(MENAFN- Khaleej Times) Justin Chang lays bare the awards seasons female troubles - but finds many movies still find place for women protagonists.
Wild showcases Reese Witherspoon as a woman searching for her life’s meaning
When she accepted her Oscar in February for Blue Jasmine Cate Blanchett delivered a painfully necessary message to those in the industry “who are still foolishly clinging to the idea that female films with women at the centre are niche experiences. They are not. Audiences want to see them and in fact they earn money. The world is round people!”
Alas the world looks flatter than ever if the movies in the running for best picture are any indication. We actually seem to have regressed this season: Blanchett’s competition for lead actress notably included Amy Adams Sandra Bullock and Judi Dench whose respective movies American Hustle Gravity and Philomena were all nominated for best picture.
The year before we had Amour Beasts of the Southern Wild Silver Linings Playbook and Zero Dark Thirty all of which boasted strongly developed female leads and scored nominations for actress as well as picture.
What’s striking about this year’s Oscar race by contrast is just how many movies in the conversation — American Sniper Birdman Boyhood Foxcatcher The Grand Budapest Hotel The Imitation Game Interstellar Nightcrawler Unbroken and Whiplash — are primarily driven if not outright dominated by male protagonists.
There are a few arguable exceptions. Ava DuVernay’s Martin Luther King Jr. drama Selma one of two probable picture nominees directed by a woman (the other being Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken) focuses on King but pointedly highlights the often overlooked contributions of the women of the civil-rights movement.
The Theory of Everything may be a simplified gloss on the life of Stephen Hawking but in lending equal dramatic weight to his wife Jane it also attempts to correct or at least complicate the supportive-wife biopic cliche.
Similarly divided between its married protagonists is Gone Girl (David Fincher’s second Girl movie in a row incidentally) whose gender politics have stirred no end of debate: Is Rosamund Pike playing a righteous anti-heroine or a freakish misogynist construct Whichever one it is I’m genuinely grateful that Amazing Amy exists.
Their masculine titles notwithstanding Birdman and Boyhood are not without their richly developed female characters — Emma Stone in the former Patricia Arquette in the latter. The same goes for Nightcrawler where Rene Russo provides a much-needed counterweight to Jake Gyllenhaal or Interstellar in which Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain balance keen intelligence and scientific acumen with fierce unruly emotions.
But surveying the race in its totality we seem to find ourselves once more in a man’s world where women tend to hover reluctantly around their men like moons stuck in orbit. What makes the situation even more perplexing is the fact that it was by no means a year lacking in first-rate female-driven movies. Julianne Moore is a worthy best actress frontrunner for the quietly devastating Still Alice. Wild gave Reese Witherspoon her most substantial dramatic showcase in years. Marion Cotillard had a magnificent run radiating fragile authenticity in Two Days One Night and the purity of a silent screen heroine in The Immigrant. Gugu Mbatha-Raw deserved to be more of a breakout star for Belle and especially Beyond the Lights.
Essie Davis is a revelation in The Babadook which goes deeper into the heart of embattled motherhood than any psychological horror movie since We Need to Talk About Kevin. (Unfortunately Babadook is ineligible for Oscar consideration due to rules disqualifying films with pre-theatrical VOD windows.)
Scarlett Johansson though playing a presumably gender-neutral alien owns every minute of Under the Skin. Ida features not one but two singular female leads Agata Trzebuchowska and Agata Kulesza and We Are the Best! has three: Mira Barkhammar Mira Grosin and Liv LeMoyne. And if you can look past Christoph Waltz’s showboating in Big Eyes the movie really does belong to Amy Adams’ radiant turn as a wife mother and artist overcoming the oppressions of her era.
Selma focuses on the often overlooked contribution of the women of the civil-rights movement
The cause of advancing diversity in art is of course more than a matter of filling quotas and counting chromosomes and it’s possible to find the system wanting without discounting the value of what it’s given us.
Refreshing as it would be for Bennett Miller Alejandro G. Inarritu and Christopher Nolan to delve into a woman’s psyche now and then their work this year merits praise and recognition.
Foxcatcher is a veritable tempest of testosterone and no less remarkable for it. Richard Linklater’s Girlhood may well have been as extraordinary as Boyhood but I’m not sure that it would have felt quite so personal or rung quite so true. A movie called Birdwoman alas could exist only in a world where comic-book heroines have the same cultural and commercial currency as their male counterparts.
It’s always easier to identify a worrisome trend than to figure out its cause much less to suggest a workable solution. We can point to the limitations of genre in the case of American Sniper The Imitation Game and Unbroken given that most biographical war movies are about the exploits adventures and sufferings of men. Still whatever these films’ particular shortcomings or virtues I suspect that awards voters are too often inclined to accept them on their own grand self-important terms which not so subtly conflate significance with masculinity: Watch Chris Kyle and Louis Zamperini march off to war! See Alan Turing change the face of history! Contrast this with the relatively solitary interior (and mostly non-biographical) journeys undertaken by some of this year’s female protagonists: a woman quietly losing her mind in Still Alice or searching for her life’s meaning in Wild or simply trying to hold on to her job in Two Days One Night. (The critic Carrie Rickey nailed it sadly in an interview several years ago: “What men do is universal; what women do is particular.”)
Given Hollywood’s bent toward weighty themes and real-life subjects one might cynically suggest that the industry should foster more historical dramas about female geniuses eccentrics and political leaders for a change. But if the result is simply a movie as banal and reductive as The Iron Lady why bother
Amy Adams’ portrayal of an artist overcoming the oppressions of her era is the highlight of Big Eyes
Some of this is simple auteurism at work: If there’s a reason why this year’s best picture race feels a bit lopsided it’s probably because Clint Eastwood Wes Anderson Inarritu Linklater Miller and Nolan were always more likely to generate frontrunner attention than emerging marginalised and/or foreign-born filmmakers like Jennifer Kent Gina Prince-Bythewood James Gray Jonathan Glazer Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne Pawel Pawlikowski and Lukas Moodysson.
And this year after year is the chief frustration of awards season: an excess of lockstep thinking and an unwillingness to look away from establishment favourites. It would take a less complacent more adventurous voting body to recognise that the subtitled likes of Ida and Two Days One Night deserve more of a place in the conversation than glossy prestige pictures like The Imitation Game or Unbroken.
It would take an even more discerning sensibility to look past the misleading Lifetime-movie veneer that has relegated a drama as piercing as Still Alice to some sort of specialty-division ghetto.
That Moore will almost certainly win best actress is I suppose some consolation but when she takes the stage come February I hope to God she tells us something we sadly still need to hear.