On Movies: Front-line performance

The girlfriend, the wife, the lover. The kooky coworker. The hooker with a heart of gold. If you're an actress in Hollywood - from an ingenue making her splash on Vanity Fair's cheesecake "Vanities" page to an A-list talent - nine times out of 10, these are the parts you're going to play. In a male-dominated industry where actors are allowed to grow old on screen and still get marquee roles - Bruce Willis, George Clooney, Denzel Washington - the window of opportunity for women is cracked open only a bit. And as they move into their 40s and 50s, the window can suddenly slam shut.

Which is why Michelle Monaghan's accomplishment in a little independent called Fort Bliss should be doubly celebrated.

A gritty portrait of an Army medic just back from an extended tour in Afghanistan, rocked by trauma and trying to reconnect with the young son she left in her estranged husband's care, Claudia Myers' film presents a fully realized female character. Monaghan's Staff Sgt. Maggie Swann is proud of who she is and what she does - she's tough, she's exceptional - but in the drab El Paso apartment where she finds herself with her five-year-old, whom she hasn't seen in 18 months (almost a third of his life), she loses her temper and feels adrift.

Since Monaghan - 38 now, a mother of two - started working in films in the early '00s, she's had smaller parts in big films (The Bourne Supremacy), bigger parts in big films (Tom Cruise's fiancee, a nurse, in Mission: Impossible III), and a couple of breakout turns, notably Gone Baby Gone, in which she played Angie Gennaro, partner in work, and in bed, with Casey Affleck's private detective, Patrick Kenzie. (Ben Affleck made his directorial debut with the abducted-child thriller, based on a Dennis Lehane novel.) And in the first season of HBO's True Detective, Monaghan was wrenching as the wife of Woody Harrelson's Louisiana detective, mother of his kids and victim of his philandering.

But nothing in her body of work prepares you for what she does in Fort Bliss. The skill and stoicism she displays tending to a wounded soldier when a convoy is attacked; the desperate pain she feels back in Texas when her son says he wants to stay with his new stepmom; the sexual hunger she radiates on a date with the ridiculously handsome garage mechanic (played by Manolo Cardona); the jolting memory of a sexual assault by a fellow soldier that crosses her eyes, and that has crushed and tainted her - all of this Monaghan pulls off with an emotional precision that is astonishing. To be sure, Oscar-worthy.

"Michelle was the perfect actress to portray this role," said Myers, who has made training films and documentaries for the U.S. military. "She had all these different qualities, but I had never seen them in the same performance. And I felt like the role of Maggie would be an opportunity to play tough and to play vulnerable and to be sort of masculine and then also, at times, very feminine. And there were unflattering aspects of the character. She's flawed, she's complicated . . . . I just thought, 'I would love to see Michelle Monaghan do all these things.' "

Audiences outside New York, Los Angeles and Washington, where Fort Bliss opened in actual brick-and-mortar theaters, still have the chance to see Monaghan do all these things, too. The film is available on view-on-demand platforms right now, and the DVD is set for release Oct. 14. But the fact that it hasn't had a theatrical run in the Philadelphia market - or almost any other major market - speaks to the struggles facing filmmakers and distributors working in the shadow of the Hollywood giants.

A few Sunday mornings ago, members of Talk Cinema, a program that screens movies across the country in advance of their release, caught Fort Bliss at the Bryn Mawr Film Institute. The reaction was almost universal awe, with attendees saying Monaghan deserved an Academy Award.

In a year that, thus far, has produced few truly standout lead performances by women, maybe this tiny film with a production budget of less than $5 million (Myers used a grant from American University, where she teaches film, to hire her casting director) offers Monaghan a chance at Oscar glory.

Ann Hornaday, reviewing the film in the Washington Post, cited Monaghan's "impressive breakout performance."

Variety critic Justin Chang nailed it when he wrote: "It's hard not to watch writer-director Claudia Myers' solid, affecting drama without picking up on a similarly bothersome subtext about the dearth of substantial mainstream roles for an actress as good as Michelle Monaghan. . . . Fort Bliss is a flawed little gem of a movie, but Monaghan's flawless performance is its own quiet call to arms."

Other actresses have parlayed their box-office success to set up production companies, trying to shepherd worthwhile projects - and pet projects - to the screen. Julia Roberts, Monaghan's North Country costar Charlize Theron, and Reese Witherspoon have taken this route. Witherspoon, in fact, is the presumptive front-runner for the best actress Oscar for her portrayal of Cheryl Strayed, the memoirist whose rocky life got turned around when she set off on a 1,100-mile solo trek across the Pacific Crest Trail, in Wild - which doesn't even come out until December.

Wild, from Fox Searchlight, will be playing in theaters across the country. Fort Bliss barely made it into theaters at all, though with its runs in New York and Los Angeles it does qualify for Oscar consideration.

So, who knows?

Maybe come Sunday, Feb. 22, some big-shot movie star in a tux will be standing onstage at the Dolby Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, opening the envelope and saying, "And the Oscar for actress in a leading role goes to . . . Michelle Monaghan."

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"National security and crack cocaine in the same sentence - does that not sound strange to you?" - Jeremy Renner, as investigative journalist Gary Webb in Kill the Messenger, opening Friday.

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@Steven_Rea