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Best Picture Nominee Review Series: The Reader

This is a guest post from Megan Kearns.

When we read books or watch movies, we often do so to feel inspired, educate ourselves or escape our daily lives. We frequently look for stories filled with passion, love, sacrifice, revenge, wit and camaraderie. We don’t usually examine how shame gnaws away at us, unraveling our lives. I had a hard time writing this review for The Reader, which shines a light on shame. The film intrigued me with its compelling acting and moral complexities. But it remains a difficult terrain to navigate. Confronting the sins of the past, the film begs the question: can you ever forgive someone you love for committing horrific crimes? And can you ever forgive yourself for loving them?

Threaded with secrecy and guilt, The Reader weaves a tale that tackles the nebulous boundaries of morality and justice. Based on the best-selling book by Bernard Schlink, it features two of my all-time favorite actors as two tormented souls forever haunted by their past. With a quiet intensity, Kate Winslet gives a subtle Oscar-winning performance as Hanna Schmitz, a brusque yet sensuous woman. A complicated and unsympathetic character, Winslet imbues her not with empathy but with a tinge of humanity. Ralph Fiennes effortlessly plays the relentlessly wounded Michael Berg, full of longing and regret, never able to let anyone into his life or his heart but Hanna. The film unfolds as Michael, the tale’s moral compass, remembers his life in flashbacks as a sensitive love-struck young boy (played perfectly with a charming innocence by David Kross) who gets involved in a steamy and tumultuous affair with an older woman until she abruptly disappears. Initially tormented by her absence, Michael moves on with his life, until Hanna unexpectedly emerges 8 years later, on trial for war crimes.

In 1958 Germany, 15-year-old Michael meets 36-year-old Hanna, a train conductor, when she helps him home after finding him sick in the street. Drawn to each other, the two eventually enter a sexual relationship. They fall into a routine pattern of sex, bathing and books. Hanna requests Michael read aloud to her; the words of Tolstoy, Homer, D.H. Lawrence and Chekov leap to life. The reading becomes an emotional aphrodisiac and a means of connection.

As if shedding layers of clothing, the film attempts to unveil the layers of Hanna’s life. Yet it always feels diaphanous, never fully within one’s grasp. She shrouds herself in secrecy. Michael and ultimately we as the audience are never meant to completely see Hanna. She’s often harsh, only showing vulnerability when she sobs in Michael’s arms as he reads to her a heartbreaking tale or when a village choir’s music brings her tears of joy. Through art, Hanna is able to express her emotions, connecting with her sensitivity and humanity. But as quickly as she enters Michael’s life, she evaporates. A tragic story laced with sexual awakening and emotional enlightenment, the film reveals that we may never really know the people we love.

When Michael sees Hanna again, she’s a defendant on trial for her actions as a former SS guard. I found it interesting that the film shows the trial of 6 former SS guards, all of whom were women. As the case unfolds, Michael realizes Hanna’s secret shame she’s been so desperate to hide. SPOILER -> She can’t read. As Germany had the highest rate of literacy in Europe, it’s unusual that Hanna would have been illiterate. And some have been quick to criticize the book and film for insinuating that a person would be more ashamed of illiteracy than perpetrating human rights atrocities. <- END SPOILER While reading is a crucial component of the plot, the movie isn’t really about reading or the saving grace of literature; rather it’s used as a metaphor for “moral illiteracy.” Illiteracy analogizes feigned ignorance, for those who claimed they didn’t know what was truly happening in the concentration camps despite the existence of over 10,000 camps and the notoriety of the Nazi massacres.

So much has been written and filmed about the Holocaust. But rarely have tales been told from the perspective of those who have committed unspeakable crimes or the people who loved them. Yet The Reader never condones, empathizes or excuses Hanna’s behavior. Whenever I see a film about the Holocaust, I’m reminded of the saying “never again,” that we can never let this happen again. But genocide didn’t end after WWII; numerous genocides continued to be waged (Cambodian, Rwandan, Palestinian, Kurdish, Croatian) and are still happening today. The film and book it’s adapted from serve as an allegory for how the subsequent generation dealt with the shame of the Holocaust and atrocities their parents’ and grandparents’ generations committed. And Hanna is the character symbolizing the people who committed those unspeakable acts.

So often, we see a man playing the villainous role of a Nazi so it’s interesting to me that a woman embodies that role instead. Yet, I can’t shake the unease I feel with the portrayal. Hanna has no children, no family and never marries. This may not have been the intended consequence, yet it comes off as a cautionary tale. Hanna appears to possess no maternal instinct; rather than protect, she seduces a sweet and naïve boy, alternately treating him tenderly as a passionate lover or with curt callousness. She stands trial for war crimes as a former SS guard, participating in the deaths of hundreds of women and girls. I can’t shake the feeling that if she had been scripted to bear a child or to have lost a child, she wouldn’t have behaved this way. Are single, childless women more cruel and apathetic? No, of course not. Yet Hollywood continually seems to reinforce the notion that women without children are cold and calculating.

Gender role reversals weave throughout The Reader. In the beginning, Hanna helps Michael when he’s sick. By the end of the film, the roles have switched and Michael aids Hanna. It’s interesting watching a movie with an affair between an adult woman and a teenage boy. While I certainly don’t condone it, and it made me feel squeamish rather than erotic (as many reviews described their relationship), I couldn’t help but feel relieved that it wasn’t a 15-year-old girl in this situation as we so often see men with much younger women. In the book, Hanna becomes physically abusive in one scene when she’s overcome with rage whips Michael with a belt. While she’s softened slightly for the film, I still can’t shake my apprehension that there’s an element of sexual predator.

The film slightly expands the roles of the other female characters in the book, which relies heavily on Michael’s internal monologues and narratives. By removing voiceovers, the movie does a fantastic job showing us rather than telling us the story. We see other women in the film including Lena Olin in a dual-role as holocaust survivors, Michael’s mother and sisters, a female law student (added to the film) and Michael’s daughter Julia. Yet most, save for Olin, speak minimal or no lines and none of them have any personalities to speak of.

The only woman existing in Michael’s world is Hanna, whom he uses as a scale in which to weigh all his other relationships with women. Hanna never lets Michael into her world, everything is on her terms. Yet we the audience rarely see the story from Hanna’s perspective. Occasionally we watch Hanna’s face; her terrified expression when she learns she’s going to be promoted, lest anyone discover her secret or her joy when she first unwraps Michael’s packages of recorded books, which she comes to rely on later in life. Literature is also used in the film “as a powerful means of communication, and at other times as a substitute for communication.” Michael eventually uses reading to communicate with Hanna while she uses reading as a way to deal with her emotions and grapple with her past. But even the sole female protagonist, who serves as Michael’s sun, moon and stars, still has her thoughts and views removed. SPOILER -> In the book, Hanna eventually reads books by Holocaust survivors like Elie Wiesel. <- END SPOILER She can’t muffle the sounds of the dead, they continue to haunt her. But the film adaptation erases this crucial point. The only part that even comes close to addressing Hanna’s perspective on her past actions is when she declares:

“It doesn’t matter what I feel. It doesn’t matter what I think. The dead are still dead.”

A tragic yet powerful film that raises so many crucial questions about collective action and individual choice. It’s interesting to me that so much buzz surrounded Winslet’s Oscar-winning performance. Don’t get me wrong, she was sublime in it. But while she gives a commanding yet nuanced performance, the movie often treats women as cursory. Hanna merely serves as a vehicle to express the capacity for human cruelty and apathy, to look away and ignore the brutality happening in society. Even the film’s message isn’t really about Hanna or women in general for that matter. The women merely exist as satellites, all orbiting around Michael. Just like so many other films, it still boils down to a story revolving around a man; his feelings, his perspective and his world.

Megan Kearns is a blogger, freelance writer and activist. A feminist vegan, Megan blogs at The Opinioness of the World, where she writes about gender in pop culture, sexism in the media, reproductive justice and living vegan. Her work has also appeared at Arts & Opinion, Italianieuropei, Open Letters Monthly, and A Safe World for Women. She earned her B.A. in Anthropology and Sociology and a Graduate Certificate in Women and Politics and Public Policy. Megan lives in Boston, MA with her diva cat and more books than she will probably ever read in her lifetime. She contributed reviews of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, Something Borrowed, !Women Art Revolution, and The Kids Are All Right (for our 2011 Best Picture Nominee Review Series). She was the first writer featured as a Monthly Guest Contributor.

Best Picture Nominee Review Series: Juno

This review by Amber Leab originally appeared at Bitch Flicks in October 2008.

Juno(2007)

It took me a long time to see the film Juno. I was thrilled when Diablo Cody won the Oscar for Best Screenplay, but at the same time suspicious about her little movie being so lauded. To win an Oscar, the film must be saying the “right” things to the “right” people, a dynamic that rarely favors progressive thinking (see the movie Crash as a recent example). In other words, when too many people love a movie, there’s probably something wrong.

Aside from critical praise and popularity, the topic of teen pregnancy is rarely done without a hefty dose of morality. While we are in a peculiar cultural gray area on the subject—consider the cover of OK Magazine, featuring smiling teen mom Jamie Lynn Spears, or the Republican VP nominee’s pregnant teenage daughter—there seems to be an anti-choice undercurrent running through pregnancy plots, not to mention the culture at large.

The expectations I had going in were also based on reading commentary about the ultra-hip dialogue and soundtrack of the film. While certainly not negative in themselves, coupled with a controversial topic, these features could be enough to couch a conservative, anti-woman message in a hip, fresh film.

It turns out, however, that after an initial adjustment period to the dialogue (and a question about whether the film is set in the early ‘90s), Juno turns out to be planted in a feminist worldview, and is a film that teenagers, especially, ought to see. It was thoroughly enjoyable, funny and touching. I liked it so much that I watched it again, but when I started to write about it, what I liked about the movie became all the more confusing. I loved the music, although Juno MacGuff is way hipper than I was (or am), and I saw a representation that reminded me of myself at that age. I saw a paternal relationship that I never had and a familial openness that I’ve also never had. I saw characters who I wanted as my childhood friends and family.

And while in Juno we have a strong, unconventional female character—and a lead character, at that—the film itself was very, very safe. And I worry whether that’s a good thing. It’s certainly understandable for a first film. A Hollywood outsider would have a much more difficult time making an overtly progressive movie about teen pregnancy, but if she plays the politics safe, and if her own personality is enough of a draw, she just might make it.

I was worried when Juno visited the dumpy abortion clinic and met her pro-life classmate protesting in the parking lot, and I was worried by the very dumpiness of the clinic. I was struck by the notion that a clinic like that would look and feel much more sterile—even in the lobby, as far as Juno went. The thought of fingernails sent her running out of the building. A detail like “fingernails” made the abortion too real for Juno, a teenager, I suppose. Is this a good or bad thing? I don’t know.

Juno, in a rather nonchalant way, seeks permission of the baby’s father, her good friend Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera), for the abortion. Or, rather, she seeks his opinion; she seems to want him to resist her plans. But his lack of resistance causes her to make the following decisions on her own. This straddles the line somewhat. She wants to be told what to do, and rather than seeking out someone smarter and more experienced than she is, she asks the boy whose approval she’s still seeking.

Juno wants her baby to have the perfect family; one unlike her own, which her mother abandoned. Her family now consists of her father, her stepmother Bren (Allison Janney), and her half-sister Liberty Bell. Juno doesn’t have a bad deal going. Her folks are markedly working class (they’re both members of the labor class, a group that doesn’t see much Hollywood recognition; he’s an HVAC repairman, she’s a nail technician). Yet Juno imagines a perfect life to consist of two loving parents and a McMansion.Why would she seek out people of this particular class? Is this a case of Juno’s lack of class awareness or the film’s?

The film’s real progressive moment comes when Juno realizes that her idea of perfection isn’t perfect. She realizes that a father who doesn’t want to be there would be as bad as a mother who hadn’t wanted to be there. She sees that a father isn’t a necessity–or perhaps simply that two parents aren’t a necessity. Yet what does this all add up to mean? There’s certainly a moment of female solidarity (and this isn’t the only one, certainly, in the film), and a difficult decision that she makes independently. But, as with other conclusions I’ve made, I’m left with the question of “So what?”

The film does love all of its characters, which is a refreshing change for a high school flick. Juno’s best friend, Leah, is a cheerleader who exhibits some flaky, teenage qualities (her crush on the chubby, bearded, middle-aged math teacher takes a cliché and gives it a twist), but the film loves her nonetheless. Vanessa Loring (Jennifer Garner) is an obsessional, middle-class mommy blogger type, but we see that she would be a good mother, and the film cares for her. We even have sympathy for Mark (Jason Bateman) who, through his relationship with Juno, realizes that he and his wife no longer want the same thing (if they ever did). There are cringe-worthy moments with Mark and Juno, but none that damn him completely. It’s a rare film that gives us no bad guys, which is a large part of its charm.

It’s easy to want to live in a world like this, where a pregnant sixteen-year-old seems to get by pretty well, with her parents’ support and a relationship with her baby’s adoptive family. She has a sweet teenage love affair and doesn’t seem to struggle much. While teen angst is the stuff of Hollywood cliché, things just seemed too easy for Juno. I wish my teenage years could’ve been a bit more like Juno’s. Hell, I wish my life now could be.

The final question remains, though, about whether we should criticize a movie like Juno. Representations of role models for American girls tend to inhabit the poles; either young girls are encouraged to be the beautiful bimbo or the chaste Christian. This film has a strong personality (that masquerades as strong values—even an ethic) without being preachy or moralistic. That can’t inherently be a bad thing. Yet I find myself asking for more, wanting more–something that steps outside of the realm of safety. Perhaps Juno isn’t the film to give me more.

In all, I fear Juno suffers from the same postmodern condition afflicting so many films today. It strives for a non-message in order not to offend anyone, thus allowing anti-choice advocates to cheer the film as loudly as pro-choice feminists. There’s a problem here. If a film that almost universally passes as hip and progressive is so murky in its values and allegiance that we’re not really sure what to think of it, how can a truly hip and progressive film make it today?

Best Picture Nominee Review Series: Atonement

This is a guest post from Marcia Herring.

I’d like to start this review with a confession: Atonement is the second book in my long history of reading that has made me so angry, so upset, that I literally threw it across the room.

My anger was directed at the narrator, Briony Tallis, who I had no idea was pulling the strings of the story I had grown so engrossed in, the story that, had I stepped back for one moment, I would have realized was being shaped and tugged by an even larger narrator.

First published in 2001 by Ian McEwan (author of one of my favorite gender-questioning novels The Cement Garden), Atonement was adapted to film by Joe Wright in 2007 (he’d previously directed Pride & Prejudice and has since directed Hanna). I’d heard of the novel sort of peripherally, “Oh, everyone’s reading it! You’ve got to!” and as consequence, avoided it until forced to indulge for a class and found myself (cliché alert) unable to put it down.

Both as an Academy Award-nominated (and winning, for soundtrack) film and as a book adaptation, Joe Wright’s Atonement succeeds. The film is a gorgeous and gritty, if frustrating, portrait of childhood, of war, of love, of lies and the lies one tells to correct them.

The first section of the film and novel set up the plot. The wealthy Tallis family has temporary custody of their lesser-off red-headed cousins, the Quinceys, and young Briony (Saoirse Ronan) is determined to lead them all in a play to celebrate her older brother Leon’s homecoming. Mother Tallis is sick in bed, and older sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) is awkward around the son of the Tallis’s lawn worker, Robbie (James McAvoy) and excited to hear that her brother is coming home, despite news that he’s bringing along a friend, cocky Paul Marshall.

Briony lives in a world saturated with innocence. She still writes fairy tales, slaying imaginary dragons in the tall grass. The politics of childhood become confused with budding sexuality–something that Briony witnesses in cousin Lola, and becomes obsessed and terrified with an encounter she witnesses between Cecilia and Robbie. This desire for her own sexual awakening and simultaneously not being ready for it leads to Briony witnessing and misunderstanding the encounter at the fountain, the stark near-nudity of her sister, the tableau of Robbie standing by, the broken vase.

In direct contrast to this innocence comes Paul Marshall, introduced as a dapper gentleman who intends to make money off of the war with his Army Amo chocolate bar factory. He descends upon the safe haven of the nursery where Lola is meant to be watching over her twin brothers. “You have to bite it,” he says, handing her a bar of chocolate, his face stony.

The sexuality, too, of Robbie has another angle. His attempts at a polite apology devolve quickly into crude sexual expression. Robbie is faced with the sheer absurdity and irrationality of expressing sexual attraction to one who is of a higher class. Paul Marshall experiences the opposite problem, his power over Lola used to his advantage as he inflicts first rough treatment and then a rape in the woods. That power keeps Lola from seeing the truth, that she has been mistreated, brutally; Paul Marshall keeps Lola at his side, and she eventually marries him.

Mistaken perception continues as the plot device for the first section of the film, as Briony intercepts a note from Robbie to Cecilia–the word “cunt” startling her into dangerous assumption–and interprets a hasty sexual encounter between them as rape. She tells Lola that she has read “the worst word you could possibly imagine,” the idea of desiring or expressing desire after such a secret and surely filthy part is appalling to Briony, more appalling perhaps than accepting innocence or guilt, more appalling than recognizing shades of gray. As cousin Lola is, nigh simultaneously to the romantic scene, being raped by Paul Marshall, the twins go missing and Robbie tracks them down. Because of his absence and because of her surety that Robbie’s crude note was that of a “sex maniac,” Briony accuses Robbie of Lola’s rape. Surely his wildly expressed sexual appetite is equal to and capable of no less than rape. There must be a villain, there is in all of Briony’s fairy tales, and that villain appears to be Robbie.

What follows is Rob and Briony’s means of atoning for their crimes. Rob, unable to fight the accusation against the wealthy and certain young Tallis, is sentenced to prison and then to fight in WWI. Briony, realizing years later that there were cracks in what she witnessed, that there are, perhaps, alternate truths, becomes a nurse in an attempt to undo some of the wrong she has inflicted upon Cecilia and Robbie.

On the issue of alternate truths, it is nearly impossible to discuss Atonement without discussing its construction, and therefore, its twist ending. Atonement is a movie directed by a man, adapted from a book by a man, about and concerning a woman and her version of the story of her sister and a man they both knew. To say there are layers of subterfuge to consider is an understatement.

A story is being crafted, an attempt to fill in the blanks. An attempt to create rational cause and effect as happens in all stories when we are young. An attempt to understand what must be truly random and unpredictable. Motive must be established.

But of course, things don’t follow a logical order. The wrong person is blamed for a tragedy while another gets off scot-free. War happens and the best and worst of us are lost, caught in causes we might not respect ourselves. Illness, a car crash, a lightning strike. Do we blame Briony, then, for trying to set order in her confusing world? Do we blame her for attempting to set things right that she helped to set wrong? I remember upon first completing the novel, my rage was so complete, so strong. I hated Briony for what she had done, for creating ugly and beautiful lies to cover up the truth, for believing that life was as simple as “Yes. I saw him with my own eyes.” I hated Briony for the very reasons that I love reading and watching films: writers and directors create lies for us, and we indulge in them. Fiction is called such for a reason–it isn’t real.

And as much as we would like to believe Briony’s version of events, as much as we sit, dutiful audience members and readers, we know simultaneously that life is not that simple. It is not as simple as letting oneself fall into a pond and be saved by the handsome hero. Romantic notions of rescue and war come with real danger–something which the film explores with gusto. Countless romantic tales, such as the sort that Briony is enamored with, feature a hero away at war, returning to his true love. But that is simply that: a story and one we buy into with such eagerness that it is easy for Briony, for McEwan, for Wright to pull the wool over our eyes. We want to believe that Robbie lives, that he and Cecilia are reunited, that Briony somehow makes peace with what she has done. At the end of the film, older Briony states in an interview that she could no longer find any use for honesty or reality, but where do the lies actually come in to play? As moviegoers, we anticipate a story. We know that story is not real. So what makes Briony’s betrayal any different?

The soundtrack, interlaced with the sounds of a typewriter, never lets us completely forget that this is a story that is being crafted. It is no mistake that the first shot of the movie is Briony typing away at her play, “The Trials of Arabella,” taking her work very seriously. Briony expresses the difficulty of writing: that a play depends on other people.

The difference between play and story, as Briony postulates, are similar to the difference between novel and film. McEwan spends pages describing the intricacies of the vase, complete and then broken, whereas in a film, the vase is simply there. A long camera shot transports the viewer from room to room; instead of the turn of pages, the soundtrack interacts with the actions on screen instead of, for example, a rowdy neighbor or interrupting child pulling attention from the work.

While it is, in a way, refreshing to give the narrative over so completely to a woman in what is most certainly not a “chick flick,” and while Cecilia appears to be a strong, fierce woman in charge of her own sexuality, and while Briony, if not the most trustworthy of narrators, is more than skilled enough to do the job of telling this story, both of their stories center around Robbie. Even small conversations between Briony and Cecilia, Briony and Lola, Briony and a young nurse at training devolve quickly into a discussion of Leon, or Robbie, or marriage.

Briony’s obsession with atonement, with losing herself in the quest to right the wrongs she has committed is decidedly un-feminist. Though this is, essentially, Briony’s story, her story is consumed with the stories of others, so much so that she undergoes an erasure of self to ensure the happiness of her protagonists. Briony has been stuck for her whole life revising and rewriting her story, trapped in her youth (her hair-style remains the same), only able to present the truth upon her death, and even then her tidied up version of the truth.

Any deconstruction of the traditional romantic narrative does have the potential to be feminist, however in this case, because the story is filtered not only through Briony Tallis’s obsession with that very narrative but through a male author and director, the deconstruction is seen as a loss of something good. A loss of cherished innocence, of childlike femininity.

There is no denying the technical mastery of Atonement. Simply look at the long shot as Robbie arrives at Dunkirk, despair and small hope surrounding him and swooning around him as the camera floats through soldiers waiting. Look at small consistent hints of cracks in the narrative, look at changes in perspective looped together by setting and soundtrack. Atonement is a master work of fiction and of film, but feminism is not something I believe it can claim.

Marcia Herring is a rollergirl receptionist from Southeast Missouri. She is still working on her graduate degree, but swears to have it done someday. She spends most of her time watching television and movies and wishes she could listen to music and read while doing so without going insane. She previously contributed an analysis of Degrassi, Teens, and Rape Apologism and a review of X-Men First Class.

Best Picture Nominee Review Series: Michael Clayton

Best Picture nominee Michael Clayton (2007)

This is a guest post from Robin Hitchcock.

Michael Clayton seems like an unlikely Best Picture nominee: a legal thriller that I would have sworn was adapted from an airport novel if I didn’t know that it was nominated for Best Original Screenplay. Can’t you see yourself reading this plot description on a dust jacket while you half-listen to gate change announcements? Michael Clayton is the fixer for the elite Manhattan law firm Kenner, Bach & Leeden, making the deals and greasing the wheels for the tough cases that need to go away and stay under the radar. But when he’s sent to clean up the mess when his firm’s legendary attorney Arthur Eden goes off his medication and starts sabotaging their defense against a billion-dollar toxic tort class action, Clayton is reunited with his long-dormant conscience… and it might cost him his life.

It’s a film completely lacking in the epic trappings or topical social commentary usually characterizing Best Picture nominees, especially back in 2007 when the field was still only open to five films. Sure, it has a slick look, dashes of symbolic pretension (sorry, I have no. earthly. clue. what the horses mean) and an over-the-top and sometimes offensively unrealistic portrayal of mental illness, but it seems a more likely contender for heavy basic-cable rotation than for Best Picture.

Except for the part where it is really, really good.

Tilda Swinton’s phenomenal, Oscar-winning performance as Karen Crowder, general counsel for the toxic tort defendant United Northfield and villain of the story, does much of the work of pulling the film into the prestige league. It’s the best kind of supporting acting: a tremendous richness of character is developed in a few short scenes, leaving an impression so great it is hard to believe she doesn’t appear in more of the film.

Swinton demonstrates incredible control, imbuing characterization into the barely perceptible twitches of individual facial muscles. [It’s worlds apart from Tom Wilkinson’s scenerey-chomping (but also nominated) performance as the unbalanced Arthur, which makes that character seem even more out of place in the film.] In one of my favorite scenes, Karen awkwardly contracts with a hit man with a light-voiced forced professionalism that gives me flashbacks to my worst phone interviews, while reading over a stolen memorandum held in a hand stuffed in a plastic bag. She seems so comfortable with her improvised evidence-prevention, and it stands in such strong contrast with her hesitant negotiations, that we learn a great deal about what lines this character has already crossed that have brought her to the point of contract killing. Even Swinton’s HAND can act, when it’s hidden away in a plastic bag.

It’s a terrific performance in a rich role, but unfortunately some of that richness of character is rife with sexism, or at least relies on the sexism of the audience. We first see the character breaking down in a bathroom stall, pouring sweat broadly staining the pits of her conservative blouse. Her first dialogue is anxious practice for an interview discussing her recent promotion to general counsel as she dresses in the morning. Karen sits on her hotel bed in a practical nude bra and slip, posture slumped enough that some rolls of fat form on her midsection. Rarely is a half-dressed woman so de-sexualized in Hollywood film, and that captures our interest, but only because it relies on our presumption of sexist exploitation. So much of the complexity of the character is derived from our sexist expectations of what a cold-blooded corporate killer would be like and the “feminine vulnerability” (a phrase woefully common in reveiwers’ discussions of Swinton’s performance) of Karen Crowder. Swinton’s performance is strong enough to transcend this and actually earn the mantle of “complex villain”, but it is nevertheless problematic from a feminist perspective.

And my brow furrow deepens when I consider the only other female role with any meat to it—Anna, one of the class action plaintiffs (played by Merritt Wever). Anna is a young, painfully naïve country girl, and her “purity” draws a deep love from Arthur, who calls her “God’s perfect little creature.” Arthur’s love for Anna inspires his crusade to expose U/North’s guilt. [Sidebar: As a lawyer, I hate hate hate when characters are portrayed as heroes for betraying their clients when they find out they are guilty. That is not heroic. It is unethical and WRONG. I’m looking at you, Perry Mason! And Matlock, you oughtta be disbarred! /rant] So: female character that only exists to provide motivation for male character? Check! But why stop the sexist cliches there? Anna is flattered by the (creepy and grossly ethics-violating) attention that Arthur gives her, even after he strips down and professes his love to her while she is being deposed about HER PARENTS DYING OF CANCER. She accepts the plane ticket to New York he buys for her even though she’s never been farther away from home than Milwaukee, and has to lower her voice to an awed whisper when she recounts that the ticket cost eight hundred dollars. Anna’s simplicity and innocence stands in start contrast to Karen’s ruthless professionalism, creating an unpleasant dichotomy where the dumb, docile country mouse is “God’s perfect creature” and the professional, competent city mouse is Pure Evil. I doubt this message was intentional, but it still grates. The lesson is that passing the Bechdel test (Michael Clayton flunks on the second prong) not only appeases us feminists but helps avoid undesired inferences of sexism.

Despite these shortcomings, I thoroughly enjoyed Michael Clayton. The movie is worth watching just to bask in the awesomeness of Tilda Swinton’s performance, which truly is one for the ages, but it’s got plenty else to recommend it as well. It’s gripping, good-looking, thought-provoking, and hey, George Clooney’s face is on screen like 90% of the time.

Robin Hitchcock has a card in her wallet that proves she’s an attorney, but she practices writing more than she practices law. You can read her series of reviews of wedding movies at her blog HitchDied and her reviews of everything else at The Double R Diner.

Best Picture Nominee Review Series: There Will Be Blood

Best Picture Oscar nominee, There Will Be Blood

This is a guest post from Lesley Jenike.

I’m one of those hothouse flower film enthusiasts who feel relieved whenever Citizen Kane comes on Turner Classic Movies, as if it were a remedy for my chronic migraine. I’m oddly grateful to Ted Turner (my undergraduate commencement speaker and an American mogul/eccentric much like Kane and Plainview) for TCM, though I find myself muttering after I’ve clicked back over to, say, some Jennifer Aniston rom-com, “What happened to Hollywood?” Sure, it’s a cliché of a question, but the answers are myriad and complicated, having mainly to do with changes in the culture and in the medium itself. There are certain images, ideas, and obsessions that are inherent to our collective identity as a nation, and every once in a great while contemporary filmmakers who happen to have the money, the talent, the connections, and the audacity, explore them with varying degrees of success. P.T. Anderson’s 2007 Oscar-winning There Will Be Blood is one if those movies, a masterpiece in the tradition of Welles’ Citizen Kane and, yes, I can without hesitation tell you that I absolutely adore it. Classic Hollywood lives on.

There Will Be Blood is loosely based on Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil! Though I haven’t read the novel, I do know that while adapting the material for his screenplay, Anderson chose to concentrate on the troubled and troubling relationship between Daniel Plainview, a self-made oilman played to perfection by a John Huston-inspired Daniel Day Lewis, and his more politically and emotionally progressive “son,” H.W., rather than the Teapot Dome Scandal of the 1920’s; it was an important and effective choice. During the first ten minutes of the film, Anderson provides us with all the exposition we’ll need through a largely dialogue-free sequence in which we’re witness to the crudity and danger of early American oil exploration, our main character’s relentless vigor and drive, and H.W.’s entrance into Plainview’s life as an infant orphaned by an oil-well accident. The final scene in the opening sequence is masterful: Daniel Plainview alone on a train with H.W. as a baby tucked into an open suitcase. H.W. plays with Daniel’s mustache as Daniel looks down on him with tenderness. Right from the start, Anderson is confounding our initial assumptions about Daniel specifically and about turn-of-the-century oilmen in general, by juxtaposing ruthlessness with familial love and loyalty. This is, after all, a movie in which conflict is created and developed via a collection of Biblical proportioned antagonisms—father v son and brother v brother. The film ultimately ends with the dissolution of any real (or imagined) family connection between Daniel and H.W. in lieu of a philosophical (and literal) battle of sorts between two conmen—Daniel Plainview the oilman, and Eli Sunday the preacher (played by the excellent Paul Dano. Dano, who can go toe-to-toe with the finest screen actor working today, is definitely one to watch.)

It’s important to pause here and mention changing views concerning the portrayal of women, minorities, the disabled, and the disenfranchised at large in American films. If we consider some of our American cinematic “masterpieces,” we often find them absent vibrant female characters, for example (think The Godfather, Citizen Kane, and Chinatown to name just three). As much as I desperately want to see my gender portrayed with respect, honesty, and integrity, many films that deal with the great American mythos don’t have much room for female characters, simply because women haven’t been a part of, and are often still excluded from, the creation story we tell ourselves—a story of brutal boots-on-the-ground capitalism and, negatively speaking, punishing exploitation. It’s a Judeo-Christian story in which the individual male forges his path through the wilderness, an anti-hero who, despite his great wealth and power, can’t overcome his subsequent moral corruption. What’s important to recognize is that the marked absence of “the other” in these films is a comment on an institutionalized patriarchy that extends beyond our everyday interactions to the very heart of our cultural mythos. There Will Be Blood is yet another film that further cements a white male-dominated American story of origin.

But what makes this particular film so thrilling is that it’s ultimately much more than a postmodern cop to an earlier American form; it’s a visceral, earnest portrayal of the forces at work in opposition to, and in support of, our American fantasy of self-sufficiency and self-reinvention. Anderson creates a highly stylized world in which a boy can seemingly spring from Plainview’s oil well, sans womb, in a sort of male Immaculate Conception. It’s a Cain and Abel world (though the twentieth century has already obscured the moral clarity of earlier epochs) where blazing fire erupts from great swaths of desert and where men, faces blacked by oil, seem to crawl up from the earth’s very crust. It’s a film that leaves us wondering which of the two “brothers” is more evil: Paul or Eli? Daniel or Henry? What I mean is, at its core, There Will Be Blood describes the convoluted love/hate relationship between capitalism and Eli Sunday’s frontier-style Christianity. Who will win in this war for men’s (and women’s, I guess) souls?

Both Daniel and Eli vie for the hearts, minds, and pocketbooks of Little Boston’s citizens, most effectively illustrated in the scenes between Daniel, Mary Sunday, and Abel Sunday—Mary and Eli’s father. Mary is really the only female character who gets any airtime in There Will Be Blood and, like the rest of the movie’s characters, she’s given a name with Biblical significance. As an innocent, she’s a likely victim and both her religious family and the faithless Daniel Plainview, attempt to use her as an example. When H.W. tells Daniel that Abel “beats her [Mary] when she doesn’t pray,” we watch Daniel’s wheels start to turn. As a slap-in-face to Eli, Daniel invites Mary to stand with him at the well’s christening, instead of allowing Eli to lead his “congregation” in prayer, and later, at the picnic, Daniel makes a point to tell Mary he’ll “protect her” from her father while Abel’s still in earshot. We could interpret Daniel’s gestures of warmth and affection toward Mary as genuine—after all, he was willing to take orphaned H.W. on as his son—but Anderson doesn’t shy away from also suggesting that Daniel is perfectly willing to use the cult of familial loyalty to win trust for financial gain—a savvy ploy we see time and time again in films like The Godfather, Chinatown, and, yes, Citizen Kane. It’s an ultimately destructive ruse and Daniel falls victim to it, naturally, in the end.

When H.W. is made deaf by another oil well accident, Daniel finds him to be a less than effective business partner, though Anderson and Day-Lewis endow the character with so much fervent contradiction, it’s hard to tell how Daniel really feels about his son’s handicap. Later, when a stranger approaches Daniel to tell him he’s his long-lost stepbrother, we can tell, in his own convoluted way, that Daniel is looking for an opportunity to trust—somebody, anybody—while he claims, of course, to have disdain for “these people.” And finally, after his own self-delusion proves, well, illusory, and he’s bereft of his “son” and his “brother,” (dispatched by his own hand, no less), we watch Daniel rage further into a kind of Charles Foster Kane-type isolation. The film closes with a terrifying scene that frankly verges on bathos (it takes place in Plainview’s private bowling alley of all places) in which Daniel forces Eli to submit, aloud, that he is “a false prophet” and that “God is a superstition” after Eli attempts to extort money from his old enemy.

Anderson has proven his tremendous potential with There Will Be Blood, so much so, I wonder how, after plumbing the bloody depths of our Great American Hang-ups, he could possibly top its achievement. It’s a difficult film and most likely not to everyone’s taste, but it’s a film I’m certain will age well thanks to its satisfying complexity and nuance. “Give me the blood,” indeed!

Lesley Jenike received her PhD from the University of Cincinnati in 2008. She currently teaches poetry writing, screenwriting, and literature classes at the Columbus College of Art and Design. Her book of poems is Ghost of Fashion (CustomWords, 2009). She reviewed the Oscar-nominated film, A Serious Man as part of our 2010 Best Picture Nominee Review Series.

Best Picture Nominee Review Series: No Country For Old Men

Best Picture Oscar Winner, No Country For Old Men

This is a guest post from Max Thornton.

Cormac McCarthy doesn’t understand women.

Statements like this are responsible for the ever-growing dent in my desk and the permanent lump on my forehead. McCarthy is a very highly respected writer. He’s won the Pulitzer Prize. He’s a MacArthur Fellow. He’s been compared to Faulkner, Joyce, and Melville. Can you even imagine a female writer garnering such acclaim without writing a single prominent male character, and then telling Oprah, “I don’t pretend to understand men”?

The Coen brothers, happy to say, make no such nonsense generalizations about 50% of humankind. Not only did they create one of my favorite female characters of all time in one of my favorite movies of all time–Frances McDormand’s Best-Actress-Oscar-winning turn as Marge Gunderson in 1996’s criminally non-Best-Picture-winning Fargo–but they often portray prominent female characters in their films: notably in Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Burn After Reading, and last year’s True Grit.

The union of Cormac McCarthy and the Coen brothers is, aesthetically and thematically, an excellent idea. No Country For Old Men the novel, with its sparse and evocative prose, reads like a treatment for a Coen brothers film. Violence, greed, fate, and the average joe who gets caught up in criminal activity are all recurring Coen motifs, even if the unremitting bleakness leaves almost no room for their characteristic gallows humor. However, as Ira Boudway’s Salon review puts it, in the novel’s milieu “[w]omen exist mainly to show primordial attraction and inarticulate loyalty toward men; men are more at ease sawing off shotgun barrels or dressing their own bullet wounds than they are in the presence of women, children or their own emotions.”

That’s as true of the film as it is of the book. In McCarthy’s portrayal of rural West Texas, 1980, women are receptionists, secretaries, loyal wives, and not much else. A handful of women make single-scene appearances in this movie to serve coffee or give motel room keys to the three main characters: average joe Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), old Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones, sporting a permanent worried frown that makes you want to hug him and feed him Snausages), and serial killer Anton Chigurh (a spine-tingling Javier Bardem). The only woman who really has something to do in the film is the wonderful Kelly Macdonald, whom you can witness being wonderful to the max in the terrific Boardwalk Empire (roll on fall!).

Of course, when I say “something to do,” I mean “a grand total of ten minutes’ screentime, all of it oriented to onscreen husband Brolin.” As Carla Jean Moss, Macdonald bears an expression of chronic worriment to rival Jones’s, and almost all of her scenes require her to do nothing more than fret at Brolin, asking him for guidance or expressing concern for his safety.

In a way, Carla Jean ties the film together, but she does so solely in terms of the male characters: she is the only character to share screentime with all three of the main characters (who never appear onscreen together). Occasional hints are dropped regarding her life outside of the men–“I’m used to lots of things. I work at Wal-Mart”–but, frustratingly, these are not expanded in any way. Only in her final scene does she talk about something other than Llewelyn.

Those three main characters are all men with a mission. Llewelyn’s mission is as simple as staying alive: stumbling on the scene of a drug deal gone kaput, he swipes a satchel full of cash, and in that singularly ill-thought-out action of basic greed he finds himself a hunted man, pursued by the chillingly ruthless and single-minded Chigurh. He in turn is hunted by Sheriff Bell, who is haunted by an existential crisis born of his age and sense of his own mortality. Of the three, only Chigurh operates within a clear and unambiguous moral code. Bell feels overwhelmed by the unremitting violence of his county and plans to retire, and Llewelyn dooms himself with an act of kindness (returning to the scene of the drug deal to help the wounded man who had earlier begged him for water, thus gaining the attention of his pursuers); Chigurh, though, shows no weakness or indecision, but complies fully with a set of inflexible rules.

In perhaps the movie’s most famous scene, Chigurh asks a too-observant store owner, “What’s the most you ever lost on a coin toss?” When the owner calls the toss correctly, the hitman abides by the coin’s ruling and lets him live. By allowing external cues–the sound of a toilet flushing, the ringing of a phone, the result of a coin toss–to determine his actions, Chigurh presents himself as an instrument of fate. In fact, he can be read as the personified figure of Death itself, hunting down his victims with absolute implacability, killing or sparing them on the basis of chance outcomes that invoke chaos theory and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Over the phone, Chigurh offers Llewelyn a deal: “You bring me the money, and I’ll let [Carla Jean] go. Otherwise she’s accountable, same as you.” Even after Llewelyn is dead and the money has been recovered, Chigurh’s moral code demands that he honor the terms of this deal, and he hunts down Carla Jean.

If Chigurh is, as I read him, not Death itself but a man who believes he is enacting the works of Death on earth, then Carla Jean is the one character to call him out on this. Llewelyn, the store owner, bounty hunter Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson)–all operate within Chigurh’s framework, trying to trick him or compromise with him, accepting the rules he gives them: “You need to call it. I can’t call it for you. It wouldn’t be fair.” Only Carla Jean refuses to engage, declining to call the coin toss and telling him, “It’s not the coin [that determines your actions]. It’s just you.” It’s a fascinating glimpse into her character, which remains frustratingly underdeveloped, because recognizing the arbitrary nature of the rules does not free her from them.

The film’s final scene is of now ex-Sheriff Bell talking to (or possibly at) his wife Loretta over breakfast, aimless in his retirement. He describes his dreams of his late father, who “was goin’ on ahead and he was fixin’ to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up…” His world has no place for an older man, for a sense of morality or law as he knows it. He might well be asking himself the question Chigurh asks of Wells, moments before killing him: “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”

Fargo ends similarly, after all the action and thrills are played out, with a moment of intimacy between law officer and spouse. The tone of the two endings, however, could hardly be farther apart: Ed Tom Bell ends No Country a defeated man, adrift in a harsh and incomprehensible world, with death the only blessing on his horizon; Marge Gunderson ends Fargo smiling, sharing in her husband’s little triumph, and saying, “Two more months.” Fargo offers hope and redemption for humanity in the suggestion that there is indeed more to life than a little money, whereas the philosophy of No Country For Old Men is summed up by an old white man complaining bitterly about “the money, and the drugs…[and] children[…]with green hair and bones in their noses.”

The offer of redemption, I think, makes Fargo the superior film. It’s telling that the Academy, an institution frequently criticized for demonstrating the reactionary politics of a bunch of complaining old white men, chose to honor the film with no female protagonist and no redemption.

Max Thornton is about to move halfway across the world to be a grad student. She writes words at Gay Christian Geek.

YouTube Break: Peggy Olson on Women in the Workplace

Ah, Mad Men. I have such mixed feelings about the show, which is part of the reason I haven’t written about it here. Yet.* With seasons 1-4 now streaming on Netflix, and with the fifth season premiering sometime in 2012 (delayed while star Jon Hamm inked a 3-year, 8-figure deal), now is a good time to really look at the show. (Hint.)

Here is a cheeky little ad the FX network created for the show, highlighting feminist fave Peggy Olson.

If you haven’t seen Mad Men, how do you feel about this advertisement? If you’re familiar–or a fan–devoid of its context, doesn’t the ad appear to be promoting the very sexist ideology the show attempts to critique? (Oh, right, but it’s ironic, which excuses it from everything, am I right?)

*Stay tuned for our announcement and Call for Writers for Mad Men Week here at Bitch Flicks!

From the Archive: The Power of Representation

Given the Obama administration’s embarrassing failure to discuss—hell, even mention—the War on Women, I thought Amber’s following post, which was first published here on February 16, 2009, would warrant rereading.

This Is What a Feminist Looks Like?

Representing President Obama as a “Super-feminist” has ignited a debate over who the savior of feminism ought to be (see here for a good overview), and likely sold a lot of copies of Ms. magazine’s January edition. Praise for the new president’s political aspirations regarding women’s rights isn’t contended; it’s how the feminist magazine chose to portray Obama: tearing open his Clark Kent clothes to swoop in and rescue us. It’s the representation that has people peeved.

For our purposes here at BF, two articles were published last month—the weekend before the inauguration—about the impact the movies had on Obama’s election. Not that the movies got him elected, but how roles black American men play in the movies have a real effect on the people who see them, and how we can see, through the movies, our own cultural values reflected back on us.

If you ever question how important representation in film really is, I think these articles make the point well. While they specifically focus on male presidential aspirations (and on the unique history of black Americans), they also remind us how pop culture permeates our society and informs opinions and values.

The New York Times published “How the Movies Made a President,” written by A.O. Scott and Manhola Dargis, in their Film section. The article provides an overview of black male roles, from the “Black Everyman” of the ’60s to the “Black Messiah,” currently played and re-played by Will Smith.

Make no mistake: Hollywood’s historic refusal to embrace black artists and its insistence on racist caricatures and stereotypes linger to this day. Yet in the past 50 years — or, to be precise, in the 47 years since Mr. Obama was born — black men in the movies have traveled from the ghetto to the boardroom, from supporting roles in kitchens, liveries and social-problem movies to the rarefied summit of the Hollywood A-list. In those years the movies have helped images of black popular life emerge from behind what W. E. B. Du Bois called “a vast veil,” creating public spaces in which we could glimpse who we are and what we might become.

We hear from the likes of Elizabeth Banks and Katherine Heigl that the only roles really open to them—genuinely talented, lovely young actresses—are that of sidekick, buddy, and romantic object. It’s not that there haven’t been good, meaty roles for women; there have, for sure. But what movie roles do young girls imitate? What fictional figures can women look up to?

The Root’s “Hollywood’s Leading Man: From Sammy Davis Jr. to Dave Chappelle’s Black Bush, how pop culture tested the waters for a black president” offers a more nuanced and contrarian view of the power of pop culture (and reminds us of the egos of those who really believe their art makes a difference). The article surveys the satirical representations of a black president as representative of the racial divide in America, but cites the series 24 as a shift—although one not without its problems—and questions how television and cinema will change.

So now that we have a black president, how will we react to media portrayals? Will there be pressure among writers and producers to create black leaders who feel real and black-led administrations that feel plausible? Will we, as viewers, be able to enjoy over-the-top portrayals of black presidents, such as Terry Crews’ wig-wearing wrestler in Idiocracy, as merely fun entertainment, devoid of racial and social commentary?

Might we perhaps see a black actor playing the lead in a complex drama like The West Wing, or a romantic comedy along An American President, where the president gets to be a fully fleshed out human, and not a cardboard icon? And isn’t it about time that we saw a portrayal of an African-American president who just happens to be a woman, too?

I, too, would like to see that woman. And I think we’d all like to see her on the cover of Ms., wearing a t-shirt that reads “This is what a feminist looks like.”

YouTube Break: Reality Rehab With Dr. Jenn

Back in March, we featured Jennifer L. Pozner’s book, Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV, as a Quote of the Day. I just ran across something awesome: a satirical and hilarious video series called, Reality Rehab with Dr. Jenn, in which Pozner hosts a mock-reality-rehab show. Her main responsibility as host involves revealing and critiquing reality TV stereotypes by attempting to help those stock characters “learn how to be three-dimensional human beings again.” The featured stock characters include The Desperate Bachelorette, The Angry Black Woman, The “Real” Housewife, The Top Model, The Slutty Bitch, The Douchebag Dude, and The Gangsta Guy. I’m posting the trailer below, but definitely go to her site, and check out the entire series!

Bio from the Web site:

JENNIFER L. POZNER (“Dr Jenn”; Executive Producer) is the author of Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV, and the producer and cowriter of this Reality Rehab project. She is founder and Executive Director of Women In Media & News and editor of WIMN’s Voices. A widely published journalist who freelances for corporate and independent print and broadcast outlets, Jennifer is also a noted lecturer on women, media, politics and pop culture. Jennifer has appeared as a media commentator on NBC, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, ABC News Now, GRITtv, Democracy Now!, National Public Radio, and Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. She has served as an adviser for and has been featured in several documentary films, including I Was a Teenage Feminist and Miss Representation. Jenn is extremely indebted to and impressed by the entire Reality Rehab team, who worked entirely for free to pull this indy project together. This is her first time writing and producing a video project…she hopes you enjoy it! (Tell her what you think on Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube.)

Guest Writer Wednesday: Incendies

Incendies: Lebanon Is Scorched, Burned and Blistered

To say that the Middle East has been scorched, burned and blistered by war is an understatement. In Incendies–a ground-breaking diaspora film, set in both present day Canada and in Lebanon in the recent past–we get to see in painful detail the intricacies of how the war burned many families into horrific mangled messes.

The idea of return is common among diaspora films of the last few decades. Usually the protagonist of the film returns to their family’s place of origin and discovers the rubble and ruins that have been vacated by their parent’s generation. Usually we do not see the atrocities that happened, but we are told that they are too terrible to talk about or to show. The protagonist walks around looking traumatized which, I have to admit, despite my devotion to these films, is part of the growing pains in the development of a genre.

Where Incendies distinguishes itself is in the crafting of a story that really is too terrible to tell and too terrible to witness. And then it makes us witness every terrible moment of it.

A cinematic moment. The image comes first and the explanation comes much much later.

The brilliance of Incendies is not simply in the visceral moments of violence–the shock of a child being ripped from her mother’s arms before the mother is burned alive–it is in the crafting of a story that makes visible the back and forth of retaliation: like an equation where each variable, each action has a predictable and increasingly despicable reaction. Details were planted early in the film and later revealed their terrible significance. At the same time, the film avoids didacticism, and instead reaches for and finds mythological resonance.

Violence and pain become sources of empathy and identification for the audience.

The film is based on a play written and directed by seasoned writer, actor and director extraordinaire, Wajdi Mouawad. He is of Lebanese origin and has received the highest accolades for his creative work in Canada. The Incendies stage play has traveled the world and has received rave reviews. Mouawad directed a film in 2004, Littoral, that was also an adaptation of a script he had written and directed for the stage. His initial transition to film was bumpy. Littoral was similarly a story of returning to Lebanon to burying a parent. Unfortunately, it was heavy in dialogue and the emotional tone of the film was forced. This time, Mouawad’s story has been better cinematically served by teaming up with director Denis Villeneuve. Villeneuve has spent the last decade working on the project of cinematic representations of violence. Even with an Oscar nomination in the Foreign Language category, Incendies is doing far better than its distributor had expected.

Seen through a feminist lens, the intersecting oppressions on the protagonist’s life do not simply come from the war planes overhead–which are never named, but are likely from Israel. The old world familial relationships that are what could loosely be referred to as pre-capitalist are further entrenched rather than displaced by war. The political, religious, and gender divides as well as ideas about honor and group loyalty are part of the web that entraps the protagonist. The story is written with non identical twins, a boy and girl, returning to Lebanon to search for their father and brother while uncovering their mother’s past. Each child is able to search in different spaces based on their respective genders, further revealing a splitting in the already fractured narrative.

The now classic diasporic subject returning to the ‘homeland’ and looking.

The incredible violence we witness in the film is shot and edited with emotional rawness and, importantly, respect for women’s bodies. The rape scene is a good example; we are first told through dialogue that it is going to happen. We see the woman sitting in a chair and then see the rapist enter the room. The camera cuts to a close-up of her face as she is waiting, then cuts to a close-up of the rapist’s face as he looks at her. It cuts back to her on the ground crying. The editing implies the act of rape, and reduces the voyeuristic impact on the audience. Instead, we share in the victim’s anticipatory fear and in her pain afterward.

The protagonist is played by Lubna Azabal, a Moroccan actress who is a contender to be the next generation Hiam Abbas.
Hiam Abbas is the Arab world’s Meryl Streep.

The press releases claim that the film is set in an unnamed Arab country. The film itself evades realist details that would pin it to an exact location: the cityscapes are not Beirut, because they were shot in Jordan. The prison which is referred to as “in the South” is undoubtedly modeled after the notorious Khiam prisons in Lebanon, but in the film it is given a new name. The Nationalist party and its leader are fictional, although they occupied a similar position in the ideological landscape of Lebanon. License plates on cars are from several countries. The protagonist is modeled after Souha Bechara, a famous Lebanese freedom fighter who was in prison for assassination and sang through her solitary confinement. Unlike the character Nehal, the historical figure of Souha did not have children. Obscuring, renaming, and deliberate obfuscation are perhaps the historical equivalent of mythological strokes in narrative structure. The lack of geopolitical specificity is perhaps what allows the film to breathe the symbolic into the Lebanese situation. Make no mistake – some things are obscure, but the important details situate the film with utter literalism in Lebanon over the last few decades.

The film is traumatic to watch and perhaps cathartic too, especially for anyone from the region. I sobbed at least six times. The film allows a flood of memories to return, and stimulates after-film conversations about things people have repressed for years. In one of these conversations someone asked why the mother would bring the memories of violence onto her children. “They live in Canada, they don’t even speak Arabic, why do they need to unearth a painful and terrible history? Why not live in ignorant bliss,” she asked. What are the assumptions operating here? Do those in diaspora ever really live in ignorant bliss, when they are raised by parent(s) who have been through trauma, and war trickles down through their actions onto the children somehow? In Incendies, the children were raised without a father and without an extended family on either their paternal or maternal sides. The film asks us to think about whether their lives were ever really free of violence, even though the violence may have been displaced and unnamed. Traces of violence and the reality of unknown origins haunted them. The film suggests both that there is violence implicit in the return of the exile and the inevitability of that return. In this story, the boundaries between ‘here’ and ‘over there,’ past and present, families and strangers are found to be more permeable than many would like to think.

Vicky Moufawad-Paul is a curator, artist, film programmer, and the Artistic Director at A Space Gallery in Toronto. She earned a Masters of Fine Arts from York University, where she conducted research on the visual culture of Palestine. She was previously the founding Executive Director of the Toronto Arab Film Festival, and has worked at the Toronto International Film Festival Group. She was a member of the Visual and Media Arts Committee at the Toronto Arts Council, a founding member of the Advisory Board of the Palestine Film Festival, and a member of the Board of Directors at Trinity Square Video. Her writing has been published by Fuse Magazine, E-Fagia, the Arab American National Museum, and the Journal of Peace Research. She was also a contributor to the anthology Decentre: concerning artist-run culture/a propos de centres d’artistes (YYZ Books, 2008). Moufawad-Paul’s video art has been exhibited nationally and internationally.

Movie Preview: Life, Above All

I saw a preview for Life, Above All when I went to see Woody Allen’s latest misogyny-fest, Midnight in Paris. For the record, I mostly hated Midnight in Paris–and should review it as the sexist piece of crap it is–but I’m trying to find examples of positivity in the film industry these days. The only truly great thing about attending Midnight in Paris was discovering the upcoming Life, Above All (now playing in New York and L.A.) and the upcoming Take Shelter–holy crap that’s a freaky trailer.

Michael Shannon scares me.

Anyway, the official Web site synopsizes Life, Above All as follows:

Just after the death of her newly-born sister, Chanda, 12 years old, learns of a rumor that spreads like wildfire through her small, dust-ridden village near Johannesburg. It destroys her family and forces her mother to flee. Sensing that the gossip stems from prejudice and superstition, Chanda leaves home and school in search of her mother and the truth. Life, Above All is an emotional and universal drama about a young girl (stunningly performed by first-time-actress Khomotso Manyaka) who fights the fear and shame that have poisoned her community … Directed by South African filmmaker Oliver Schmitz (Mapantsula), it is based on the international award winning novel Chanda’s Secrets by Allan Stratton.

The trailer itself gets me teary-eyed. I watched it and realized how rarely mother-daughter relationships grace the screen in a way that doesn’t portray the mother as smothering and ridiculous and usually insane, and at the very least, just … shitty. (See: Black Swan, Carrie, Mommie Dearest, Phoebe in Wonderland, Gone Baby Gone, Fish Tank, and the upcoming Ansiedad. Add screen portrayals of the Mother-in-Law to the list, and it’s a disturbing clusterfuck of epic proportions.)

While a few reviewers argue that Life, Above All ignores the government’s responsibilities in the HIV/AIDS crisis in South Africa (like the film failing to mention former president Thabo Mbeki’s sympathies with AIDS denialists in the 00’s), I’m excerpting from several positive reviews that focus on the interpersonal relationships in the film:

By Liz Braun:

Life, Above All is an historical snapshot of the AIDS crisis in Africa and an indictment of sorts of the government bungling that allowed the epidemic to overwhelm South Africa. The culprits (ignorance, poverty, big pharma, religious and political leaders, etc.) are not so much the focus; the point of this quiet, heartbreaking drama is all those children left to cope, especially the orphans.

By Nora Lee Mandel:

Rather than focusing on the usual corrective lessons on the transmission and treatment of HIV/AIDS, the family’s struggles play out within systems of traditional care and limited modern medical facilities that are strained to the breaking point. Chanda rails against the stoic comforts of religion and receives only discouraging advice at an overcrowded clinic. Her illiterate and exhausted mother falls prey to the greed of a charlatan doctor, a demon exorcism, and horrific neglect by her revengeful sister, who has not forgiven Lillian for her flouting of tribal marriage traditions for the sake of love.

By Manohla Dargis:

Chanda’s silence is unnerving, as is the absence of tears, and while her calm conveys a preternatural strength of character it also suggests a lifetime of pain. No child, you think, should have to pick out her baby sister’s coffin. But she does, taking in the horror of the funeral home and its metal table without flinching and then pushing forward, still dry eyed, still determined, taking on life with an appealing (and enviable) toughness and grace that make this difficult story not just bearable but also absorbing. As the weight of the world bears down on her slender frame, she becomes the movie’s moral compass and its authentic wonder: the child who is forced to be an adult yet remains childlike enough to feel real.

By Mary Corliss:

Two years ago, a drama with a seemingly forbidding subject — an illiterate teenage girl, pregnant with her father’s child and hellishly abused by her drug-addicted mother — won over critics, audiences and the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The film was Precious. Now comes Life, Above All, which deals with the tragedy of AIDS in South Africa, as seen by a 12-year-old girl named Chanda. At the end of its world premiere at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, critics cheered like schoolkids, giving it a 10-minute standing ovation.

By Alison Willmore:

… when its focus narrows onto Manyaka and her mother (Lerato Mvelase), their deep mutual affection and the terrifying sacrifices they’re ready to make because of it, the film sings, becoming a moving tribute to love holding fast against suffering. The ending, which offers a hint of relief, is unfiltered, frankly unbelievable melodrama, but something grimmer and more measured would be intolerable after everything that comes before.

Guest Writer Wednesday: African American Romantic Comedies: Colorism

This guest post by Renee Martin also appears at her blog Women’s Eye on Media.

I love a good romantic comedy, but I must admit I am especially partial to those that star Blacks. It is a rare thing to see a dominant Black presence in media, and romantic comedies happen to be the only genre that this consistently happens in. Unfortunately, these movies still fall into specific tropes that are a direct result of being produced in a White supremacist culture.

Many of the male stars like, Morris Chestnut and Taye Diggs are dark skinned Black men. In fact, you could reasonably argue that Morris Chestnut is the king of the African Romantic comedy. These dark skinned men are always described as fiiiine, hot, and a real catch. When it comes to colourism and Black men, it would be fair to say that it is not an issue in African American comedies, because the actors range from Morris Chestnut to the ever so lovely LL Cool J (and yes, I love him).

The same is not necessarily true when it comes to women. From Stacey Dash in VHI’s new series Single Ladies, to Paula Patton in 2011’s Jumping the Broom, to Sanaa Lathan in The Best Man, to Zoe Saldana in Guess Who, to Vivica Fox in Two Can Play That Game, and Queen Latifah in Just Wright, light skinned women have a tendency to dominate the genre. The darkest skinned women that you will find in the genre are Monique, who played the ghetto woman Two Can Play That Game, Kimberly Elise, who played Helen in Diary of a Mad Black Woman (the title says it all doesn’t it), and Gabrielle Union, who starred in Deliver Us From Eva.

What is perhaps most interesting, is that in Deliver Us From Eva, Union played the stereotypical angry Black woman who had been burned countless times. She was absolutely vicious to anyone that approached her, and her brother in laws absolutely detested her, that is until they paid LL. Cool J to date her, and suddenly she became soft, and loving. Here we go again with another Black woman being saved from her angry ways by the love of a good Black man. (Tyler Perry is somewhere dancing a little jig.) All the things that allowed her to support her sisters up to and including putting them through school, and saving money for the benefit of their family, were seen as negative character traits. When Union played opposite Vivica Fox in Two Can Play That Game, she played the role of Jezebel. That’s right, a dark Black woman out to steal away Morris Chestnut from the light skinned, smart, and in control Vivica Fox. Union was slut shamed throughout the movie, and yet when Vivica Fox chose to sleep with Chestnut in his office it was simply being freaky and keeping your man happy. Particularly telling, is that no reference was made to differentiate between the two women, except for the visually obvious difference in hue. Why one was necessarily deserving of being slut shamed, when she was essentially no different than the other, was left for the viewer to determine. Even in movies, the strong dark skinned Black woman can never get a break.

Colourism can be just as damaging to Black men as Dr. Michael Eric Dyson explained, when he examined the relationship between himself and his incarcerated dark skinned brother, yet in movies, the hue of Black men can range from LL. Cool J and Terrence Howard to Taye Diggs and Richard T Jones, without any real issue. In fact, the very range in hue of Black men suggests that Black men are all uniquely valuable and sexually attractive. This is why it is hard to comprehend why the same universal acceptance is not given to Black women.

In Jungle Fever, Wesley Snipes leaves his light skinned Black wife played by Lonette McKee, for an Italian woman. In a scene with McKee’s girlfriends, they discuss how the trend for a long time was for Black men to seek out light bright and damn near White women as partners, and how that changed as inter racial relationships became acceptable. You see, the White woman has always been held up as the epitome of beauty, and failing that, the WOC who was closest in appearance to Whiteness was then the chosen prize, thereby leaving dark skinned women completely out of the loop. A new documentary entitled Dark Skin being released this fall discusses this issue. If you doubt that this is an issue, a simple look at what L’Oreal Feria haircolor did to Beyonce, or what Elle Magazine did to Gabourey Sidibe is more than enough to settle this issue.

No woman of colour can ever be light skinned enough. What is particularly disgusting, is not only do these movies have all Black casts, in quite a few instances, they have Black directors to boot. What does it say about Black cinema, that we constantly reproduce our internalized racial hatred? Since we know that colorism is an issue for the entire community, why is it that, Black women are particularly targeted with erasure? Watching these movies really brought to mind the conversations in media about the lonely Black woman, who is destined to die a single woman. As much as African American romantic comedies constantly end with a Black woman and a Black men either in a committed relationship, or getting married, the near erasure of dark skinned women plays into the whole idea that unless you are light skinned you are not worthy of being loved. When we add in the fact that these movies are not aimed at White people, it seems to me that Blacks have come to find this idea acceptable, otherwise when given the opportunity to tell our stories, darker Black women would appear in this genre more regularly, rather than being restricted to films like The Color Purple and Precious.

Editors Note: This is an ongoing series. You can find part 1 here on class. Next week, we will be looking at the ubiquitous usage of the word nigger in these movies.

Renee Martin is a disabled mother of two, and a freelance writer who focuses on social justice. On her blog Womanist Musings she largely writes about social justice generally. She also is a contributor and co-creator of the blog Fangs for the Fantasy, where she writes critically using a social justice lens on the urban fantasy genre. Each week she also participates in the Fangs for the Fantasy podcast, where she discusses the latest in urban fantasy. At Women’s Eye on Media, where she is also a co-creator and shares editing and writing duties with fellow creator Holly Ord, she writes about social justice and the media. Her work has been published at The Guardian, Ms Blog and several small newspapers. She previously cross-posted her review of The Big C at Bitch Flicks.