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Every Laura Dern Role, Ranked
Often volatile and warped onscreen, immensely likable off-screen.
Sandy kindles the plot of Blue Velvet, telling the movie’s amateur detective (Kyle MacLachlan) that the severed ear he found belongs to a local lounge singer (Isabella Rossellini) whose grim personal life breaches the supposed paradise of suburbia. As a globe-trotting documentarian — an analog of the film’s director, Jennifer Fox — who encounters largely forgotten (or at least misunderstood) relics from a “relationship” she had at age 13 with her adult horseback-riding instructors (Elizabeth Debicki and Jason Ritter), Dern has the weighty task of calibrating a character experiencing emotional whiplash as she excavates old memories. The bellyachers who objected to the age difference between Licorice Pizza ’s relatively tame protagonists would go mad dissecting Dern’s Rambling Rose character, a coquettish Depression-era housekeeper who falls hard for her older employer (Robert DuVall) and provides his 13-year-old son’s (Lukas Haas) first sexual experience.
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