{"id":540545,"date":"2026-07-23T16:19:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-23T16:19:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/540545\/"},"modified":"2026-07-23T16:19:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-23T16:19:08","slug":"anne-hathaway-opens-up-the-heart-of-christopher-nolans-films","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/540545\/","title":{"rendered":"Anne Hathaway opens up the heart of Christopher Nolan’s films"},"content":{"rendered":"

With Together Again<\/a>, Jesse Hassenger looks at actors and directors who have worked together on at least three films, analyzing the nature of their collaborations.<\/p>\n

Given his close working relationship with his creative and life partner Emma Thomas, Christopher Nolan seems like a Wife Guy. Given the results of that collaboration, though, Nolan has become better-known as a Dead Wife Guy. While his unofficial company of favored actors does have a few women, many of his narratives feature male-driven ensembles where at least one of the heroes must grapple with a dead spouse (or spouse figure): Bruce Wayne nurses his grief over Rachel in the second Dark Knight movie; Inception\u2018s Dom is haunted by the dream-world figure of his dead wife Mal; Leonard searches for his wife\u2019s killer in Memento. It\u2019s all over Nolan\u2019s filmography, sometimes twice in a single film; The Prestige eventually curses each of its dueling magicians with a dead wife as collateral damage in their obsessive careers. It\u2019s in this context that Nolan\u2019s recently three-peated work with Anne Hathaway stands out.<\/p>\n

True to her pre-Nolan sorta-rom-com history, Hathaway has played the love interest under his direction, and, yes, the faithful wife, as she does in The Odyssey<\/a>. But even more so than the other women in Nolan\u2019s rolodex, she brings a much-needed feminine energy to his sensitive large-scale bro-downs\u2014which have in turn provided her with a triptych of films surprisingly well-suited to her strengths as an actor.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Hathaway arrived at her first Nolan movie already an Oscar nominee and a substantial star, having briskly cycled through Disney-machine introductions (the Princess Diaries movies) and I\u2019m-an-adult-now displays of sexuality (Havoc, Brokeback Mountain<\/a>) before landing at the happy medium of old-fashioned star vehicles like The Devil Wears Prada. The latter was a film emblematic of her greater career, especially in the 2000s: Many of her movies might be casually, carelessly shelved with other romantic comedies, but her love interests tend to be kind of a nothing presence, both as a performer and in the story at hand. So why did Anne Hathaway get the reputation as a rom-com mainstay? It\u2019s probably because her persona, especially early on, was compatible with the kind of striving character lazily written into 2000s romances. Hathaway\u2019s screen presence for much of that era felt similarly steered by someone who prizes that type-A orderliness\u2014a rom-com heroine in a succession of mostly unfunny, non-romantic movies.<\/p>\n

Yet when it comes to The Dark Knight Rises<\/a>, it\u2019s precisely that impression of romance that allows her to dominate the movie despite lacking the showiness of Heath Ledger\u2019s Joker or Tom Hardy\u2019s Bane. Praising Hathaway\u2019s ability to coax heart-eyes from Christian Bale might sound regressive; after all, Marvel has proudly evolved the superhero subgenre beyond the need for such concerns as falling in or out of love, drawing a succession of female characters whose love lives are largely sequestered tastefully offscreen. Luckily, Nolan ignored the then-growing consensus against superhero smooching. (In contrast to, say, Ant-Man and the Wasp, who have an entire relationship and breakup while barely seeming to touch each other, Selina first plants one on Bruce without ceremony, in order to steal his car.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

To be fair, The Dark Knight Rises does not feature a grown-up relationship. Nolan\u2019s baseline seriousness has sometimes obscured how pulpy and even silly his movies can get, yet Hathaway seems to intuitively understand his tone and its leeway. Selina Kyle\u2014she\u2019s never officially dubbed Catwoman\u2014enters the movie breaking into a safe belonging to Bruce Wayne (and taking advantage of his gamy knee to knock him on his ass!), and almost immediately performs a very Anne Hathaway trick. Having disguised herself as a catering worker for an event at Wayne\u2019s home, Selina is caught just after opening his safe. When she realizes Wayne has figured out what she\u2019s up to, she immediately shifts her tone. Trembling, girlish eagerness to please drops as quickly and disposably as a mask, with an ostentatious \u201coops\u201d in response to Bruce musing that he was told his safe was uncrackable. \u201cNo one told me it was uncrackable,\u201d Selina continues in a mock pout.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a cheesy note that Hathaway hits hard, and it\u2019s not the last time, either; later, Selina escapes from a shootout and Hathaway toggles between terrified, shell-shocked victim screaming for help and over-it aloofness as she disappears into the night once she\u2019s out of cop earshot. These moments play great, though, as do Selina\u2019s sometimes-middling quips, because Hathaway is rarely more charming than when she\u2019s committing to a bit. Many of her best later-period roles hinge on exactly the striving, performative quality she demonstrates in her earlier films, with the self-consciousness reconfigured as a sly feature rather than an earnest bug. Even a movie like her artistic breakthrough Rachel Getting Married is partially about the image her character desperately projects\u2014the fuck-up role in her family she both protests and fills with dyspeptic discomfort. That acting-on-acting thread continues all the way up to this year\u2019s Mother Mary (the first of her five 2026 movies), where she\u2019s a pop-star performer losing her sense of self. There\u2019s a bit of cloak-and-dagger deception in The Odyssey, too, with Penelope forced to play the part of the elegant, even-tempered, loyal yet pragmatic queen.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In The Dark Knight Rises, Hathaway uses her performativeness to give Selina a duality that\u2019s more quicksilver and less meticulous than her Bruce\/Batman counterpart. It\u2019s code-switching with a touch of 1940s fabulousness, half moll and half screwball. There\u2019s a broader transformation at work, too: Selina starts off like Nolan\u2019s favorite non-wife female role\u2014the noirish femme fatale\u2014and by the end of the movie, she\u2019s the very personification of Bruce finding peace and love, away from the public eye as both a powerful billionaire and the Batman.<\/p>\n

This threatens to reduce Hathaway to a love-interest accessory\u2014and to some extent, she is, given that she\u2019s joining the third movie in a trilogy about Batman. But while Hathaway and Nolan\u2019s Selina isn\u2019t as psychologically thorny or nervy as the tour-de-force performance Michelle Pfeiffer gives in Batman Returns, the movie makes the case for her being a similarly perfect match for this universe\u2019s Bruce, especially as The Dark Knight Rises hurtles forward. After she first banters with Bruce, Selina turns up at a costume party with cat ears, and later wearing goofy headgear that conveniently pulls up into a similar-looking silhouette, both chic costumes accompanied by a tasteful little face mask. The brief mid-movie scenes of Batman and Catwoman kicking ass together\u2014mere minutes of screentime\u2014are the closest Nolan has ever come to a swoonworthy consummation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So when it comes time to see Bruce and Selina happily ever after, it\u2019s a surprisingly moving image, echoed from a moment described earlier by Alfred (Michael Caine), voicing his hope that he would one day encounter an incognito Bruce who has left his traumatic double life behind. Again, it\u2019s easy to read some regression into that image: Here\u2019s the former hellcat, domesticated. But while his subsequent movies would largely step further away from noir, Nolan and Hathaway give his love of that subgenre a touching send-off with a femme fatale redeemed, rather than punished the way a true noir might dictate (or successfully villainous, the way a neo-noir might end).\u00a0<\/p>\n

Bruce and Selina\u2019s rarified domestic bliss is all but reprised in The Odyssey, when an early flashback shows Odysseus (Matt Damon) and Penelope (Hathaway) discussing what he might do instead of going off to fight in an open-ended Trojan War. Penelope suggests that they might sneak away together on a boat bound for the horizon, renouncing the royal responsibilities and burdens that threaten their family. Odysseus doesn\u2019t agree to it, but snatches of that imagery return in the film\u2019s finale, as he and Penelope reunite and agree to exile themselves from Ithaca, with mournful knowledge of the damage the war has wrought upon the world. It\u2019s a more bittersweet ending than Dark Knight Rises, which essentially offers a happy one (with Nolan even cutting back to Gotham for an assurance that a Batman-like figure will continue to serve in Bruce Wayne\u2019s absence), and Penelope is a much different figure than Selina Kyle\u2014less dynamic but more emotionally textured.<\/p>\n

Still, on the scale of Christopher Nolan\u2019s wives, Penelope is notably not a martyr or a betrayer, and the most fully formed and human of the lot. The contrast is especially obvious in a movie where most of the other female roles are imbued with magic (Circe, Calypso, Athena) or cursed with a near-magical reputation (Helen Of Troy). While Nolan portrays these characters matter-of-factly, his presentation of Penelope is more stylized. She\u2019s introduced from behind latticework, sectioning off her semi-private weaving quarters from a palace overrun with her suitors. Nolan does capture her unobstructed, particularly in her fraught conversations with her son (Tom Holland), but some of her big scenes take place with her obscured in some way.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In one of the most striking shots of the film, Penelope talks to the scheming Antinous (Robert Pattinson), and the camera views them through the weaving on Penelope\u2019s loom. Penelope looks a little hazy through the fabric, while the camera angle makes Antinous look ghostly. Nolan often uses shallow focus, and in The Odyssey depicts several dialogue scenes with rack focus emphasizing the speaker, rather than cutting between one-shots. The weaving subtly keeps Pattinson less in focus, while also placing a sense of royal mystique around Hathaway. Despite that royal bearing\u2014and Hathaway\u2019s theatrical ability to force Nolan\u2019s intentionally colloquial version of Homer to occasionally sound like roughly approximated Shakespeare\u2014Penelope is the human anchor for The Odyssey, even when she\u2019s suggesting locking the suitors in the palace and burning them alive. She\u2019s both more grounded and more idealized than the literally magical women Odysseus encounters. For Nolan, humanity simply means expounding on or symbolizing love.<\/p>\n

Hathaway\u2019s role as an ambassador of love becomes more explicit in Interstellar<\/a>, and points to the ways Nolan\u2019s approach has shifted since welcoming Hathaway into his circle. His reputation as a chilly, Kubrickian control freak was always overblown and Interstellar, the movie that was supposed to lock in his next-gen Kubrick status, moves him further away from that, despite its superficial resemblances to Kubrick\u2019s own odyssey from 1968.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As in The Prestige, Nolan doubles down on the dead-spouse gambit\u2014and for the first time, a woman plays one of his tortured Wife Guys. Hathaway\u2019s Amelia Brand is a NASA scientist tasked to find an inhabitable planet as an alternative to a dying Earth, and argues passionately for focusing limited resources on reaching a planet where she may find the man she loves, who has gone ahead to explore that planet. Her colleague Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) argues that this is a bias she needs to overcome, while Amelia counters with a justification for following her heart, even though she knows there\u2019s a good chance her lover is dead: \u201cLove is the one thing we\u2019re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space.\u201d Just before this line, Cooper tries to brush off the science of love as more of the social variety. Amelia has a comeback to this, too, speaking to the heart of a major Nolan preoccupation: \u201cWe love people who have died. Where\u2019s the social utility in that?\u201d<\/p>\n

This scene is light-years away from the outlines of romance Hathaway was performing a decade earlier. It\u2019s passionate, straight-faced, and endearingly corny\u2014very Nolan, in other words, and Hathaway nails it. She plays against the most stereotypical reading of the role, the woman who prioritizes the heart over the brain, with a fervent exterior that barely masks her greater sadness. As easy as it is to pluck self-inserts from Nolan\u2019s other movies, Amelia is a stealth candidate for one of his strongest on-screen analogues.\u00a0<\/p>\n

At the same time, it would be reductive to ascribe Hathaway\u2019s increasingly complex performances to Nolan, whether they\u2019re as unvarnished as Interstellar, playfully deceptive as The Dark Knight Rises, or theatrical as The Odyssey. For all of his narrative pretzels, Nolan\u2019s way with actors tends to be pretty straightforward. With many of his female characters, that could probably be downgraded to simplistic. Yet Hathaway seems incapable of merely playing the wife or the girlfriend for him, even when those words fit a simplified description of her role. Her self-consciousness becomes, in this context, a great gift.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Perhaps, rather than Nolan\u2019s direction adding to her performances\u2019 complexity, it\u2019s fairer to say that Nolan\u2019s movies have opened up emotionally in Hathaway\u2019s presence. There\u2019s emotional impact in Memento, The Prestige, and more. But his three with Hathaway confirm that Kubrick-style detachment isn\u2019t really his bag\u2014that he can naturally wring some tears from an audience. Nolan\u2019s movies aren\u2019t the only ones that benefit from Hathaway\u2019s later-career reinterpretation of her own poise, but there\u2019s a courtly sense of gender equality, however illusionary it might be, in their collaboration. At times, they seem to be holding doors open for each other.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With Together Again, Jesse Hassenger looks at actors and directors who have worked together on at least three…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":540546,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[430,156,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-540545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=540545"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540545\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/540546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=540545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=540545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=540545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}