And yet, Winger’s decision is in keeping with her choices over her career, her choices in characters, the choices her characters make to try to find whatever it is they’re looking for, with the success of a Paula or Sissy rather than the sad failure of a Kit. As someone with a clear love for acting but an open dislike for the business that goes into it, there’s no need to take roles just to take them. In her not-exactly-a-memoir Undiscovered, she writes:
“Although I have participated in the odd film project here and there over the last twelve years, I had no real desire to hop back on that merry-go-round. I watched others as they grabbed for the golden ring and felt fine out in the country on my pony. It is a strange experience to be so in a certain world, and then not. I tried to imagine how to start anew.”
Those odd film projects haven’t always been worthy of her talents (her husband’s “Big Bad Love,” “Eulogy,” “Lola Versus”), but at least three of her supporting roles in the last decade have been events. In “Rachel Getting Married” (directed by the late, great Jonathan Demme), Winger’s own absence from the film world seems to inform the more painful absence of Abby from Kym (Anne Hathaway) and Rachel’s (Rosemarie DeWitt) life. She’s colder and more distant here than she’s been before, her smiles forced, her husky laugh covering up a lack of comfort being there for her children. Where Rachel is, by nature, gentler when asking her mother if there’s anything more she’d like to do for the wedding, the more troubled Kym brings the fire out of her, with Abby first avoiding her gaze in their confrontation, then lashing out violently. It’s a startling performance that wouldn’t have been nearly as effective if not for Winger’s break.
The same break informs her arc in “In Treatment,” reunited with her “A Dangerous Woman” costar Byrne as Frances, an actress having trouble remembering her lines after she fixates on her sister’s impending death from breast cancer. Closer in demeanor to the Winger of old (even teasing Byrne’s therapist about a possible attraction he might feel for her), she nevertheless self-excoriates for being a bad daughter to her now deceased mother, a bad sister, a bad mother, while relishing in addressing the ageism and sexism that fiftysomething actresses face. By the time she reaches her final episode in the season and brings up her sister entrusting her with an important decision, we’ve seen a woman who hasn’t totally overcome the resentment and guilt she’s dealt with for years, but someone who has come closer to reckoning with unintended consequences that sometimes come with forging your own path.
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