NAOMI WATTS

PERSONIFICATION OF GOOD AND EVIL INTERSECT IN DIMINISHING STRUGGLE

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

F

ilms often produce an emotive affect by contrasting good and evil. To create this experience, directors need a particularly innocent protagonist and a particularly villainess antagonist, as well as a narrative that brings the two characters together at a crossroads.

Naomi Watts performs just that well-meaning innocence that a director requires to gradually deconstruct a protagonist meant for misfortune. 

Directors cast Watts as that perfect companion to the hero, often to the anti-hero and sometimes, as plain and obvious to everyone as can be, to the villain.

Director Peter Jackson cast Watts as Ann Darrow opposite the giant monster that transitions from villain to tragic anti-hero in King Kong (2005).

That heartfelt emotional plea incrementally developed by Ann even sways the audience to begin to favour Kong.

Watts initially screams of civilized innocence. But then Ann becomes empathetic to the lonely isolated giant. Watts’ image of innocence is so sublimely bright and all things good that evil becomes less dark to the point that Ann tries to rescue Kong from the many problems that can occur in New York City.

Watts plays as close to her cinematic self as can be when she takes on the role of good Queen Gertrude with the evil doppelganger Mechtild in Ophelia (2018), a reimagined Hamlet from the perspective of the love interest. Daisy Ridley plays Orphelia in between film projects for Disney on the Star Wars reboot.

Watts plays royalty again as a Princess in Diana (2013). Watts bends her screen character a bit to more closely resemble the biopic character Princess Diana. Naveen Andrews plays the love interest, Doctor Hasnat Khan, with whom Diana had an affair post-Prince Charles.

Watts shows how the Princess tries to find herself through the affair after being rejected by the British Monarchy and the Queen’s Court.

In The Impossible (2012), Watts costars with another actor with credits as a Star Wars leading character. Watts takes a turn as the hero with much virtue as she struggles to keep herself and her son alive in the wake of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

The director’s camera follows the mother and son characters as they struggle to survive through the debris mixed about in the ocean tide and a deconstructed vacation resort.

Ewan McGregor costars as Maria’s husband Henry, who becomes separated from her at the resort when the tsunami hits.

Watts also plays supporting characters with a big and a small presence on screen next to Hollywood leading actors.

In J. Edgar (2011) Watts plays the assistant to the Director of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigations, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. The narrative unravels as Hoover dictates his memoir while Watts intersects the more twisted narrative, from time to time, as a potential love interest.

Viggo Mortensen and Vincent Cassel have difficulty withstanding the pure goodness of the screen character in Eastern Promises (2007). Watts has a more substantial role co-starring as a hospital doctor that must return a newborn child to a family after the mother dies in childbirth.

Unfortunately for Anna, the newborn child leads her to the Russian mafia. This dark setting of the underworld is told by filmmaker David Cronenberg.

Watts must use all her powers to remain innocent as the world her character uncovers becomes darker and darker.

In Mulholland Dr. (2001) David Lynch creates a psychodrama out of a multi-vehicle road accident. Lynch shows how the darkness leaves the accident scene and gradually diminishes the optimistic good that Watts has created for her character.

Betty has recently moved to Hollywood to try with but a chance to become a movie star.  But when Betty arrives, Rita, played by Laura Harring, has already taken possession of her apartment. 

Rita has blindly escaped from the motor vehicle collision during the opening scenes, barely finding her way accidentally into Betty’s apartment. But as Rita recovers from her brain trauma, she becomes darker, and Betty’s light becomes somewhat diminished as a result.

Watts does not need the title role to make her screen character light up the set. The talented actor can work innocence through a wide spectrum of emotions until her character becomes the personification of that diminishing struggle between good and evil.