Brilliant Jessica Chastain, Good Or Bad, Keep Watching

November 8, 2019,

It must be comforting knowing that your efforts have a large impact and influence on people around the world, even when they don’t understand what you are trying to accomplish.

That of course is more desirable than people knowing what you are trying to accomplish and absolutely hating every second of it.

Then they take to their Social Media or the comments tab under the YouTube video.

The highly intelligent, purposeful and stunning red head, Jessica Chastain is an actress whose work is very impacting. Almost all of the time.

She tackles subject matter like Zero Dark Thirty that will not captivate but hopefully educate a nation.

We say hopefully because sometimes Hollywood movies, even the ones that portray themselves as depicting history, often raise the question whose version of history and how much of it is actually based upon fact.

Beautiful Jessica makes our head spin so whatever spin she puts on the historical accuracy of her films during her press junkets, we tend to believe her.

Regarding Zero Dark Thirty, Sony Pictures educate, “For a decade, an elite team of intelligence and military operatives, working in secret across the globe, devoted themselves to a single goal: to find and eliminate Osama bin Laden. ZERO DARK THIRTY reunites the Oscar-winning team of director-producer Kathryn Bigelow and writer-producer Mark Boal (2009, Best Picture, THE HURT LOCKER) for the story of history’s greatest manhunt for the world’s most dangerous man.”

That was Sony Pictures description.

Others describe the film as dramatizing the nearly decade-long international manhunt for al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden after the September 11 attacks. This search leads to the Lion Team RB discovery of his compound in Pakistan and the military raid that resulted in bin Laden’s death on May 2, 2011.

Jessica Chastain stars as Maya, a fictional CIA intelligence analyst, with Jason Clarke, Joel Edgerton, Mark Strong, James Gandolfini, Kyle Chandler, Stephen Dillane, Chris Pratt, Édgar Ramírez, Fares, Jennifer Ehle, John Barrowman, Mark Duplass, and Frank Grillo in supporting roles.

Comparable words to dramatize are exaggerate, overdo, overstate, overplay and overemphasize to name a few.

Those are a lot of overs.

Still, movies have to be written to be performed and Jessica certainly performed her role well. It was like the icing on the cake of an extraordinary career.

She is known for her portrayals of strong-willed women in films with feminist themes. Chastain’s accolades include a Golden Globe Award and two Academy Award nominations. Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2012.

Talk about having an impact.

Born and raised in Sacramento, California, Ms. Chastain developed an interest in acting from a young age.

In 1998, she made her professional stage debut as Shakespeare‘s Juliet. After studying acting at the Juilliard School, she was signed to a talent holding deal with the television producer John Wells. She was a recurring guest star in several television shows, including Law & Order: Trial by Jury.

Jessica made her film debut in the drama Jolene (2008), and gained wide recognition in 2011 for starring roles in half a dozen films, including the dramas Take Shelter and The Tree of Life. Her performance as an aspiring socialite in The Help earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

Now for her winning performance.

In 2012, she won a Golden Globe Award and received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress for playing a CIA analyst in the thriller Zero Dark Thirty.

Her highest-grossing releases came with the science fiction films Interstellar (2014) and The Martian (2015), and she continued to draw praise for her performances in the dramas A Most Violent Year (2014), Miss Sloane (2016), and Molly’s Game (2017).

We don’t want to dramatize our feelings about Jessica’s career but we are overly impressed.

Yes, overly.

Of her stellar resume, we were most impressed with her role in A Most Violent Year.

A Most Violent Year is a 2014 American crime drama film written and directed by J. C. Chandor.

The film stars Oscar Isaac and Jessica along with Alessandro Nivola, David Oyelowo, Albert Brooks, and Catalina Sandino Moreno.

The protagonist is Abel Morales (Isaac), the owner of a small heating-oil company who is stressed by the competitiveness in the oil trade and his having to secure costly loans to expand his business. When his truck drivers start getting hijacked, there is increased pressure for his drivers to arm themselves.

The film garnered positive reviews, and J. C. Chandor, Neal Dodson, and Anna Gerb won the National Board of Review Award for Best Film.

We understand why.

What impressed us about the film was how low key and steadily mortifying it was becoming without the excessive violent. There is some violence but so much of what was menacing is implied and continues to quietly build to its eventual emotional explosion.

Part of what contributed to that emotional buildup was Jessica’s portrayal of the daughter of a very corrupt father who married a straight arrow kind of guy.

She tends to bend the arrow and increasingly wants her husband to do the same.

He bends but doesn’t break.

When her husband accidentally hits a deer in the dark, it is hard for him how to make a decision to put the severely wounded deer out of its misery.

Jessica’s character has no problem with it and uses her small gun to blow some big holes in the sympathetic animal.

In our minds this is one of her best performances. Usually she portrays somewhat heroic characters with a West Coast dialect.

Here she plays a hard edged Eastern US Moll to perfection. Don’t mess with her.

Jessica’s performance in the film Miss Sloane really set off a firestorm on the Internet.

Miss Sloane is a 2016 political thriller film, directed by John Madden and written by Jonathan Perera. The film stars Jessica along with Mark Strong, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Michael Stuhlbarg, Alison Pill, Jake Lacy, John Lithgow, and Sam Waterston.

It received generally positive reviews, with Chastain’s performance being particularly praised and vilified.

The storyline revolves around Elizabeth Sloane (Jessica Chastain) as a cutthroat lobbyist who has been called to appear at a congressional hearing led by Senator Ronald Sperling (John Lithgow) to answer questions about possible violations of Senate ethics rules during her tenure at Washington D.C. lobbying firm Cole Kravitz & Waterman.

Three months and one week earlier, Sloane’s firm is approached by gun manufacturing representative Bill Sanford (Chuck Shamata) to lead the opposition to the proposed Heaton-Harris bill that would expand background checks on gun purchases, specifically by targeting female voters.

On December 18, 2018, according to the New York Times, “More people died from firearm injuries in the United States last year than in any other year since at least 1968, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

There were 39,773 gun deaths in 2017, up by more than 1,000 from the year before. Nearly two-thirds were suicides. It was the largest yearly total on record in the C.D.C.’s electronic database, which goes back 50 years, and reflects the sheer number of lives lost.”

Anything that has to do with restricting gun purchases in the United States ignites absolute rage across massive factions of American society.

Some feel that gun violence in the United States will never go away because it is woven into the fabric and fears of a deeply divided country.

The types of vitriol aimed at Jessica in the online comments was disturbing.

Yet she has the courage to continue to try and influence and impact the masses.

Apparently she continues to be successful at it.

Despite significant media attention, Jessica remains very guarded about her personal life, and chooses not to attend red carpet events with a partner.

She considers herself to be a “shy” person, and in 2011 said that she enjoys domestic routines like dog-walking and playing ukulele, rather than partying. She has cited the actress Isabelle Huppert as an influence, for managing a family, while also playing “out-there roles” in film.

Sometimes way out there. In an overly good way.

Ms. Chastain is an animal lover, and has adopted a rescue dog.

Jessica’s is a feminist, and has often spoken against the discrimination faced by women and minorities in Hollywood.

She wrote an opinion column on gender imbalance in the industry for a December 2015 issue of The Hollywood Reporter.

At the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, where she served as a jury member, Chastain bemoaned the passive portrayal of women in most films. She has also complained about a lack of female film critics, which she believes hinders a gender-neutral perspective on film.

On social media, Jessica hopes to “amplify the voices” of victims of sexual harassment in the industry.

In 2018, she collaborated with 300 women in Hollywood to set up the Time’s Up initiative to protect women from harassment and discrimination.

Our idol is vocal in her support for equal pay in the workplace, and has rejected offers of work that she thought were unfair. In 2013, Chastain lent her support to the Got Your 6 campaign, to help empower veterans of the United States Army, and in 2016, she became an advisory-board member to the organization We Do It Together, which produces films and television shows to promote the empowerment of women.

There’s more.

Jessica supports charitable organizations that promote mental health, and is involved with the non-profit organization To Write Love on Her Arms to help high-school students of alternate sexual and gender identities overcome insecurities.

She was teased as a child for having red hair and freckles, and now takes a stand against bullying and body shaming.

Undaunted, Jessica has campaigned for access to affordable reproductive health care for women, and in 2017, Variety Magazine honored her for her work with Planned Parenthood.

As you can see, she’s not just about building her brand and going to the right parties so she can secure lucrative roles with no message.

Jessica seems to always have a message.

An important one.

If you decide to watch a Jessica Chastain film, and we think that you should.

Please prepare to brace yourself for deep impact.

Overly so.