Emily Blunt, then and now

The release of The Devil Wears Prada 2 earlier this year reminded me that this is the 20th anniversary of our awareness of Emily Blunt. The original film came out in 2006, and that's definitely the first time I had ever seen Blunt on screen. (She'd been working for three years before that, but not in anything I'd seen.) In those 20 years, she has become one of my favorite actresses.

Oh yeah, she's beautiful, and she's just my type. I'm not going to deny that. 

But from that very first role in The Devil Wears Prada, it was clear she had the chops as well. She has since appeared in a number of other personal favorites that have done extremely well in my year-end rankings, chief among them Your Sister's Sister, Looper, Edge of Tomorrow and Sicario. And her performances in those films are primary reasons why the films are so effective. (Maybe not Looper, I think her role was smaller in that.)

And yet awards love has largely eluded her. In those 20 years, she's earned only one Oscar nomination, that being for Oppenheimer a few years ago -- a role I don't even remember being very compelling. (The finer details of Oppenheimer did not really stay with me.) Specifically in the case of Sicario, I feel like that performance was served up on a platter for Oscar consideration, and I don't mean to suggest it was just awards bait. I mean it was a strong lead performance in a film that received three other Oscar nominations, and everyone could see that Blunt was central to the film's success. 

Maybe it's just the fact that she's British, and British actresses are usually feted by the Oscars, but I feel like Blunt not having more nominated work is a bit of a crime. Just this year, Brit Jessie Buckley walked away with an Oscar for histrionic work in a film that's way less good and way less subtle than some of Blunt's best films. 

I'm writing about Blunt today not because I just saw Disclosure Day, although I did just see Disclosure Day. It's because the next night I also saw a movie from very back at the beginnings of that career called Wind Chill, which was released in 2007. 

I didn't go hunting for Wind Chill. In fact, I had no idea what I wanted to watch when I started browsing on Netflix. And there's no doubt the algorithm pushed up Wind Chill higher in prominence due to the release of Disclosure Day, but I think I had to click into it in the first place to see that Blunt was involved. Once I saw that, it was a cinch to make it that night's movie. (The fact that the movie is executive produced by George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh, even stranger given the sort of movie it is, was the clincher, if the decision still needed clinching.)

First, Disclosure Day.

I'm not going to reveal spoilers, because it's only just opening in the U.S today. But I did want to give you my general impression, and I'll also link to my review (here) if you want to read it. I gave it a 6/10, or three stars. My primary two complaints, as it were: the story is a bit all over the place, and the ultimate secret being disclosed feels a bit too obvious within the history of Spielberg's career. (I don't know why I'm dancing around that secret, the advertising materials themselves don't try very hard to keep it.) 

But Blunt's performance is quite good. As a Kanas City weather woman undergoing a profound change, she herself has got to be all over the place, emotionally -- repeatedly struck with sudden knowledge upon meeting a new person, and at the same time, reacting with fear about what's going on with her. It's a performance that requires many of the same skills as a person playing someone with split personality disorder, and Blunt pulls it off with typical aplomb. There are also moments when she's in sort of a trance, as in the signature scene from the trailers, where she's on camera and suddenly starts speaking in clicking noises. It's a role that requires a lot of an actor, and there's no one better to do it than Blunt. 

Wind Chill was interesting because it strikes me as the sort of film Blunt would have only made if it were already in progress at the time The Devil Wears Prada was released, which it likely was, given that it came out only a year later. The story involves Blunt's character and a man played by Ashton Holmes, who I must be remembering from A History of Violence because he hasn't been in much else I've seen. They're on a road trip home from college to Delaware for Christmas, and get into a car accident in the snowy night on a shortcut, where they remain stranded without help. They're then haunted by the ghosts of people who died on that stretch of the road. 

This one gets only two stars from me, despite the pedigree of the star and the producers. (The connection of Clooney and Soderbergh is that the director, Gregory Jacobs, is in their inner circle; he also directed Magic Mike XXL.) It was really interesting to watch what is essentially a low-budget horror movie starring someone with Blunt's natural instincts. She's definitely good in this movie, better than the role requires, but there's a strange disconnect to watching her smart reactions to horror stimuli that are clearly beneath someone of her talents. Hey, everyone has their beginnings. 

Blunt is 43 now, so her window to finally get that Oscar could be closing. Or maybe not. She's really showing no signs of slowing down, and she doesn't look like she's done any of the plastic surgery that can sometimes curtail the careers of an actress of her age. Sometimes actresses get their most award-worthy roles when they start to get a little older, and if we are already looking at this year's Oscars, we need to look no further than 75-year-old Amy Madigan finally getting a first Oscar halfway through her eighth decade. Let's just hope it doesn't take Blunt that long.