15) Juno MacGuff (Juno, 2007)
Best Quote: "You should've gone to China, you know, cause I hear they give away babies like free iPods. You know, they pretty much just put them in those t-shirt guns and shoot them out at sporting events."
14) Captain Jack Sparrow (Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl, 2001)
Best Quote: "Me? I'm dishonest, and a dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest. Honestly. It's the honest ones you have to watch out for, because you can never predict when they're going to do something incredibly... stupid."
13) Hermione Granger (The Harry Potter Series)
12) Stanley Kowalski (A Streetcar Named Desire)
Best Quote: "Now that's how I'm gonna clear the table. Don't you ever talk that way to me. 'Pig,' 'Pollack,' 'disgusting,' 'vulgar,' 'greasy.' Those kind of words have been on your tongue and your sister's tongue just too much around here. What do you think you are? A pair of queens? Now just remember what Huey Long said- that every man's a king, and I'm the king around here and don't you forget it."
11) Miranda Priestly (The Devil Wears Prada 2007)
Best Quote:
10) Holly Golightly (Breakfast at Tiffany's)
9) The Joker (The Dark Knight, 2008)
When "The Dark Knight" was released in 2008, it wasn't Batman who brought the crowds. It was the Joker. This may be for any number of reasons. Of course, the first is the most likely cause- the Joker was the famed final completed role of Heath Ledger, who passed away tragically the same year at the age of 28. The casting of the Joker had been something of a Hollywood scandal. All cried foul when the role, previously played to an almost immortal level by Jack Nicholson, was handed off to a blonde, pretty 20-something. However, once the movie debuted, anyone who thought Ledger was a mistake was silenced. Ledger's joker blew Nicholson's out completely out of the water, creating a character all his own and yet still faithful to the comic books, and establishing before his death an instant movie legend. The Joker is far from being an empty comic book villain simply seeking money or world domination. The Joker considers himself a being with a higher purpose- he exists in the world for the same reason Batman does. While Batman is an agent of order and goodness, Joker see himself to be an agent of chaos. He believes fully that human beings do not exist to be solely good, and that at our core, we are a race of people who will turn on each other the moment it becomes convenient. Our morals are socially induced and fraudulent to our animal nature- when the chips are down, we'll give them up easily enough. The Joker finds Batman to be fascinating, with his imposed rules and limits, instead choosing to exist completely without limits in his own way. He has no moral compass and no desires. As Alfred (Michael Caine) notes to Batman, "Some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn." Fascinating and complex, brutal and challenging, Heath Ledger's Joker is a villain for the ages, and a character that will go down in movie history as one of the most human (and monstrous) of all time.
Best Quote: "You see, their morals, their code, it's a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They're only as good as the world allows them to be. I'll show you. When the chips are down, these... civilized people, they'll eat each other. See, I'm not a monster. I'm just ahead of the curve."
8) Alex Forrest (Fatal Attraction, 1987)
7) Barbara Covett (Notes on a Scandal, 2006)
"We are bound by the secrets we share," writes Barbara, from her shabby apartment. She is a veritable repository of secrets, and secrets can indeed be seductive. An unmarried woman in her later years, Barbara is a woman who understands loneliness as few people can. She is perennially alone. Prickly and cool, she is generally disliked by her colleagues at the primary school at which she teaches history, and has spent most of her life in a sort of quiet longing. She seems to be a closeted lesbian, and has a history of picking young female teachers to befriend and then becoming obsessed with them. In her mind, they are in a romantic relationship, and these friends should behave accordingly. Such is the case when Sheba Hart joins the school staff. She is young and beautiful, wispy and obviously wealthy. Barbara likes her immediately, and they strike up a friendship. Barbara is remarkably class-conscious, almost to obsession, and is enamored with her apparently high-class yuppie paramour. When Sheba begins an affair with a 15 year old student, she confides in Barbara, and from there, Barbara is placed in a position of power. Sheba must now play by her rules and behave accordingly, or Barbara will go to the police. Barbara is narrating this tale through entries in her journal, her sole pastime, and we get the feeling immediately that her narration is not to be trusted. Though she fancies herself an insightful judge of character, we can tell immediately that these romantic fantasies are the schoolgirl dreams of a teenager, manifested in the cold, lonely mind of an elderly woman. Her love for Sheba seems built entirely on what Sheba could be, not what Sheba is. Barbara is by turns harrowing and sympathetic. We deeply feel for her secretive nature, her complete isolation, but also know that she is being a bully and a stalker. Played by a pitch-perfect Judy Dench, Barbara Covett is both a victim and a perpetrator for the ages.
Best Quote: "People like Sheba think they know what it is to be lonely. But of the drip, drip of the long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. What it's like to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the launderette. Or to be so chronically untouched that the accidental brush of a bus conductor's hand sends a jolt of longing straight to your groin. Of this, Sheba and her like have no clue."
6) George Bailey (It's a Wonderful Life, 1946)
There is perhaps to stronger Christmas classic than "It's a Wonderful Life," "A Christmas Story" be damned. Unfairly written off in current times as empty schmaltz, "Wonderful Life" is a strong portrait of one man who made life choices he hated for the sake of those he loved, and at Christmas, when the year is over and it's time to reflect, there is no better movie to make you feel that it will all be worth it in the end. Jimmy Stewart plays George as a man who wants everything in life- to travel to exotic places, see great things, have lots of money, and "shake the dust off his crummy little town." His is one of those small towns that people who aspire to much loathe, and George definitely loathes Bedford Falls. What he loves, though, is his family, and in the face of adversity, he still remains a principled man. When his father dies and his business is in jeopardy, despite the fact that it helps to improve the lives of common folks throughout the town, George sacrifices his own life dreams to stay behind and help. This is a pattern throughout his life, Every time there is an opportunity for him to cut his losses and pursue his dreams, the devil take the hindermost, he makes the noble decision. His disappointment and resentment build like a cancer on his soul, until one day, due to the sloppy handling of business matters by another staff member, he decides that none of it has been worth it and he may as well end it all. It is only here that George begins to realize (through the intervention of a wingless angel, no less) that his own life, small though it may have been, has been great. He hasn't seen great things, but he has been a great man. Jimmy Stewart's performance here is an absolute master class, traveling from boyhood cockiness to adult despair to redemption smoothly and beautifully. The touching story of George Bailey has been around since 1946, and I have no reason to believe it will seem any less wonderful in 2046.
Best Quote: "Do you know how long it takes a working man to save $5,000? Just remember this, Mr. Potter, that this rabble you're talking about... they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath? Anyway, my father didn't think so. People were human beings to him. But to you, a warped, frustrated old man, they're cattle. Well in my book, my father died a much richer man than you'll ever be!"
5) Amy Elliott Dunne (Gone Girl, 2014)
4) Jo March (Little Women, 1994)
3) Ennis Del Mar (Brokeback Mountain, 2005)
For many, Heath Ledger's short life was highlighted by two major performances: The Joker, and Ennis Del Mar. The two characters could not be more different. While the Joker is wild and unrestrained, Ennis del Mar, a working class ranch hand in the conservative 1960s, is tight-lipped and cautious. Raised a poor orphan and used to struggling for every mouthful, Ennis is a man who understands work and responsibility, and feels unsentimental about his lot in life. When he begins to fall in love with another man, Jack Twist, the sheer feeling of it frightens him to his core. While Jack openly dreams about opening a ranch with Ennis and having them live out a happy life together in the mountains, Ennis knows better. It isn't safe. He doesn't dare entertain dreams when reality is so difficult as it is. After their first encounter, Ennis lives the rest of his life in a thinly veiled terror, constantly afraid of being uncovered for what he is. He isolates his family from the world and only takes work that will keep him away from the city, much to the bewilderment of his wife Alma. Ennis' relationship with Alma is complicated. One gets the sense that he loves her- or thought he did, once- but more than anything, feels that pull of responsibility toward her. He feels similarly about his daughters. While Jack ultimately pays the ultimate price for their relationship, Ennis is similarly a man in prison: a prisoner of his own life and his own time.
Best Quote: "If you can't fix it, Jack, you gotta stand it. We gotta stand this."
2) Clementine Kruczynski (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind)
In a movie dedicated to the beauty and tragedy of forgetting, Kate Winslet has created a character who is memorable in the best way. Though usually cast in costume dramas, playing witty, posh characters in corsets, Clementine is the very definition of a modern woman. She is artistic, absent-minded, stubborn, impulsive, and creative. She is that rare being who seems to step into a room and immediately become its focus. When she meets Joel Barrish, an introverted loner type who seems to trudge through his life on autopilot, she immediately brightens up his existence. This sounds like the ever-exasperating "Manic Pixie Dreamgirl" trope, in which an impossibly quirky girl exists purely to show a broody male character how wonderful life is or how to loosen up. (See: "The Perks of Being a Wallflower," "500 Days of Summer," "Garden State," etc.) But Clementine is all too aware of that trope, and flatly rejects it. She reserves the right to be who she is and wear bizarre thrift store t-shirts and drink too much and dye her hair a new color every week without it being for the Joel's thrill and wonderment. This isn't to say she isn't flawed- everything Joel loves about her is also, ultimately, that which exasperates him, and as in real life, there are fights and threats and broken promises to go around. Clementine is vitally alive, and she's one of my favorite creations of stage or screen.
Defining Quote: "Too many guys think I'm a concept, or I complete them, or I'm gonna make them alive. But I'm just a fucked up girl whose lookin' for my own peace of mind. Don't assign me yours."
1) Scarlett O'Hara (Gone with the Wind, 1937)
Ah, Scarlett. That most polarizing of figures in modern literature and film, that so many women hail as a feminist hero and others downplay as a heartless bitch not worthy of the title. Since I was a teenager, I have been fascinated with Scarlett and her remarkable journey, not just through the American Civil War and the loss of her civilization, but her emotional journey. At the film's outset, Scarlett is a spoiled, willful southern belle who is utterly fixated on a man who belongs to another woman. Stubborn, vain, and utterly self-involved, she is convinced that any man who isn't in love with her can and should be with proper coaching, and so is all the more stumped when the object of her desire, dreamy-eyed and vacant Ashley Wilkes, seems to reject her at every turn.
The tale of Scarlett, which follows her from the age of 16 to the ripe, old age of 28, is essentially told in three acts. Until the fall of Atlanta, Scarlett is a singleminded, conniving young woman who resents and dislikes the role society has thrust upon her, but also clings to it. ("How women clutch the very chains that bind them!" exclaims well-traveled, enlightened Rhett Butler.) She dislikes the notion that men do not value intelligence in a woman, dislikes still more that in order to catch a husband (that most important of all duties for a young girl,) she must severely downplay the amount of intelligence she has. She is also remarkably shortsighted. She fancies life to be much more fun as a single belle while simultaneously recklessly pursuing marriage to Ashley Wilkes, never making the connection that if she did marry him, she would be considered a matron and be expected to give up on all the fun, flirtation and parties of single life. The same is true of her hasty and ill-considered marriage to Charles Hamilton. In her rush to hurt Ashley for rejecting her, she doesn't actually understand that she will now be a married woman, and expect to behave and comport herself as such. These impulsive, reckless decisions characterize Scarlett's life, and her complete lack of self-reflection or capacity for insight prevent her from making better choices. She dislikes other women, seeing them only as competition for the attentions of men, and in my view, would resent the label of a feminist hero solely because Scarlett never cared about the fate or success of all women- just herself.
After the beginning of the war, Scarlett's soft, sheltered world completely collapses. She loses her mother to death, her father to senility, and her home and safety to the Yankees. She goes from being a petted princess to the family patriarch in one blow, and now must find some way to survive a world she was not raised to live. This second act, Survival Scarlett, shows us how deeply poverty, cold, hunger, death, and lack of security can affect a person, and how much they can rend asunder the person you once were. Scarlett is frequently described in the novel during this time as having "the look of a hungry cat," and having "eyes you expect to see over a pair of dueling pistols." With no one to keep her temper in check and the wolf permanently at the door of Tara, Scarlett becomes bitter, hard, resentful, dropping the manners and prim virtues of her society as luxuries she cannot afford anymore. Though Georgian society has always thought of Scarlett as "a flighty bit of baggage," as one neighbor snips, this animalistic streak in Scarlett begins to pry open the void that will characterize the third act.
