Happy Birthday, Rosemarie DeWitt! Today we celebrate an actress who has won a Satellite Award, a Toronto Film Critics Award, and received nominations for Independent Spirit Awards and Gotham Independent Film Awards. She has graced many indie movie screens throughout her career, including the films of Lynn Shelton, who was FF2’s SWAN of the Day on October 23 for the anniversary of her film, Laggies.
In 2011, Shelton’s Your Sister’s Sister premiered, featuring Rosemarie DeWitt alongside Emily Blunt and Mark Duplass. Dewitt’s character, Hannah, is the sister of Iris (Blunt), who is friends with Jack (Duplass). The dramedy centers on the convoluted relationship between the three. “Your Sister’s Sister is wonderfully acted and well-paced, with naturally-flowing dialogue and surprising plot twists. I came to care very much about these three people,” Jan Lisa Huttner writes in her review of the film, adding that DeWitt provides, “a bit of extra emotional gravitas.” Jan also got the chance to interview Lynn Shelton when she was promoting the film. On the plot of Your Sister’s Sister, Shelton shared, “Everybody has had that experience of going home for Thanksgiving and starting to act ten years old again because they’re in the same situation with their parents and their siblings. So you get back into this rut again of who you were when you were first becoming a grownup. It’s not until you get out that you can break out of those bonds, but we still get trapped by them when we return. Behavior patterns get repeated, and that was actually part of the backstory between these two sisters (Iris and Hannah). We had a very elaborate narrative written about what had happened between them in the past involving similar kinds of betrayals. Lots of shit is coming up within this drama. It’s not just on the surface.”
Two years later, DeWitt starred in Touchy Feely, also directed by Lynn Shelton. She plays a massage therapist who develops a fear of touching people’s skin after she is faced with the idea of moving in with her boyfriend. The cast also includes Allison Janney, Elliot Page and Ron Livingston, with whom DeWitt has been married since 2009. Julia Lasker reviewed Touchy Feely in a piece for FF2, writing, “The characters are interesting, it’s funny, and the plot is truly thought-provoking … What’s uniquely well-done in this one, however, are the parallel storylines between characters. The journeys that the individual characters undergo complement and augment each other in a way that touched me so deeply that I can’t quite put it into words.”
Celebrate Rosemarie DeWitt’s birthday by watching Touchy Feely for free on Tubi today!
© Anna Nappi (10/26/21) Special for FF2 Media.
CREDITS & PERMISSIONS
Featured photo: “Hollywood, Rosemarie DeWitt” by Pulicciano is licensed with CC BY-SA 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/
