Thora Birch is persuasive as the withdrawn young woman who would rather not explain herself. We value her restraint, especially in American Beauty, where she makes an alienated daughter worth caring about without making her easy company.
Fi1m perspective
In American Beauty (1999), Thora Birch's Jane Burnham is an alienated daughter whose unhappiness deserves to be taken seriously. Birch does that without making a great display of it. Her restrained playing lets Jane remain withdrawn without becoming uninteresting, and we rate the performance for resisting the temptation to make difficult feelings immediately appealing. The film can be smug about its suburban characters; Birch helps make one of them worth caring about even when she offers little encouragement.
The move from family films including Hocus Pocus (1993) and Now and Then (1995) to American Beauty marks the important turn in her work. Disaffected young women became a recurring presence, with independent films occupying much of the following decade. A lower-profile period followed, before later work included a supporting role in The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019) and a recurring television part in The Walking Dead (2019–2020). Those changes in prominence tell us less about her acting than the early adult performances do.
Sam Mendes's American Beauty gives us a useful measure of both her strengths and the limits of what an actor can repair. Alan Ball's script can seem too pleased with its own jokes, while the cast finds unhappiness beneath them. Annette Bening is our chief reason to recommend the film, but Birch contributes to that necessary work of making the people matter. We felt for Jane because Birch makes her isolation credible without insisting on our sympathy. That does not excuse the writing's smugness, but it makes the film worth an evening despite it.
In Ghost World (2001), Birch's sardonic Enid Coleslaw gives her another outsider to play, this time in a leading role. The interest is in seeing that intelligence and reserve sustain more of a film. It would be reductive to treat Jane and Enid simply as two examples of teenage discontent; the appeal is in Birch taking each one's feelings seriously. Start with American Beauty for the ensemble, then give her more of the evening with Ghost World.
Biography
Thora Birch is an American actress. She began her career as a child performer, appearing in television commercials from the age of four and making her feature film debut in Purple People Eater (1988).
Birch rose to prominence with roles in 1990s films including Patriot Games (1992), Hocus Pocus (1993) and Monkey Trouble (1994). She received a BAFTA nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Jane Burnham in American Beauty (1999).
She later starred as Enid in Ghost World (2001), earning a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy. Birch has also appeared in television series such as The Walking Dead.
