I’m sure that we haven’t seen the best of Rooney Mara’s career just yet, but her quick rise to stardom has been incredibly impressive. Very quickly after playing the memorable girlfriend character in The Social Network she was cast as Lisbeth in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, apparently garnering director David Fincher’s affection for her dedication to her work, and trying to sort of slip into the skin of this character made famous by Noomi Rapace. Mara made it her own though, capturing the hardness in the eyes of this character, a hardness that is shown to be deliberate by the few moments of vulnerability she subtly reveals in the later moments of the film.
I love her as Erica in The Social Network though. A lot of hay gets made of that opening scene for just how much dialogue writer Aaron Sorkin crams into so little time, but what impresses me most the more I watch it is the degree to which Mara is dialed in to this character, who in turn is far more dialed in to the conversation than her distracted counterpart, played brilliantly by Jesse Eisenberg. She shows how much she hurts, but her face also demonstrates a real toughness that comes up again later on when she encounters Mark Zuckerberg again. The moment she finds out about the blog he writes about her is beautifully heartwrenching; the look on her face in this scene is one that’s hard to forget.
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