Rooney Mara, Powerful Family, Explosive And Captivating Actress

Artistic masterpieces in motion, already developed and in finished form, are evident from the moment you begin to watch them.

Part of the reason that is so is because of how the film makes you feel emotionally.

It is deeply affecting.

Not every actress can pull that feat off even with the best written material and the finest of co-stars.

That’s what makes Rooney Mara so special. She can pull it off and she has, more than once.

Patricia Rooney Mara is an American actress.

You need to take a breath to read the following. We never saw this one coming.

Rooney was born and raised in Bedford, New York, a town in Westchester County about 40 miles north of New York City. Her mother’s family (the Rooneys) founded the Pittsburgh Steelers and her father’s family (the Maras) founded the New York Giants.

We still have to think about that one for a second. Talk about two families with a vision making incredible history together.

Have you ever heard of such a thing?

Rooney had a vision as well regarding her name.

She never really liked or felt like a Patricia and liked Rooney much better thus going by her middle name first.

Hence the name Rooney Mara.

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The United States Representative Tom Rooney from Florida is her first cousin, once removed.

She began her acting career playing supporting roles in several independent films, including the coming-of-age drama film Tanner Hall (2009), before starring as Nancy Thompson in the 2010 remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street and as Erica Albright in the biographical drama film The Social Network (2010).

In the film, you remember her as the girl who broke up with Mark Zuckerberg, right?

In 2011, Rooney had a career breakthrough when she portrayed Lisbeth Salander, the title character in David Fincher‘s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, based on Stieg Larsson‘s Millennium book series.

To follow up on the original movie, the exceptional nail biting 2009 Swedish version starring Noomi Rapace was a hard thing to do but Rooney pulled it off with stars.

Our American beauty received critical acclaim for her performance in the 2011 version and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress and a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama.

She was originally cast as Maya Hansen in Zero Dark Thirty (2012) but dropped out to do Side Effects (2013) and was replaced by Jessica Chastain.

In 2013, she also starred in the independent drama Ain’t Them Bodies Saints and the acclaimed sci-fi romantic drama, Her.

The following year, she starred in the adventure drama film Trash (2014). In 2015, she garnered further critical acclaim for her performance in Todd Haynes‘ romantic drama Carol, for which she tied for the Best Actress Award at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival.

Rooney’s family has always had a strong sense of global social responsibility. Our luminary founded the charity Faces of Kibera, which aimed to provide housing, food, and medical care for orphans in Kibera, a Nairobi, Kenya slum.

The charity’s goal was to build an orphanage in the region, for which 6 acres of land have been purchased. To raise money the group auctioned off memorabilia from the Steelers and Giants, as well as training camp events on eBay to raise the money.

What ignited her attention to this cause was when she visited the area as a volunteer in 2006 and was moved to help the orphans, many whose parents have died from AIDS and HIV-related illnesses.

Rooney began the charity due to her frustration with the growing number of nonprofits that are just business opportunities. “The people who need help aren’t really getting it. So I started my own”, she told Interview magazine in 2009.

In January 2011, Faces of Kibera merged with Uweza Foundation which runs community-based empowerment programs in Kibera, including soccer leagues and after-school tutoring.

Let’s visit them at uwezakenya.org where they educate, “Uweza is Kiswahili for ability and power. Uweza Foundation fights the cycle of poverty that persists in Kenya’s Kibera slum. We invest in the future of the children and youth of Kibera through education, life skills, talent development, and economic empowerment. All of our initiatives are developed and/or run by Kenyans, primarily residents of Kibera who are dedicated to the betterment of their community.

Our projects that develop talent, build life skills, and improve emotional and mental well-being are an investment, rather than a handout.”

Makes perfect sense.

Ms. Mara serves as the president of the board of directors for the foundation.

Given her powerful family roots and broad life experiences we are starting to understand even better why she has created at least three master pieces from her extensive television and film resume.

It is our determination to view all of her films.

In the film Side Effects, she truly had us believing that she was a women struggling with depression and suicidal thoughts when in reality there was something far more sinister at work.

It was her performance in Una though that was emotionally wrenching and very uncomfortable in the questions that it raised.

Una is a 2016 American-British-Canadian drama film directed by Benedict Andrews based upon the play Blackbird by David Harrower, who also wrote the film’s screenplay.

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A young woman, Una (Rooney), arrives unexpectedly at an older man’s workplace looking for the truth behind the affair (properly described as statutory rape) that occurred between them. The interactions were instigated by Ray (Ben Mendelsohn) when she was a 13-year-old child and he was a next-door neighbor and trusted friend of her father.

One intriguing aspect to this film is the number of directions it could have taken.

Her antagonist was previously caught, convicted and did serve his time but she wasn’t quite done with him because what he did to her wasn’t quite done with her, even though she is now an adult.

The traditional road in this genre is to publicly humiliate him again for what is truly an unforgivable crime, even if he had been molested as a youth, which he had not been.

Another more brutal one is to hunt him down and kill him or take a far more sinister pathway like the one traveled in the harrowing film Hard Candy where the potential young victim isn’t as vulnerable as she seems and really sends her potential abuser through a sustained terrifying experience where castration was a very real possibility.

So why has Una tracked him down so many years later? What does she hope to get out of him and put him through that a public trial and jail time as a pedophile among inmates did not?

Perhaps some of it was the unfairness of how their futures turned out.

Ray moved on to a great job and new identity with a beautiful wife and daughter while Una was stuck in the same small town where everyone knew her tragedy, with mostly, but not always sympathetic eyes.

Una still seemed stuck in the past.

The part that is most harrowing is how for a second you can believe him that when she was thirteen and they both wanted to run away together that he was truly in love with her and never ever did that to another child again.

That just doesn’t ring true but give him credit, he is convincing.

Can an emotionally healthy and stable adult man actually fall in love with a thirteen year old girl?

On the surface it seems absolutely ludicrous to contemplate it but given Ray’s reaction and performance it might make the implausible seem possible that he is the first pedophile in history to be emotionally drawn to a thirteen year old and it is truly about love and not sex.

But hold that unthinkable thought because they do have sex so it may be about many things but ultimately it is primarily about that; an inappropriate and criminal behavior with a minor who is not accountable for her behavior and will be greatly damaged by the experience.

Possibly for life.

For Una, her hope is that Ray did uniquely love her.

If that is the case then her pain can be softened.

You see it wasn’t the fact that he sexually abused her that seemed to be bothering her the most. It was the abandonment that traumatized her more. The feeling that she was just another young delicacy most likely among many.

He reassures her that she was not and that there was something special about her and that he truly loved her.

We once knew someone in our circle, who when he was 17, a virgin and about to graduate from high school when he met these two incredible 14 year old girls who actually could have been thirteen going on 14.

He fell in love with both of them.

They both seemed to want something from him. It wasn’t about a carnal threesome. It was very emotional for at least him and one of the young teens.

He didn’t make to love to them and it ended very sadly.

It some ways it scarred him for life.

What struck him most were two things. Even though he was a late minor, he still felt like to have sex with them was the behavior of a pedophile.

What struck him even more was the intensity of it all. The emotions were so raw and powerful that it was something he would never feel later when he became sexually active with girls his own age, 18 and older.

The point being, the way he described his deep pain over their friendships ending, it came across as though even if those feelings submerged for decades, if they were triggered again, it would be extremely intense even as an adult.

Maybe more so because of the length it time that they lay dormant.

In the film Una, between the anger, confrontation and pain, there was this unusual bond between them now as adults that is so visceral.

At some point Una wants him to make love to her as an adult and they attempt to before he feels it doesn’t feel right, once again making it believable that he is not your garden variety predator who could now get an easy piece.

Rooney Mara turns what could be awkward and predictable in other feminine hands into an emotionally charged and admittedly draining but incredibly satisfying theatrical affair that poses far more questions than it answers.