Bryce Dallas Howard is at her most engaging when another actor gives her something to push against. We enjoy her conversational comedy, but parts that make a character obvious from the start do her few favours.
Fi1m perspective
In Argylle (2024), Bryce Dallas Howard's Elly Conway would rather be at home, and keeps saying so. Sam Rockwell's Aidan meets that reluctance with a faint embarrassment about being good at his job. Put them in a car or a hotel room and their bickering has an ease that Matthew Vaughn's film keeps interrupting. We enjoyed their company because Howard makes Elly's wish to get out of the adventure seem entirely reasonable. It is a likeable performance in a film we cannot recommend, and a useful place to see what she does well.
Her breakthrough came as Ivy in M. Night Shyamalan's The Village (2004), followed by supporting blockbuster parts and then Claire Dearing in the Jurassic World trilogy (2015–2022). The franchise work put her physical preparation and stunt work to use. In Black Mirror: Nosedive (2016), she has the task of conveying inner conflict beneath surface composure. That gives us a reason to keep watching her face, something her more emphatic parts do not always provide.
The Help (2011) shows the limits of a part that leaves too little for her to find. As Hilly Holbrook, Howard is emphatic, and Tate Taylor gives us little reason to look beyond that first impression. There is no comparable space for the private feeling Jessica Chastain finds in Celia Foote, or the shifts between comedy and hurt that Octavia Spencer brings to Minny Jackson. Howard makes Hilly easy to read, but there is little left to discover. It is a limitation of the writing and direction as well as the performance.
Vaughn allows her more room with Rockwell, though Jason Fuchs's script keeps replacing their exchanges with another reveal. Elly's work as a spy novelist whose stories predict real espionage gives Howard a promising comic situation: someone who invents adventures has to endure one. The disappointment is how quickly the film stops trusting that situation to hold our attention. Howard and Rockwell can make a conversation worth staying for, even when the plot has exhausted our patience. Someone should offer the pair a comedy without an espionage plot to keep explaining.
Biography
Bryce Dallas Howard is an American actress and director. The daughter of filmmaker Ron Howard, she trained at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts and graduated with a BFA in drama in 2003.
She made her film debut in M. Night Shyamalan's The Village (2004) and went on to appear in Spider-Man 3 (2007), Terminator Salvation (2009), The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (2010), The Help (2011) and the Jurassic World trilogy (2015–2022) as Claire Dearing. She played Elly Conway in Argylle (2024). Howard has also directed episodes of The Mandalorian and the documentary Dads (2019).
