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August 19, 2009
E-mail a friendYOUNG VOICES
Marisa Tomei's Quiet Comeback
Along with countless others, I first noticed Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinnie, in which she played a sassy Italian-American with the comical name Mona Lisa Vito. The movie itself was hilarious, and her performance was absolutely first-rate, earning her a Supporting Actress Oscar. Tomei's beauty was immediately obvious, but her chops as an actor suggested big things.
After winning the highest honor in American cinema in one of her first feature roles, Tomei's career, which initially showed so much promise, seemed to slow. She appeared in a number of films and TV shows, including a cameo on Seinfeld where she went on an ill-fated date with George Costanza, but few of these roles allowed her talents to surface to their full extent. With a couple of notable exceptions (her performance in 2001's In the Bedroom, for one), Tomei faded from the public eye, somewhat.
Then, last year, she reappeared. Of course, she had never been gone officially, but it felt like she had. In Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, opposite heavyweights Albert Finney and Philip Seymour Hoffman, Tomei shone more brightly than she had in any film in years. Playing the depressed and disillusioned wife to Hoffman's drug-addicted white collar criminal husband, Tomei brought back all of the quiet intensity she had been seemingly holding back all these years. It should also be noted that Tomei, who spent a good deal of the film topless, looked as stunning as she did back in 1992.
Her latest role, opposite Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler is a more than adequate follow-up. Just as in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, Tomei's performance is earnest, nuanced and intense. Oddly (but not by any means objectionably), she also spends much of her screentime topless in this one, too.
Much has been made of the comeback of Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, but Tomei's comeback, already underway, is just as noteworthy.