Discussing acting can be elusive. Even the most articulate of performers, who can break down their process clearly and succinctly, only account for the surface of what finds its way to screen. A great performance, particularly by a recognizable movie star, can often feel like a dream, part of a larger image of stardom. When Dunst plays a role, she carries the weight of her previous performances like past lives. As Rachel Syme put it in The New Yorker, her screen persona channels a girlishness and a “conflicted, jumbled femininity.” Dunst follows the different threads of possible experiences as if she emerges from a deep sleep for each new role, born and reborn again.
In some form or another, Dunst has been performing since she was a toddler, first in commercials and later on screen. With the release of “Interview with the Vampire,” playing a woman in her thirties trapped in the body of a ten-year-old girl, she became a child star, which she built into a successful career as a teen idol. She collaborated with Sofia Coppola on “The Virgin Suicides” at just 16. Like her iconic role as a child vampire, she was frozen in eternal youth by the boys who loved and remembered her. They grew older, got married, had children, and she would always stay the same age.
Maintaining youthfulness can be a heavy burden for young actresses. Dunst, consciously or not, has embraced aging. Unlike some of her peers, she often plays characters close to her actual age.
In “The Beguiled,” her third collaboration with Coppola (not counting her brief cameo in “The Bling Ring”), Dunst plays Edwina, the last standing school teacher in a girl’s school in Virginia during the Civil War. Edwina does not yield the authority of the headmistress, and despite her age, she often seems more like a student than a teacher. Her fragility, a pale tenseness, is overshadowed by the power of youth and confidence that surrounds her. We sense a woman diminished to please others. Edwina’s uncomfortable way of holding her hands by her waist and the way she looks away when spoken to reflect a woman in the process of self-annihilation. When Miss Farnsworth touches her necklace one morning, seemingly to admire it, Edwina shrinks in humiliation, embarrassed by her vanity.