It may not feel like Jennifer Lawrence has been what one would consider ‘gone’ for that long, exactly, but Hollywood is one of those places that seems to move fast, especially when you’re a woman and you’ve been in a couple of films that weren’t box-office smashes. However, Lawrence is one of those performers who hasn’t just managed to pull off a successful comeback: she’s become a much more interesting performer, too.
After her meteoric rise to stardom and a first Oscar nomination at the age of 20 for Winter’s Bone, Lawrence became the second-youngest winner in the Best Actress category for Silver Linings Playbook. In the five years after that 2012 win, Lawrence was in 12 films, most of which were big-budget tentpoles and she was everywhere. But with the drawbacks of overexposure and some projects that didn’t resonate with critics or audiences, her release schedule started to slow; between 2018-2020, she appeared in Red Sparrow, an espionage film that didn’t leave much of a mark beyond the fuss around its nudity, and Dark Phoenix, an X-Men filmed that had been filmed ages before and experienced numerous production issues. However, Lawrence must have noticed this, because what happened next was interesting, to say the least.
After withdrawing more from the public eye, Lawrence returned in 2021’s Don’t Look Up, not what one would call the best film of that year’s Best Picture nominees, but it certainly reminded the world that should could act. She followed that high-profile film with the much more intimate Causeway, a drama which hinged on her work with Brian Tyree Henry. In this $2million feature, Lawrence returned to the more grounded films that she had started catching eyes with, such as Winter’s Bone. Her appearance in the film (which she’s brilliant in) seems a far cry from the high-profile features she’d appeared in half a decade ago.
Instead of following this critical darling up with another low-budget drama, Lawrence reignited the mid-budget studio sex comedy with 2023’s No Hard Feelings, a film where her performance is without ego and she subjects herself to a lot of things many performers of her profile would refuse to do (including being kicked in the vagina). The film should have been a bigger hit at the box office, as critics everywhere seemed to say, ‘Man, I haven’t seen a film like this for years, I miss them. Oh well!’
Post-studio comedy, Lawrence then made the next move in a series of plays that have continued to reshape. Instead of another grounded drama or mid-budget comedy, Lawrence lit audiences aflame with Lynne Ramsey’s Die, My Love. In this arthouse film which primarily features Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, and a lot of madness, Lawrence plays a woman who unravels whilst isolated in a country house with her baby and husband (who is mostly absent). Similar to her work in Causeway and No Hard Feelings, Lawrence displays no limits as she claws at walls, crawls on the floor, and does things that I’m not sure I can write about without setting off alarms.
But these wonderful performances themselves aren’t the only thing that Lawrence has done which are interesting. She was a wonderful performer before, but by choosing a wider variety of projects (many of which are riskier) and range of roles that requires more dynamism form a lead, Lawrence has become a much more interesting performer to watch. This critical resurgence has been an exciting ride so far, and whatever Lawrence chooses next remains to be seen, but it’s almost guaranteed that it will be something worth watching.
Bio:
Conrad is a bibliophile, cinephile, and all-round pop-culture sponge. When he’s not watching films or working his day job, he can be found writing a lot (seriously, like a lot) or running.
