How Movies Tell You You Are Getting Old

The blasted “younger actor.”

The Lost Daughter, the directorial debut of Maggie Gyllenhaal, is a terrific film. The movie, which you can find in selected theaters now and on Netflix on December 31, is based on the novel by pseudonymous author Elena Ferrante and tells the story of Leda, played by Olivia Colman. Leda is a professor and scholar who takes a beach vacation by herself to Greece, where Leda meets a young mother (Dakota Johnson), her young daughter and her extended family. Their interaction, and Leda’s own internal struggles as a woman, a scholar and especially a mother, inspires Leda to look back at her own life, decisions she has made and what kind a person she once was and what she is now.

It’s a fascinating, prickly little movie that I’d argue marks Gyllenhaal as an incredibly serious director moving forward. (She is an absolute natural.) Colman is particularly strong as a woman who keeps refusing to be put in whatever box everyone in her life, and seemingly everyone in the world, keeps trying to put her in. I’ll be releasing my top 10 films of the year on my Grierson & Leitch podcast this week, and there’s an outstanding chance The Lost Daughter will be on it.

But I don’t want to talk about that right now. I want to talk about the casting.

Specifically, I want to talk about the two women who play Leda. Colman has the biggest part, the meatiest role, playing Leda in present day. But then when the film flashes back to her early life as a mother, trying to raise two small girls (who are 25 and 23 in present day), Leda is played by Jessie Buckley. (Who is just as terrific as Colman.)

Anytime a movie follows one character and spans more than a decade of time, it has to make a decision on how to dramatize it. Sometimes they use technology, most famously in The Irishman. Sometimes they just dress up the actors to look a little different, recently to terrible effect in Dear Evan Hansen. Sometimes the movie just ignores the aging process entirely, like Spike Lee did, amusingly, in Da 5 Bloods. (Delroy Lindo plays an 18-year-old soldier in that movie but looks and talks exactly like Delroy Lindo.) But most movies do what The Lost Daughter does: They cast two different actors.