Carey Mulligan

In Maestro (2023), Carey Mulligan delivers a speech from a doorway, barely moving, and gives us a woman who has thought carefully about her complaint. As Felicia Montealegre, she understands the bargain of her marriage to Leonard Bernstein and is irritated to find it more expensive than expected. Bradley Cooper’s film gives her room to be clever about that disappointment. We recommend it chiefly for her, though its attention to the marriage leaves it thin on the music. The stillness works because she makes Felicia’s thinking clear without turning the speech into a demonstration of suffering.

That intelligence has become more interesting as the parts have changed. Her film debut was Kitty Bennet in Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice (2005), a warmly acted ensemble in which our attention went chiefly to Keira Knightley’s Elizabeth. The breakthrough lead in An Education (2009) opened a career moving between studio supporting roles and independent leads. By Promising Young Woman (2020), she was carrying a revenge narrative, a useful contrast to the literary and period dramas in which she is frequently cast.

Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn (2023) offers a smaller, less satisfying use of her. Poor Dear Pamela has stayed beyond a welcome that was never entirely offered, an uncomfortable position for Mulligan in the country-house ensemble. There is room here for the awkwardness of someone dependent on other people’s manners, but Rosamund Pike and Richard E. Grant supply the stronger reasons to watch. The performances cannot correct a film that keeps confusing rudeness with satire.

The Ballad of Wallis Island (2025) gives her a more rewarding part as Nell Mortimer, singing with Tom Basden, though she is still given less to do than she deserves. Nell has deliberately left their life as a folk duo behind, and Mulligan lets her be warm without making her seem sorry for going. We were quietly moved when they first sang together in Charles’s front room, because the harmony made their shared past believable without anyone explaining it. The songs are performed in full, without cutaways instructing us to admire their effect, and provide a welcome break from the chatter. Start there if the doorway speeches are what you know her for; she is worth hearing when she gets to sing.