Pop Goddess

I really enjoyed A.O. Scott’s article in this week’s New York Times Sunday magazine, and I wanted to share it with you.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/09/magazine/hollywoods-year-of-heroine-worship.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0

He expresses a lot of my feelings about how women are represented in the movies.  Some of the highlights:

-The discussion about how women’s pictures devolved into chick flicks, and “the assumption that stories about men are large, important and universal, while stories about women are particular, local and trivial.”

-Scott puts his finger on what bothers me about declarations of “year of the woman” or when a story by/about women is treated as revolutionary.  This ignores a rich history of films in which mature, confident women are equal partners with men.

-Scott also zeroes in on why it’s so tempting, but problematic, to expect stories of/by women (and, I would argue, of/by people of color) to not just be stories about particular individuals but to be paradigms, “to represent, to set an example and blaze a path.”  It’s an unfair expectation, but it’s a consequence of “under- and misrepresentation,” as Scott puts it.

-I also agree with Scott that historically, “the question of who a woman will be is always bound up with the questions of whom she will marry.”  That’s what makes Brave so refreshing.

-And of course Scott discusses the profoundly valuable Bechdel test, according to which a film “1. has to have at least two [named] women in it 2. Who talk to each other 3. About something besides a man.”

It’s interesting to note that Kathryn Bigelow’s Hurt Locker and most of her earlier films, if I remember correctly, fail this test.  I haven’t watched Zero Dark Thirty yet, but I suspect this might be true for it as well.*  But our expectations about what kind of film she should make is related, I think, to the earlier point about under-representation.  It also raises the question of what makes a “woman’s picture” – the story, the lead characters, the creator? You could ask the same in a literary context as well:  are Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary any less/more/different women’s stories than the novels of Austen and the Brontes?

So check out A.O. Scott’s article and share your answers to these questions and any other responses you have in the comments section below.  Enjoy and share!

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/09/magazine/hollywoods-year-of-heroine-worship.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0

*Note: Jessica Chastain and Jennifer Ehle’s characters, both CIA operatives, actually do have conversations about something other than a man (in a romantic context), although their longest conversation does involve Ehle’s Jessica questioning Maya about whether Maya would ever have a fling with her boss.

Seriously, just start engraving Daniel Day-Lewis’ name on the Best Actor statuette right now.  I’m sure there are other great performances out there this season (I think Denzel is a strong contender for Flight), but I don’t think they can top Day-Lewis’ portrayal of Lincoln.  Beyond the amazing physical transformation, the actor has absorbed Lincoln from the inside out – his Lincoln is towering yet scraggily down-to-earth, humane but not anachronistically bleeding-heart; a man with a keen eye on history yet equally aware of on-the-ground exigencies.  For all this, there’s no showboating in Day-Lewis’ performance.  He’s not an actor pantomiming a great historical figure; he seems to simply become the man himself.

Right from the start, the film tries to separate the man from the legend.  While visiting troops, Lincoln is uncomfortable, maybe even impatient, when two awed young soldiers start quoting his Gettysburg Address back to him. He appears more interested in the details of their lives than in having them reflect his public persona back to him.  Then we see him lounging in an armchair in his bedroom, feet in slippers.  Later, he’s sprawled on the floor next to his young son, Tad.  There’s something so human and vulnerable about the way Tad climbs onto his father’s back and the shot of Lincoln’s slippers on the floor, forgotten as he carries his son to bed.

I’m glad Lincoln isn’t a standard biopic – they can be so rote and by-the numbers.  This film’s approach is much more interesting – narrow in scope, deep in detail.  The details it’s chiefly concerned with are the sometimes dirty political machinations involved in achieving a lofty goal.  The down-in-the-mud, fairly un-heroic battle sequence at the beginning of the film parallels the down-and-dirty politicking that Lincoln and his surrogates engage in to ensure passage of the 13^th amendment.  James Spader, Tim Blake Nelson, and John Hawkes play a comedic trio of proto-lobbyists, doling out patronage to secure the necessary votes.

Based on this film and The Amazing but Totally Unnecessary Spiderman, I feel like Sally Field is getting harder to watch as time goes by.  The exposed-nerve quality that’s always made her so compelling is getting amplified, so that it’s almost too much to take.  (I wonder if Claire Danes is going to progress that way, too.)  Perhaps Field was right on target with her depiction of Mary’s almost florid grief and sadness, but it felt out of balance with the rest of the film.  I did like the cut from her anguish just before the inaugural reception to her smiling mask of hospitality in the receiving line.  The abrupt transition underscored how much pain she was always hiding behind that mask.

One narrative device at the end of the film made me uncomfortable.  I hesitate to include a spoiler alert because it reinforces the film’s gimmick; I’ll just say that it involves Tommy Lee Jones’ character.  The movie treats the fact that Thaddeus Stevens has a relationship with a black woman, his housekeeper, as a sort of punchline to a joke he puts over on everyone else, the secret that explains his abolitionist zeal.  So it only makes sense for a white man to care about racial equality as much as he does because he’s sleeping with a black woman?  I found that suggestion insulting, and I wish the film had presented that biographical information more matter-of-factly and less like a surprise twist.

With the exception of that false note, I enjoyed Lincoln. It breathes life into legal and political minutiae (Lincoln could’ve been teaching a constitutional law class when he discusses the legal maneuvering required for the Emancipation Proclamation); frames the legal battle over slavery in a way that echoes future civil rights struggles; and offers a very human portrait of a man, husband, and father who also happens to be one of the greatest figures in American history.

My first thought after watching Silver Linings Playbook was, “Well, here’s another example of the annual Weinstein marketing juggernaut.”  Another movie that doesn’t seem to warrant all the Oscar buzz it’s generating.  It’s entertaining, but it sometimes feels like a made-for-television movie (not to knock a good TV movie) or a multi-episode arc on a sitcom.  It introduces too many narrative strands and doesn’t tackle any of them deeply enough.  Ashley and I both agreed that we were underwhelmed, and then we proceeded to talk about the movie for a solid thirty minutes.  So maybe it has more going on than we initially thought?  Or maybe we spent that time talking about how it could have been better.

One strand that the movie introduces but then doesn’t resolve satisfactorily is Pat Sr.’s (a surprisingly low-key Robert De Niro) anxiety and obsessive compulsive behavior.  Is the fact that the movie doesn’t substantively address his issues a sign of its weakness or the mark of an unconventional film that isn’t afraid to leave things unresolved and messy, as real life tends to be?  At the end of the movie, we get a shot of Pat Sr.’s TV remotes out of his usual obsessive formation; does that indicate that all his problematic behaviors are resolved, or just that he’s okay enough, as okay as any of us ever are?  Ditto with Ronnie’s strained marriage and the immense pressure he feels.  Pat tells him not to throw his marriage away, and that’s enough for Ronnie to work on his marriage?  I can’t decide whether the movie’s glancing looks at each of these serious problems is realistically open-ended or superficial.

Either way, Bradley Cooper gives a live-wire performance as Pat, laying bare the character’s volatility and tenuous sense of control.  The role capitalizes on the slightly manic edge the actor always has, even when he’s playing a more conventional romantic lead.  Cooper is totally convincing when Pat describes how he’d been “white-knuckling it” his whole life, living tightly-coiled, somehow managing his mood swings and anxiety without realizing what exactly he was dealing with.

I was less impressed with Jennifer Lawrence.  I haven’t seen Winter’s Bone, so maybe it’s not fair for me to say that she hasn’t ever impressed me all that much.  She was flat in X-Men: First Class; in The Hunger Games, she didn’t fully communicate Katniss’ conflicting impulses of self-preservation, anger, and loyalty.  I think she does her best with what she’s given here, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that Tiffany is another iteration of the “interesting because she’s screwed up” female character that Hollywood seems to find so fascinating.

I loved seeing veteran Hindi film actor Anupam Kher as Pat’s therapist, Dr. Patel.  He’s acted in so many Hindi films, not to mention crossovers like Bend It Like Beckham and Bride and Prejudice, that it’s harder to think of movies that he hasn’t been in rather than ones he has been in.  He always brings a certain grounded authenticity to his roles, and in this film he’s matter-of-factly supportive and even bracing when necessary.

I don’t know how well the movie’s football and dance competition strands lined up together at the end.  It feels forced, and I didn’t buy that all those people who didn’t visit Pat in the mental institution once in eight months would attend the dance competition.  Seriously, even Dash Mihok, apparently the only cop in town, shows up for this thing?  It all makes for an enjoyable payoff, but it also seems too sentimental for the other messier, more realistic choices in the film.  In keeping with the movie’s rougher edges, Pat and Tiffany remain hilariously amateurish in their dancing, and I appreciated that.  They may not be experts like their inspirations, Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor, but they do capture some of that duo’s joyous spirit.