Elizabeth Olsen attends a screening for her new romantic comedy Eternity in Los Angeles on Nov. 5.Mario Anzuoni/Reuters
Annie Hall, Norma Rae, 9 to 5, The Way We Were, Thelma and Louise, Working Girl, Broadcast News – these movies turned their female leads into stars, because they connected women’s lives to the culture at large. We saw ourselves in Sally Field, Jane Fonda, Melanie Griffith, Holly Hunter; we empathized with what they struggled against and yearned for. Those kinds of mid-budget films have largely disappeared from cinemas, so today’s actresses are trying to make their cultural connections through streaming series. But for every Big Little Lies that catches fire, many more misfire: The Girlfriend for Robin Wright, Sirens for Julianne Moore, Nine Perfect Strangers for Nicole Kidman. These women want to work. They’re getting less than they deserve.
If even Julia Roberts can’t entice people into theatres for After the Hunt (though its viewership will ratchet up now that it’s arrived on Prime), what hope does Elizabeth Olsen have with her lightweight romp of a new film, Eternity (in theatres Nov. 26)?
From the minute she blew my hair back in Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011), I’ve been waiting to see more of that Olsen and her rich talent. She’s been trying: She’s worked with challenging directors (Spike Lee on Oldboy, Azazel Jacobs on His Three Daughters); she’s headlined two interesting limited series (Sorry for Your Loss and Love & Death). But her deeper ambitions were swept aside when she signed onto/cashed into the role of Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That juggernaut sucks up the best actors of Olsen’s generation, but it doesn’t use the breadth of their talents; it makes a cultural connection, all right, just not a profound, artistic one.
I met Olsen, who is 36, in a hotel room last September when Eternity premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. She introduced herself as “Lizzie,” wore her hair straight with bangs and looked extremely Mary Tyler Moore in a long, striped button-down shirt, jeans and loafers. “I would love to feel that directors and producers know me, know what I want and can do – but I don’t think that’s so,” she said. “I want to make art, with great artists, that holds up a mirror to something that is happening in our world, and challenge people with it.”
She has “several projects in development with great filmmakers,” but they’re on hold because they’re not getting the budgets they need. “These directors know how to make a movie for nothing, but they don’t want to,” she says. “They know what that will look like.” She feels “cynical and frustrated” that her career is happening at this moment, “when everyone is trying to figure out what the film industry is, how do we function in it now, what even is independent cinema anymore, and how do we make something financially okay to invest in?”
In the meantime, Olsen made Eternity. Written by Pat Cunnane (fun fact, he’s the son of U.S. congresswoman Madeleine Dean), the script made the Black List of most promising unproduced screenplays in 2022; the film, directed by David Freyne and shot in Vancouver, has the ba-dum-bump rhythm of a Borscht Belt routine, with a thin undercurrent of disappointment bubbling beneath. When Joan (Olsen) dies in her 80s, she discovers that the afterlife is as rife with hucksters as earthly life, but at least she gets to spend it looking 30. However, she has one week to choose what kind of eternity, and with whom: Will she choose her longtime husband, Larry (Miles Teller), whom she knows through and through, or her first love, Luke (Callum Turner), who died young in the Second World War and always left her wanting more? In other words, will she opt for the life she had or the life she missed?
In Eternity, Olsen’s character Joan must decide whether to spend the afterlife with her husband Larry, played by Miles Teller, or her lost love Luke.Leah Gallo/The Associated Press
“I never read a rom-com that I wanted to do until this,” Olsen says. “It’s sincere. It’s sweet without saccharine, and that’s hard to find.” Larry’s brand of “neurotic romance” reminded her of her own husband, the musician Robbie Arnett, of the band Milo Greene, who just celebrated his 40th birthday. In Eternity, “Larry chokes to death on a pretzel,” Olsen says, laughing. “That’s absolutely the way Robbie is going to go.”
As Joan, Olsen speaks in a jokey-dame voice, which she found by watching “a lot of Anne Meara,” and she borrowed Joan’s “hummingbird quality” from the young Shirley MacLaine, especially two of her cultural-touchstone films, The Apartment and Irma la Douce. Both of those women were wised-up, winning actresses who would have been role models for their generation when Joan was young. “Joan would have watched them and internalized their rhythms,” Olsen says. “They seemed older, even when they were younger.”
Speaking of wised-up: To succeed in the Marvel Universe, Olsen says, “You have to summon the ability to feel stupid.” She chuckles wryly, but she means it. “I have to do crazy stuff – move my fingers as if fire is coming out of them. It’s adorable when you see a girl or boy doing it on a playground, but as a grown woman, it’s hard. You have to find a part of you that believes in it, the way people believe in astrology. You have to choose to commit to it.
“I feel a bit of that with Eternity as well,” she continues. “What if these absurd circumstances were real? Let’s lean into it. Make it the world you exist in.”
I guess that’s what all these great, somewhat stranded actresses are doing – Claire Danes in The Beast in Me, Emma Thompson in Down Cemetery Road, Glenn Close and Naomi Watts in All’s Fair. They’re leaning into what they can get. Making the best of the world they exist in.
As if the universe was agreeing, as I left my interview with Olsen, I ran into one of her Eternity co-stars by the hotel elevator, the actor and comedian John Early. He plays an afterlife co-ordinator who helps Joan make her decision. “Elizabeth Olsen,” he stated confidently, “is the Holly Hunter of our time.” But that’s the question: Can she be?