I always find her a weirdly opaque actress. She’s definitely totally opaque in FWAAF.
If she’s supposed to be playing the confident, sexually-experienced, gorgeous American breezing in and out and creating havoc in a film about bumbling English eccentricity and self-deprecation, then we need to see that in her performance.
But you spend half the time thinking ‘Why did she say x? Does she mean it, is it a weird joke, or does she just have the self-knowledge of a teaspoon? Or is it just bad acting from someone who doesn’t understand the character, even though ‘’confident, charming American, charmed by bumbling Hugh Grant’ doesn’t seem that complicated ?’
Like when she pretends she thinks they’re engaged after she first sleeps with Charles, and then says ‘But I think we both missed a great opportunity here’ — why? If she likes Charles, exchanging numbers would be normal. She’s going to the US, not Jupiter.
Why does a glamorous American who works for Vogue and happily shags all round her marry a charmless Tory politician old enough to be her father, never seems that nice to her, and whose friends she describes as ‘gruesome stiffs’?
Are we really supposed to imagine she and ghastly Hamish cancelled their honeymoon for the funeral of a man they’d met twice? When she looks all stony-faced at the funeral, is she supposed to be grieving or has she already realised Hamish is awful, especially as she tells Charles, in a breathtaking display of tactlessness given the circumstances, that she’d liked him telling her he loved her?
Why does she wear a weirdly unweddingy outfit to Charles and Duckface’s wedding, when she’s been all hats and fabulousness at the previous two where she was a guest? (I mean, why does she even attend? If she likes Charles, it’s too late.) Is the outfit supposed to show us she’s sadder and wiser?
And if it’s actually supposed to be a joke about not noticing the pouring rain, it needs to be said with obvious irony. Not just sort of blankly, like she might really not have noticed.