Episode Details

“I’m tired of being amazing. I don’t want to be amazing anymore.”

The single sentence becomes the crux of the show and of modern motherhood. Jenny Kaminski (Dakota Fanning), a hardworking publishing executive, meets Marissa when they’re hiding out in the bathroom at a school event. The two forge a friendship over twinning in the same dress and dealing with the same dilemma. They are tired of the platitudes their husbands serve them, of doing it all at home and at work, and being told they can have it all if they really work for it.

The Nod Magazine

In All Her Fault, Dakota Fanning plays Jenny Kaminski, a married wife and mother carrying the load of a single mom. She takes care of her young son and her husband, a man who doesn’t clean up after himself in the kitchen, and texts her to ask where their son’s water bottle is.

When I finally started watching All Her Fault, weeks after hearing the well-earned buzz, I was both excited and not at all surprised to see Dakota Fanning playing Jenny. Something about the casting made perfect sense to me — but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I just knew that Jenny Kaminski = Ray from Uptown Girls.

After sitting with my thoughts some more, I realized that it’s not just Ray; Dakota Fanning’s entire extensive resume has clearly laid the groundwork to lead her straight to the role of Jenny Kamiski. It feels like the writing was on the wall in a very unique and specific way.

Jenny Kaminski is very much who I imagine all of Dakota Fanning’s characters from childhood could have grown up to be: an “amazing” woman doing it all.

Who better to play a wife and mother who is ‘doing it all’ than an actress who grew up playing children who also had to do it all? Who better to play the new friend of a mother whose son was kidnapped than a woman who has herself played a kidnapped child?

Dakota Fanning has played multiple little girls who either ran away or were kidnapped at some point in a film*. Both Lily Owens from The Secret Lives of Bees and Lucy from I Am Sam (Dakota Fanning’s SAG award-winning performance) run away. Abigail Jennings (Trapped) and Lupita “Pita” Ramos (Man on Fire) are both kidnapping victims. Ray also runs away to Coney Island in Uptown Girls, in one of the most pivotal (and memeified) scenes in cinematic history. How surreal to now play a mother supporting another mother with a missing child.

Some of the initial details and musings that sparked my early connection to Ray, and then to more of Dakota’s other incredible roles, include…

* I knew Ray would make a wonderful mother if she chose to have children. Girls who have complicated relationships with their mothers sometimes pass down all the trauma, but sometimes they do all the work necessary to break the cycle and become much healthier moms. I think Ray did the latter.

* I knew Ray would have a fabulous career and be such a ballbusting badass. You can really see Jenny’s inner child (aka the precocious spitfire that is Ray) come out when she’s working.

* Jenny Kaminski is both a member and an outsider. She lives in this Monterey-type town (very Big Little Lies except it’s Chicago), but she’s also on the outskirts of it, too; she’s not playing their games, and she sees through the bullshit. Ray’s world in Uptown Girls is one of deep privilege, but she also saw it for what it was (as much as a child can)

* Jenny Kaminski knows the lifesaving power of female friendship.

Many of Dakota Fanning’s younger characters were saved by strong, loyal, unconventional women in the form of Molly Gunn (RIP Brittany Murphy),