability when she confronts her father for the way he has treated her and her mother, only to be rejected and left worse off than she was before.

1. Elisabeth Moss, Listen Up Philip

For the majority of its running time, Listen Up Philip focuses on the arrogant and self-centered author Philip (Jason Schwartzman) and his equally arrogant and self-centered mentor Ike (Jonathan Pryce). Their narrow worldview frequently exhibits feelings of misogyny, with Ike in particular having hostile feelings toward the women he believes have only wanted to hurt and belittle him his entire life. When we first meet her, Philip’s girlfriend Ashley (Elizabeth Moss) seems destined fall victim to her boyfriend’s selfishness, but the genius of director Alex Ross Perry’s film and Moss’ performance in particular is the way it flips the script on our expectations. The film’s novelistic structure jumps around in time and between characters, devoting an entire section of the film to Ashely in the wake of her separation from Philip. She treats his departure not as an ending but as a new beginning, and Moss plays Ashley as a woman who has been freed of the oppressive atmosphere of an unfulfilling relationship and finally has time to focus on her own needs.  When Philip does finally attempt to return to Ashely and she denies him, Moss somehow manages to express eight different emotions on her at once in one of the mostly quietly powerful moments of 2014.