Great Performances

Naomi Watts -- 21 Grams
She's one of those girls in the back of the class, her nose buried in a book (so you can't see her beauty) or daydreaming (so you can't read her mind). And then, in a flash: prom queen! Star of the school play! Valedictorian or vamp! Likely Oscar nominee for 21 Grams! Her vault from nowhere to notoriety reminds you that anonymity is an ideal perch for looking at others, and into oneself. Nothing succeeds like late success.

At 35, Naomi Watts is not exactly a Gray Panther. But like the character she plays in 21 Grams — and like three other featured players in our ensemble: Paul Giamatti, Sean Astin and Shohreh Aghdashloo — she has been abruptly thrust into the spotlight after years of scrambling to make do.

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Watts has worked in movies for half her life, though the movies hardly knew it. Australia, where she moved from England when she was 14, exported half its acting population to Hollywood (including Watts' buddy Nicole Kidman), while she was left to play in Aussie soaps. Moving to California in the mid-'90s didn't land Watts starring roles, unless you count Children of the Corn IV and some TV shows. One of these was dumped by the network, and released to theaters as a movie: Mulholland Dr. ABC's rejection of the David Lynch pilot proved to be Watts' promotion from the back row. Playing a starstruck, recklessly curious blond, she led viewers into thinking they could trust her, then pulled a spectacular double cross. That was the flash moment, at the film's nightmare climax, that revealed the actress's cunning intelligence, her subversive allure. Watts could even seduce viewers into thinking she wasn't seductive.

Like so many actors bred in Australia, she has the gift of slipping into any character, any accent, and looking, sounding comfortable in it. She can play smart people in stupid situations, like the reporter walking into endless psychic booby traps in the hit thriller The Ring. This can't be a plate of supernatural baloney, the audience thought, because she's feeding it to us.

21 Grams has the narrative brazenness of Mulholland Dr. But this time it's for real. As a recovering drug addict who suffers a brutal shock, Watts must navigate between numbness and steely rage, mourning and the stirrings of a romantic interest that seems the worst form of betrayal. While co-stars Sean Penn and Benicio Del Toro get to strut and spume, Watts has to implode. She does it with a heartrending delicacy and power. To watch her here is to see America grieving.

Watts can tunnel into her characters, but she can't hide her luster. In Hollywood high art, she's near the head of the class.

— By Richard Corliss

Shohreh Aghdashloo -- House of Sand and Fog
There is something inexplicably wounded in her eyes, something wary and frightened in the way she meets the world. As Nadi, Shohreh Aghdashloo, 51, is the delicate fulcrum of civility on which the hostility of House of Sand and Fog is balanced. She cannot avoid the tragedy that envelops her proud husband (Ben Kingsley) and a careless, clueless young woman (Jennifer Connelly) as they wrangle over the eponymous dwelling. But through her serene, subtle and heartbreaking performance, she does steal the film.

A promising actress, Aghdashloo fled Iran during the revolution of 1978-79, first for London, then Los Angeles. She virtually abandoned acting until she and her playwright husband founded a little theatrical company that tours with Iranian plays. The casting directors found her, and director Vadim Perelman's camera found in her the still center ("dignity, integrity and saving face in a most beautiful way," as she puts it) this intense movie requires. "Now that the American film industry has got to know me I might be able to do more," she says modestly. About that there should be no question.

— By Richard Schickel. Reported by Desa Philadelphia/Los Angeles

Wentworth Miller -- the Human Stain
Good looks, good school (Princeton), pretty good Hollywood job (in development). But Wentworth Miller wanted to test himself as an actor. Voila, good luck. He won a starring role in the mini-series Dinotopia. Then he read the script for The Human Stain, from Philip Roth's novel about a professor looking back in regret on having kept the secret of his identity as a black man. Part of the film would show the character 50 years earlier.

The story hit "too close to home" for the fair-skinned, mixed-race Miller, who had been accused of racism at Princeton when a satirical cartoon he drew of a Cornel West course was misinterpreted. "But the script spoke to so many relevant issues. I grew up on the outskirts of two different communities. Which one did I belong to? [My character] thinks that he belongs to no community and that he has to answer only to himself. He turns his back on the community that gave him so much. That is betrayal."