Sheila McCarthy

In Women Talking (2022), Sheila McCarthy's Greta has two horses, Ruth and Cheryl, and explains almost everything by way of them. The women in the hayloft are deciding, over two days, what to do about the men, and Greta keeps coming back to what her horses would make of it. It ought to be maddening. McCarthy makes it the sanest voice in the loft, because she says it quietly and with no sign that she knows she is being charming. We laughed more than we expected to at those horses, and then someone would say plainly what had been done to a child, and we stopped, and the laugh made the silence worse.

That is the thing she does, and she has been doing it since the start. She came up through Canadian theatre and television in the early 1980s, and Patricia Rozema's I've Heard the Mermaids Singing (1987) gave her a lead, Polly Vandersma, and a type: the awkward, bookish woman who is funny without meaning to be. Rozema would work with her again. The type followed her to The Lotus Eaters (1993), as Diane Kingswood, and to Hollywood, where she played a news reporter, Samantha Coleman, in Die Hard 2 (1990). Hollywood did not keep her. The hopes raised by Mermaids were not met there and the career stayed largely Canadian, which is usually written up as a shortfall. We are not sure it was.

Television took much of the middle stretch: Sarah Hamoudi in Little Mosque on the Prairie (2007–2012), then parts in Orphan Black, The Umbrella Academy and Star Trek: Discovery. These are not roles a critic dwells on. They kept her working and kept her in view, and then Sarah Polley cast her as Greta and sat Judith Ivey's Agata beside her.

What she does that other actors do not is decline to push. Ivey's Agata has the authority of a woman who has buried people; McCarthy's Greta has none of that weight and gets her way anyway, by patience. She said of the part that "Greta’s magic is like that of a good grade school teacher. She speaks quietly and gently and you lean in", and that is an exact description of what happens on screen. Polley's film is better acted than it is shot, Luc Montpellier's drained colour being a fault we have already set out, and McCarthy and Ivey are a good part of why the acting carries it.

The limitation is in what she has been offered rather than in her. Her two leads that matter came before 1994. Since then she has been the woman to the side of the frame, and Women Talking shows how much she can do from there. Somebody should write her another lead. She has been carrying other people's films from the edge for thirty years.