2006 Flak Film Also-Ran Awards: The Steak Knives
Second-Best Actress
by Flak Staff

The second installment in a five-part Oscars feature

 Photo Slideshow

To be eligible for the Steak Knives, candidates must not have been recognized by the Oscars, the Golden Globes, the Independent Spirit Awards or in the top tier of the Village Voice Take Seven Critics' Poll. To see the ineligible nominees, click here.

Joan Allen
The Upside of Anger

Only guys with a savior complex could find Terry lovable. She drinks too much and has nothing kind to say about anyone, especially her cowardly husband who recently ran out on her and her four daughters. But Joan Allen, as she did with a similarly unlikable wife and mother in The Ice Storm, adds the necessary dimensions to make Terry compelling in her grief and funny in her rage. Allen supplies adult intelligence — she alone of her generation seems preternaturally gifted at playing beautiful not-young women burdened both by their brains and the sense that their world values sexy girls and men of any age (or level of success) far more than they do her. She conveys the character's difficult limbo, flirting between accepting her abandonment as confirmation of how much life sucks or (even more scary) confirmation of her own failings. Most of us would avoid Terry in real life, but Allen reveals the depths of disappointment that went into making her so caustic in the first place. Not lovable, but certainly heartrending. — Tim Grierson

Miranda July
Me and You and Everyone We Know

Miranda July's feature directorial debut, Me and You and Everyone We Know is certainly flawed, but it's undeniably special. It's a generational film, as was Bonnie and Clyde, which was so different and odd that New York Times critic Bosley Crowther panned it and then reversed himself in print after receiving a slew of appalled letters from the new generation of filmgoers. Reviewers — especially ones working for the New York Times — don't change their minds in print, but Crowther reluctantly recognized those letters as a changing of the guard. July is a member of the new new guard, alongside Sofia Coppola (Lost In Translation) and Zach Braff (Garden State). My parents hated Garden State, while both my sister and I loved how it captured our Internet-dissociated world and spoke to us in a language our analog, still-able-to-tolerate-dial-up parents can't understand any more than their parents dug Bonnie and Clyde.

July plays Christine, who, despite her ultra-appealing, quirky cuteness, is sad, lonely, and incapable of normal social interaction. She's much more comfortable, even fearless, in her own apartment, alternating her free time between creating dramatic one-woman digital shorts and shooting her own video diaries. She tries, occasionally in stalker-ish fashion, to cast her fears and awkwardness aside, but again, she doesn't know how to act around real people who exist outside the Internet and her own head. She doesn't know when to stop goofing around, when or even how to be herself, and so even when she's fallen in love (from a safe distance) with a recently divorced shoe salesman, her playful, flailing flirtation eventually turns a bit creepy. Christine — like the salesman, his two sons, or any other character in Me and You and Everyone We Know — has no idea why she does anything. July's ability to capture Christine's confusion about how her complete communication of freedom nevertheless results in lack of clarity is astounding. — Chris Shadoian

Sibel Kekilli
Head-On

Of all of the variables that build a movie, one of the most subjective is chemistry. What are we seeing here — one great performance, two great performances, or some alchemic process taking place in the space between those performances that allows the actors to do things they would never be able to replicate? I'm not familiar with anything else that Sibel Kekilli and Biron Ünel have appeared in, so I can't testify to one effect or the other, but both give such gobsmacking performances in Head-On that I suspect it's alchemy … but then again, the movie is itself about when that alchemy occurs between their characters, so perhaps it's just their consummate craft misdirecting me.

The only reason the question even arises is because Head-On feels remarkably real. Sibel Keklli's character, also named Sibel, wants out from under her father's roof in Hamburg; the only way he'll let her out is if she marries a fellow Turk, but her reason for leaving is to lead as non-marital a life as possible. Her solution to the catch-22 is to convince the 20-years-older Cahit (Ünel) to be a sham husband — and the plot seems all the more fitting for being hatched in the psych ward from which they are both being released. I think the filmmakers contrived a poor ending for the movie, but Kekilli and Ünel make the journey endlessly compelling, each communicating how something innate about the other compels them to work past their self-abnegation. Kekilli is called upon to deliver every possible emotion that you could imagine a 24-year-old might feel, and she does it with such natural aplomb that you would never guess that this was her (proper) film debut. — Sean Weitner

Rachel McAdams
Red Eye

"The reign of the purely pictorial heroine is over." Sally Field? Penny Marshall? No, those words came from actress-hater Alfred Hitchcock himself. "Glamour has nothing to do with reality," he also noted, "and I maintain that reality is the most important factor in the making of a successful film."

Enter Rachel McAdams, a young woman picking the right projects (The Notebook, Mean Girls) for a deliberate, Julia Roberts-esque rise to the top. Her challenge in Red Eye was to play not just a potent woman, as her position as a luxury hotel manager would suggest, but one that has overcome adversity en route. A strong woman is one thing, but battle-hardened … it's like character gold.

The nameless (read: Hitchcockian) conspirators use her widowed father, her job and a resonant sexual assault from her past as strategic and psychological ammunition against her. McAdams replies with a character who shows fear — oh, she shows it well — but pushes past it. On the strength of her performance, Red Eye becomes less of a Wes Craven thriller and more of a testament to real women overcoming adversity. — Andy Stilp

Tilda Swinton
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

Without Satan, "Paradise Lost" would be a fatal read; likewise the White Witch in Narnia. Given the Witch's Oscar-worthy costumes, fabulous carriage and midget henchman, practically any actress might have lightened up this plodding allegory, with its charmless two-dimensional tots, but Tilda Swinton redeems it. This will come as no surprise to her fans, of course. Since leaving Cambridge with an English degree, then veering into Derek Jarman's odd company, she's always had a penchant for the surreal. She got her first wide American exposure in Orlando, playing an ethereal gender-switching noble who adventures across centuries of English history. Tall, aristocratic and blessed with the Cheekbones of Death, Swinton had no problem carrying all of that. She showed amazing range in a relatively mainstream American feature, The Deep End, playing a soccer mom who gets sucked into a fiendishly noir undertow. More recently, she was again a man (sort of), the angel Gabriel in Constantine, and arguably the very best thing in that film. In Narnia, she is no dimestore dominatrix. Maybe it comes from her family's thousand-year-old castle, or from going to school with Lady Di, or maybe it's just acting, but Swinton invests the White Witch with a seductive and hypnotic hauteur. (The Witch's only peer in screen history is Faye Dunaway's murderous "Milady" in The Four Musketeers.) When she springs a triple-cross on one of the dreary brats, she makes the line resonate with transcendent hatred, not for the evil he's done, but for its banality, when she explains to a condemned soul, "He betrayed you for sweeties." It's entirely fitting, even plausible, that she has decreed a hundred years of winter, just so she can wear all those fabulous furs.
— David Essex

Second-best Actor
Second-best Screenplay
Second-best Director
Second-best Picture

Produced by Andy Adams.