The British Invasion hit America by storm in the '60s, and even in the 21st century Vanessa Kirby is yet another byproduct of that cultural revolution. Kirby, who found her fame initially on the stage, is experiencing a recent career boom in the worlds of film and television. You likely know Kirby from her performance as Princess Margaret in the hit Netflix show “The Crown” (2016–). 2020 brought a double feature for Kirby, with artistic masterpieces “The World to Come” (2020) and “Pieces of a Woman” (2020) premiering, the latter of which garnered her an Academy Award nomination. Kirby hits the scene yet again with her leading performance in “Italian Studies” (2021). A savant of acting, Kirby exemplifies just what it means to give a powerful performance.
The performance most demonstrative of Kirby’s personal prowess is that of “Pieces of a Woman.” In the film, Kirby plays Martha, a young Bostonian who has opted for at-home childbirth. The opening 24 minutes of the film show this birth experience, with the ultimate loss of Martha’s child. It’s a gruelingly honest sequence, with screams and agony that physically affect the viewer. Kirby needed to film the sequence all in one take, suffering through the emotional toll of acting out full body pains and stimulated horror for extended amounts of time. She was asked to capture both the physical pain of labor and the emotional pain of losing a child, a wildly daunting task. At the end of the day, Kirby is successful because of her unflinching commitment. Acting is about fully enveloping a character and their strife, despite how physically burdensome it may be to your body and well-being. It’s for this reason that truly committed acting performances can be so impressive — because they’re giving in to the art.
Kirby brings that similar commitment to her newest film, “Italian Studies,” but it manifests itself in a different form. The film follows Alina Reynolds, a writer grappling with her own severe memory loss. The film is unnerving and mind-bending, distorting the memory of the viewer like that of Alina. This performance of Kirby’s differs from that of “Pieces of a Woman.” The film is much more subtle — there is no big scene in which Alina grapples with what it means to lose everything as you move through your life, but rather that personal reckoning trickles in throughout the length of the film. This is a different type of acting prowess, being the ability to not overdramatize a performance. Subtlety in emotion is still a strong commitment, in that the actor is committing to a director's vision.
Kirby demonstrates the value of commitment in acting. It is trust and faith that make a performance pop and that can cement a good film. That can be trust in the director’s vision, or even trust in one's own body and skills. Kirby does both seemingly with ease and thus exemplifies the basic facets of good acting.
