Amy Madigan is bound to win something for playing Aunt Gladys in ‘Weapons'
Might she be the standout of the summer, the one most deserving an award, other than the person who updated this billboard near LAX?
I'm Glenn Whipp, columnist for the Los Angeles Times and host of The Envelope newsletter. A forecast for a cosmic future in these parts? Hope, indeed, comes in many forms.
I'm going to tread lightly when it comes to spoilers for Zach Cregger's horror movie 'Weapons,' currently the No. 1 movie at the box office.
But I'm also of the mind that you should see 'Weapons' knowing as little as possible about it. So anything I write could be considered a spoiler, though I should also note that I'm someone who never watches movie trailers and will go so far as to close my eyes and cover my ears in a theater to avoid them. Sometimes I think the only reason I'm still writing about movies is that the job allows me to see films in advance and not have them ruined. I love flying blind.
You probably know that 'Weapons' follows what happens in an American town after 17 children disappear one night, all of them simultaneously running out the front doors of their homes, arms outstretched, at precisely 2:17 a.m. Cregger unravels the mystery from multiple, often overlapping points of view, calling to mind Paul Thomas Anderson's audacious epic 'Magnolia,' right down to the presence of a clumsy, mustachioed cop.
Well into the movie, we meet Madigan's Aunt Gladys in a principal's office at the school that the missing kids attended. All of the children were in the same class. Gladys says she is the aunt of the one child from the class who didn't run off into night. There's some understandable curiosity and concern over this boy, Alex (Cary Christopher, another standout in a very good year for child actors), and Gladys is here to reassure everyone that Alex — and his parents — are doing just fine.
Gladys is perhaps not the most reliable messenger. She is wearing a bright-red wig and multiple layers of makeup, a presentation that suggests she has spent a lifetime watching Bette Davis in 'What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?' Something is off, and, hoo boy, are we about to find out what that something is.
Madigan is excellent, disarming and adept at concealing, to a point, the hidden core of good ol' Aunt Gladys. Again, I'm treading lightly. If you've seen it, as I'm sure many of you have, you know just how delightfully insane her work in the movie is.
Critics groups love to reward the delightfully insane. They also love to champion genres, like horror, that tend to be marginalized at the Oscars.
So I'd expect some group — perhaps New York, maybe L.A. — could be eager to plant a flag for Madigan as a much-deserved, out-of-the-box supporting actress choice. She's 74, has enjoyed a fine career on stage and screen and, along with her husband, Ed Harris, made a principled stand (or sit) at the 1999 Academy Awards, refusing to applaud when Elia Kazan took the stage to receive an honorary Oscar.
It's easy to get swept up in the success of 'Weapons' and the countless stories sifting through its ending and themes. Once the film leaves theaters and the fall festival awards contenders start dropping, Madigan will need a champion or two to put her back into the conversation.
History might be on her side, though: Davis earned a lead actress Oscar nomination for 'Baby Jane.' And Ruth Gordon won the supporting actress Oscar for 'Rosemary's Baby' for the same kind of deliciously diabolical turn that Madigan gives in 'Weapons.'
Plus, you know Aunt Gladys was taking notes on Gordon's cosmetic routine in 'Rosemary's Baby.'
I'll be back in your inbox Monday. Thanks, as always, for reading.
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