Laura Dern’s resurgence started with HBO’s 'Enlightened'

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https://www.vox.com/culture/2020/2/1...dern-hbo-watch

When did the Laura Dern renaissance begin? My colleague Constance Grady pins its origins to 2017, when Dern appeared in the incredible one-two punch of the first season of Big Little Lies (for which she won an Emmy) and Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Since then, she’s rolled from strength to strength, in movies like The Tale and Marriage Story (for which she just won an Oscar) and another season of Big Little Lies.

But I would peg Dern’s rise to an earlier program: HBO’s Enlightened, which debuted in 2011 and aired for only two seasons but tapped into Dern’s talent for playing white women of a certain social class who are barely holding it together. She’s played variations on her Enlightened character, Amy Jellicoe, in many of her biggest film and TV roles since, but none of them quite match up to Amy in my mind. She was a true original.

Enlightened was one of my favorite TV shows of the 2010s, and Dern gave perhaps the best TV performance of the decade. Created by the genius writer Mike White, Enlightened offered a genuinely new take on the antihero series. It centered on the ways women might transgress the social code we are bound by in the same ways that Tony Soprano transgressed the social code men are bound by. In Tony’s case, the transgression was in committing crimes but also in going to see a therapist — something men in his demographic rarely did when The Sopranos debuted.

Amy’s transgression is that she turns everything up to 100, and that can be incredibly annoying. She, like Tony, is uncompromising. But unlike Tony, she’s not making the world worse. She’s trying to make it better.