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Margot Robbie seems to be the latest actress about whom it’s impossible to speak without referencing her looks. It’s the kind of disservice that often befalls the ingenues who are in line to become the Next Big Thing, provided the cards fall just right.
Unless you were a big fan of ABC’s Mad Men knock-off Pan-Am (which: bless and keep you if you were), Robbie’s big breakthrough role was as Leonardo DiCaprio’s wife in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street. The Australian actress donned a Noo Yawk accent, tried on some furs, and made a huge impact despite playing a character whose utility within the story was constantly debated along sexist-or-not-sexist lines. Having burst onto every casting director’s radar after Wolf, she got signed up for a whole bunch of movies, most of which are opening this year. she’s in four movies in 2016, although the first two — Whiskey Tango Foxtrot and The Legend of Tarzan — have underperformed, with Suicide Squad the great hope waiting in August.
Between Wolf and the onslaught of 2016, Robbie made three movies: one was her cameo in The Big Short, which has to be considered a wild success for her, given that every review of the movie mentioned her scene specifically. The con-artist romp Focus with Will Smith was … fine. It established her as a co-lead with a bona fide movie star, instantly upping her status. Of course, her best performance — no qualifiers, no conditionals, her BEST performance — was in a movie hardly anybody saw. The post-apocalyptic indie Z for Zachariah premiered at Sundance in 2015 only to get barely released in theaters in August, never playing on more than 29 screens nationwide. It grossed $121,461. This for a movie starring not only Margot Robbie but also Chris Pine (a certified Hollywood Chris!) and Oscar nominee Chiwetel Ejiofor.
With such a whimpering release for something with actual movie stars in it, you’d expect it to be bad. Except, whoops, it’s GREAT. It’s a tense character drama set in a radioactive post-apocalypse where the population is scattered and people have holed up in their rural cabins in an attempt to self-sufficiently hunker down through the fallout. Robbie’s character has been surviving on her own but encounters Ejiofor at the beginning of the film. He’s dying of radiation sickness, and she manages to nurse him back to health, and their relationship deepens and changes. And then into THAT steps Chris Pine, handsome drifter. This triangle has no easy heroes or villains, and all three actors do bang-up work while director Craig Zobel (Compliance) ratchets up the tension.
Once again: one hundred and twenty-two thousand dollars at the box-office. That’s the bad news. The good news is that the movie is streaming on Amazon Prime right now, so you don’t have to worry about missing out. Even better, the next time someone mentions Margot Robbie as if she’s a sentient pair of gams roaming the hills of Hollywood, you can get all haughty and mention how actually you saw her in this little indie in which she gives a better performance than a bona fide Oscar nominee.
