Sorry Kate Winslet, but you can’t just do this to me. I sat down to watch the Oscar winner and queen of Reading star in I Am Ruth, and, two hours later… I’m a broken woman. In Channel 4’s feature-length drama, Winslet plays a mother wracked with worry as her daughter’s mental health disintegrates. What destroyed me wasn’t the way Ruth fulsomely swears out loud when she’s alone in the car, nor how she scuttles into the garden to smoke a secret ciggie when completely exasperated. No, it was the way her voice is always just a little bit too high, hanging on by a thread, cheeriness hiding desperation – she exists, instinctively, to gee up everyone else.
As is the way with Dominic Savage’s female-led I Am anthology series, the story has been devised alongside Winslet herself, and the action is all improvised. That sense of fly-on-the-wall naturalism is further heightened by the fact Winslet acts opposite her own real-life daughter, Mia Threapleton. Together, the pair have a special alchemy: there’s so much in their hostile silences, such yearning in their quiet cuddles.
