Take Three: Anna Faris

Craig here with Take Three.

Today: Anna Faris

Take One: Even cowgirls get the blues

I’m always up for a spot of Brokeback love. I know there's been plenty of attention around these parts in the past but let’s divert the love that-a-way. Let’s ride sidesaddle and gallop slightly away from Jake ‘n’ Heath. And Michelle 'n' Anne. And Ang. Hey, look, it’s Anna Faris as Lashawn Malone in Brokeback Mountain (2005).

I’d just seen Faris in Just Friends when barely a week later (January 2006) Brokeback was released here in the UK. The complete contrast between Faris in the two films caught me off guard. She pops up ninety-minutes in during a couples’ C&W night-out scene with Jake Gyllenhaal & Anne Hathaway.  She “talks a blue streak” without much pause for breath – and in doing so fills the gap where a homoerotic attraction is becoming increasingly apparent between Jack Twist and Lashawn’s husband Randall (David Harbour). Jack and Lashawn dance; she continues to chatter. A new scene comes and goes with Lashawn entering and chattering her way gaily through it.

It’s a minuscule part but one that actively enhances the film. And Faris, with a touch of cowgirl glamour creates a world for Lashawn that is surely real and would be utterly believable if we were to follow her story instead of Lureen’s and Alma’s. The other Brokeback wives have their moments of realisation and breakdown; Lashawn, being a passing, peripheral character, doesn’t get hers (Randall is another “confused” cowpoke). But, thanks to the key manner in which Faris makes palpable the glimmers of anxiety in Lashawn’s gasbagging, we know she’ll suffer as Lureen and Alma do.

Take Two: Coppola load of this casting coup

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