The Five Star Weekend Confirms Jennifer Garner as the Queen of Heartbroken Smiles
The Five Star Weekend Confirms Jennifer Garner as the Queen of Heartbroken Smiles
What’s in your wallet? Only heartbreak.
Peacock’s drama series The Five Star Weekend appeared out of nowhere a few weeks ago to become one of the summer’s surprise breakout hits—it racked up more than a billion minutes of streaming time in its first week of release. To be sure, it’s a very different sort of surprise breakout hit than, say, Backrooms. Rather than dealing in liminal horror and existential dread, The Five Star Weekend centers around a middle-aged woman caught up in grief and denial at the sudden, shocking, and untimely death of her husband. Rather than confronting her pain head-on, she pushes it away by inviting a handful of friends she’s known throughout her life to join her for a weekend retreat in Nantucket as she nimbly skirts around how she really feels about her husband’s loss. Spoilers: Real talk, devastating realizations, and many tears result.
Along the way, the show’s star, Jennifer Garner, demonstrates once again that she has somehow managed to channel her Midwestern American girl-next-door charm into something even more authentically Midwestern American: Demonstrating a sense of brave sorrow. See, folk in the American heartland don’t really talk about their sad feelings. It’s unseemly. They soldier on and push it down. And no other actor in Hollywood does quite so good a job of letting that self-censorship play out across their face than Garner.
That sense of getting on with it despite being very clearly gutted by personal tragedy was what made Garner a star in the first place. As Sydney Bristow in JJ Abrams’ spy thriller show Alias, Garner channeled the unflappable confidence and rangy secret agent physicality of James Bond and Ethan Hunt, but she was built differently than her male counterparts. Where they responded to loss by channeling their sorrow and anger into single-minded determination (and a touch of sociopathy), Bristow still got the job done with her usual competence but actually took the time to process her heartbreak afterwards. This made her an atypically sane and ethical super-spy, a rare sight in the edgy mediascape of ’00s America. And experiencing Feelings in the midst of a down-to-the-wire effort to save the world also gave Garner a lot of time to practice getting across the impression of carrying suppressed grief: She clearly experienced devastating emotions when things went wrong in the midst of a mission, but she pushed them back until later.
That wistful hint of a half-smile. The contour of the eyes shifting subtly from hardened determination to despair and back again. The feigned diffidence and deflection. Scroll back up and look at the header image for this post. See? That’s Garner’s iconic look of understated sorrow. It’s a winner every time.
Sydney Bristow was an all-American girl in the realest way possible (i.e. too polite and repressed to trouble others, not to mention scrub a mission, with her sadness), and Garner has honed that skill over the past 20 years into one of the strongest tools in her acting toolkit. She’s become the go-to casting choice for a character who carries hurt so deep it practically radiates off her in waves, but whose face conveys the fact that she has it very nearly under control despite it all. Whether playing an earnest aspiring mother whose husband cheats on her emotionally with a cool teenager (see: Juno) or a Bristow-like stepmother dragged into a life of intrigue when her husband vanishes (see: The Last Thing He Told Me), Garner has perfected the exact sort of wounded courage that carries The Five Star Weekend.
Also, Judy Greer plays a character named Electra. A walking reminder of the time Garner costarred in that middling Ben Affleck Daredevil movie to evoke that sense of wounded courage? That’s some truly committed method acting.