Bernardo Britto's Omni Loop, yet another movie where characters experience the same events over and over again throughout the narrative, showed me definitively what she can do as a dramatic actress, even though it is not a traditional "dramatic" role.
Of course, dramatic interpretations are possible in movies with heavy genre associations, like the time travel/time loop movie. What I really mean, though, is that her role supporting another good lead turn from Mary-Louise Parker could have been just a cypher who existed purely for plot function. Instead, Edebiri injects it with ten times more nuance than the part requires. Because she is such a good actress, that nuance doesn't call attention to itself. Nuance shouldn't, if accurately described as such.
I suppose there's something of an irony that Edebiri's work did call attention to itself in some way, in that I have chosen to write a post about her during an extremely busy time of my movie watching year, where the posts are stacking up on each other as they await their turn to be my one single post for the day. But we should take notice when a practitioner of the craft does it as well as Edebiri does here, the same way we should notice when a minor league baseball player gets a cup of coffee with the big league team at the end of the season and makes the most of his dozen at-bats. Of course, Edebiri is no minor leaguer -- or won't be for much longer if she ever was.
I started to notice the effectiveness of her technique during a scene that's probably more than halfway through the movie, where Parker's character gets a faraway look in her eyes after something Edebiri's character has said. The director prevents Parker's faraway look from resolving into dialogue for something on the order of five to ten seconds, and during that time, Edebiri changes the micro expressions on her face about a dozen times. Just through her eyes, her eyebrows and some slight scrunching of the facial muscles, Edebiri's Paula indicates multiple things simultaneously: 1) "What the hell is this look in your eyes?" 2) "I'm waiting to receive your next comment." 3) "This is weird, even for you." You'd have to see the scene to fully appreciate it, and I hope you do -- though I suspect you aren't likely to pick this out from the standard level of her technique in all the other scenes, which I was not specifically noticing before this one.
You better bet I was noticing it from there. There's one moment when Paula gives more of her back story -- this has largely been the story of Parker's Zoya to this point -- and it's a long, unbroken take held on Edebiri's face. Because the things she's telling Zoya are so hard for her, involving admissions she's never made out loud and the dredging up of traumatizing childhood memories, Paula only gets going in fits and starts, her face squinting into little frowns as she has to push the words out of her mouth through sheer force of will. In even describing this the way I am, I probably make it sound like the mechanics of her performance are way too visible. Really, I just want to describe the best I can the instincts that come so easily and so naturally to this actress.
I see lots of good performances in lots of good movies, and Edebiri's is probably not so exceptional in that regard. The reason I'm writing about it is that good movies and good performances remind us of things we already knew but sometimes take for granted. Because of her function in the film, Edebiri's role as an actor is to play off the lead, and that requires a lot of reacting. And once I started noticing the choices Edebiri was making in her reactions, I couldn't take my eyes off her, even when she was not the focal point of the scene -- in fact, especially then.
Maybe it's time for me to finally watch The Bear.
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