Force Majeure

From Blue Velvet to Jurassic Park, Laura Dern has made her mark in some of the finest films of the past 35 years. But even she didn’t foresee her recent purple patch – Star Wars, Twin Peaks, Big Little Lies, and now the mighty Marriage Story, and that’s before returning to the world of Jurassic. Total Film meets an actor on fire.

- James Mottram

It’s the second day of this year’s Venice Film Festival and Noah Baumbach’s sublime Marriage Story has just landed. In the lush Excelsior Hotel, patrons buzz around downstairs trying to catch a glimpse of the cast; above them, on the first floor, Laura Dern marches with purpose in Total Film’s direction. In towering Louboutin heels and an arresting red and black-striped Dior dress, it’s as if she’s come in character, as Los Angeles divorce lawyer Nora Fanshaw.

Chronicling the separation and increasingly painful divorce of a New York theatre couple, director Charlie (Adam Driver) and actress Nicole (Scarlett Johansson), Baumbach’s film takes a vicious turn when Nicole moves back to L.A. to live with her mother, taking their young son with them, and is advised to get lawyered up. Enter Dern’s fearsome Nora, who comes armed with hugs, herbal teas and handkerchiefs for her clients and a barbed-wire baton for the ex-partners.

“I’ve been privileged to play some pretty unleashed characters,” explains Dern, “but what I love about Nora… as a champion of creating your narrative to make you the winner, which is the end goal – which is troubling about the business of divorce – she is stealthy and meticulous and careful with every word, and even the way she attacks. She in her own way is the opposite of the bear-like lawyer, but equally attacking and direct. She’s someone who would never lose her cool; she is so in control.”