Tag: An Education

‘Mistress America’: Passing The Bechdel Test All The Way Through

I didn’t expect Gerwig and Baumbach together to create in the second film (‘Frances Ha’ was the first) the two offscreen romantic partners have written in which Gerwig plays the lead and Baumbach directs, a movie that (in spite of its terrible title) is one of the delights of this summer: ‘Mistress America’.

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I haven’t seen a movie directed by Noah Baumbach since The Squid and the Whale, a film that made me hate every critic who praised it and made me mistrust any person who said, “I liked it.” For the past decade he has been one of the filmmakers whose career infuriates me; his output makes me think of all the more deserving work (much of it from women) which hasn’t been funded

I first took notice of Greta Gerwig when she was in the execrable Whit Stillman film Damsels in Distress. Although I walked out at the halfway point of a preview screening (past a standing figure in the dark by the doorway whom I now recognize was Stillman himself). I could see Gerwig’s talent underneath the ridiculously mannered dialogue and stilted action. I didn’t expect Gerwig and Baumbach together to create in the second film (Frances Ha was the first) the two offscreen romantic partners have written in which Gerwig plays the lead and Baumbach directs, a movie that (in spite of its terrible title) is one of the delights of this summer: Mistress America.

The protagonist, Tracy (played by Lola Kirke: sister of Girls’ Jemima Kirke: I wondered why she looked so familiar) is in her first semester at Barnard in New York City and is having trouble finding the fun and stimulation college life–and New York–is supposed to be brimming with. Her dorm-mate alternates between chastising her and making fun of her (much more realistic than Boyhood‘s dorm-mate, embarrassed but politely deferential when she walked into her own room and found her roommate’s brother in bed with his girlfriend) and Tracy falls asleep in one of her literature classes–which leads to her making her first college friend, Tony (Matthew Shear) who surreptitiously wakes her. The two of them share writing ambitions and commiserate over screwdrivers in his room when they both have stories rejected by the campus literary magazine. But when he gets a girlfriend, Nicolette (Jasmine Cephas Jones) Tracy finds herself alone again, and her mother suggests she call Brooke (Gerwig) the 30-year-old daughter of the man the mother is engaged to marry.

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The two have a night that is full of everything Tracy feels she’s been missing

 

Brooke meets Tracy in the chaotic, tourist-ridden Times Square where Brooke has an apartment. She explains,”I got off the bus from Jersey. I thought this was the cool place to live.” The two have a night that is full of everything Tracy feels she’s been missing: they first have a good, cheap, dinner, get backstage passes for a band who invite Brooke to join them onstage (she makes out with the bass player at the afterparty while Tracy looks on). Brooke and Tracy dance and talk, not about boyfriends (except very briefly) but about their own ambitions: Brooke cobbles together a living with interior decorating, a little tutoring and as the teacher of a spin class, but she also has concrete plans to open a restaurant. After that first night (when Tracy crashes on the couch in Brooke’s apartment) they spend time together throughout the semester, which helps Tracy come out of her shell.
Brooke doesn’t just have cool friends and know the right places to go (not to mention the savvy to find a place in the middle of Times Square where she can live by herself for not much money) but is also hilariously, gloriously opinionated. When she’s caught on camera kissing the band’s bass player she says, “Must we document ourselves all the time? Must we?”

When an old high school classmate confronts Brooke in a bar about her treatment of her when they were younger, Brooke is dismissive, saying that she doesn’t care what the woman thinks of her–and the woman shouldn’t care either. In the middle of a confrontation between Tony, a jealous Nicolette and Tracy, Brooke says, “There’s no cheating when you’re 18, you should all be touching each other all the time.”

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The real revelation here is Lola Kirke, who, as Tracy, starts off unsure of herself but accrues confidence at a record pace.

 

Tracy writes the title short story, revolving around a very lightly fictionalized Brooke, “Claudia” which contains some truths that Tracy would never say to her face, an interesting development considering Baumbach wrote The Squid and The Whale about his own parents–and his portrait of them was not a flattering one. But Tracy’s story seems far too knowing and polished for an 18-year-old college student to have written: Gerwig and Baumbach missed an opportunity to parody a faux-sophisticated writing style as we hear Tracy read parts of the story as the film’s voiceover. Tracy also becomes less hesitant to express her opinions off the page: before she met Brooke , when Tony asked for “notes” on his story she had none, though he had plenty of suggestions for hers. Afterward she tells him he should stop trying for humor in his writing, because he doesn’t have a sense of humor in real life. At a later point he says to her, “You used to be so nice,” reminding us that, especially in describing young women “nice” is another way of saying “unformed”, “overly polite” or “afraid to say what she’s really thinking.”

I kept waiting for this film to go terribly wrong. The movies in which a younger man gloms onto an older one as an inspiration or role model usually show the older man has some great flaw, and free-living, fun women like Brooke in films (not just narrative ones) are usually punished, so I wondered if she would turn out to be a compulsive liar (since a lot of what she claims seems to be far-fetched) a drug addict or would have an untreated bipolar disorder and we would see her depressive side of in the latter half of the film. But Brooke’s downfall (which is more like a reckoning) doesn’t lie within herself but within the changes New York and other large cities have undergone in the past two or three decades. At one time someone like Brooke could make her way with nothing but ideas and ambition, but now young creative types and the places they like to hang out are at the mercy of the very rich, the only people who can afford to live in great swaths of those cities. The real-life restaurant where Brooke and Tracy have their first dinner closed one of their locations, unable to make a profit in today’s high-rent Manhattan.

Gerwig has, with Baumbach, written a role that she was born to play: her slightly spacy delivery serves as a disguise for Brooke’s razor-sharp observations. When a wealthy patron tells her that she’s funny and doesn’t know it, she corrects him, “”I know I’m funny. I know everything about myself.” But the real revelation here is Lola Kirke, who, as Tracy, starts off unsure of herself but accrues confidence at a record pace. In some ways, Tracy, with her brown shoulder-length hair in bulky, unflattering, outdated sweaters (which may be Baumbach reaching back to his own college years, the way the soundtrack includes familiar ’80s synth pop) is much more ordinary and natural than the young women we’re used to seeing in film but when she smiles and her eyes gleam at her newfound naughtiness, she burns a hole in the screen.

By the end both women have come into their own in a way films rarely acknowledge women do: the closest example I can think of is An Education but the focus in that film was on only one character. I would have liked to see this film explore the characters’ sexuality a little more: Tracy says (in the voiceover) that she’s “so in love” with “Claudia” and their chemistry together does seem to teeter to the non-platonic, though they never even kiss. Still I can’t complain when not just one but both of the main women characters end up single—and happy in their independence. When you leave the theater you’ll be smiling too.

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing, besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender

Best Picture Nominee Review Series: 2010 Roundup

It’s over a year late . . . but here it is! 
“As much as I would like to sit through a movie like this and enjoy it for what it is (ground-breaking sci-fi entertainment that will go down in history), I simply can’t. James Cameron’s attempt to create a more spiritual, natural, and peaceful society leaves me annoyed that once again this idea is filtered through a white, Western, male member of a patriarchal society. Some theorists will consider Cameron’s Alien trilogy feminist, because of Sigourney Weaver’s empowered Ripley (legend says it was written to be asexual–with casting deciding the character’s sex), but she still has to prove her femininity and womanliness by saving cats and small children. I fear that many feminists will laud Avatar as well–for creating a world where the people worship a female entity (“Eywa”), because the Clan leader’s female mate/wife is as powerful as him, and since the female lead is as empowered as Ripley. However, like Ripley, Neytiri too has her feminine trappings, as her power can be explained away through her heritage.”
Avatar reviewed by Nine Deuce
“Cameron can only seem to conceive of an ideal society five light years and nearly two centuries removed from our own if it exactly mirrors an episode of Fantasy Island in which he’s the guest star, but it’s cool. He’s got a revolutionary political message to communicate: if we don’t all buy Priuses and reject militarism and imperialism right quick, we’ll destroy our planet and rudely intrude upon blue fucker utopias everywhere, thus ruining countless enlightened neo-primitive sex parties attended by the universe’s hottest aliens.”

The Blind Side reviewed by Stephanie Rogers

“There’s a way to tell a true story, and there’s a way to completely botch the shit out of a true story. Shit-botching, in this instance, might include basing the entire film around an upper-class white woman’s struggle to essentially reform a young Black man by taking him in, buying him clothes, getting him a tutor, teaching him how to tackle, and threatening to kill a group of young Black men he used to hang out with.
However, a filmmaker might consider, when telling the true story of Michael Oher’s struggles to overcome his amazing obstacles, to actually base the film on the true story of Michael Oher’s struggles to overcome his amazing obstacles.”

The Blind Side reviewed by Nine Deuce

“What was the intended message of this film? It won an Oscar, so I know it had to have a message, but what could it have been? I’ve got it (a suggestion from Davetavius)! The message is this: don’t buy more than one Taco Bell franchise or you’ll have to adopt a black guy. I’ll accept that that’s the intended message of the film, because if the actual message that came across in the movie was intentional, I may have to hide in the house for the rest of my life.”

District 9 reviewed by Sarah Domet

“Perhaps Blomkamp’s vision is to convey the notion that our greatest hope for an internationally practiced humanism is to fully experience the isolation and desperation at the individual level. I want to believe that this is his message. But I fear I may be giving him too much credit, for in the end Blomkamp never fully considers the implications of violent discrimination and segregation on anyone but (white, male) Wikus, the original perpetrator of this alien apartheid in the first place. In the end, Wikus becomes a victim, too, yes. However his victimhood is meant to be understood as a courageous act of martyrdom, and, more specifically, one of choice. After all, Wikus told Christopher Johnson to board the Mothership without him; Wikus would stay behind to fight the bad guys. If nothing else, Wikus was given the luxury of choice and self-determination, a luxury not afforded to the “others” of this film, woman and prawn alike.”

An Education reviewed by Jesseca Cornelson

“The script isn’t bad. After all, if movies didn’t routinely take shortcuts by using familiar, stylized codes for characterization, they couldn’t tell their intricate tales in about 100 minutes. It’s just that the script is so tidy and effective that it doesn’t come anywhere close to transcending its form. At times I wondered if the film would have felt as artful if it had been cast with more familiar Hollywood types, say Julia Roberts as Miss Stubbs or Anne Hathaway as Jenny, both of whom I find exude a sweetness that always makes me aware of how terribly charming they are. Would the film have been as engaging if everyone had American accents? I wonder if audiences’ own aspirations to sophistication might make us a bit blind to how ordinary this film is.”

The Hurt Locker reviewed by Amber Leab

“The Hurt Locker is a powerful anti-war film, which can almost get lost in the breathless action sequences. Its message is subtle but unmistakable: war utterly breaks you. The final scene of the film, which has been criticized for its ambiguity (we see James voluntarily back in action after a brief return home and a too-familiar scene representing shallow American excess), is actually a haunting, almost terrifying reminder of our implication in war. If you see James as a hero at the end of the movie, you haven’t understood a frame of the film you just watched. Yet the film teases us with a traditional genre representation of the hero. We want him to be a hero, only finding joy in the adrenaline rush of war, but he isn’t. He’s an empty shell of a person, nothing more than an animated suit heading toward…nothing. He’s walking off into the abyss. War has ripped out his humanity. This is what we do to our soldiers: we ask them to do the impossible in combat, and it destroys them.”

Inglourious Basterds reviewed by Amanda ReCupido

“I saw Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds when it first came out and then again recently in the sweep of the Oscar season. I remember upon first viewing being surprised that, unlike all the posters and marketing would have you believe, Brad Pitt is not the hero of this story. In fact, it is an unassuming, quiet, doe-eyed Jewish girl, Shosanna (played by Melanie Laurent) who carries the film. Brad Pitt and his cronies just kinda happen to be there, bludgeoning and scalping people (this is, after all, a Tarantino flick), and faltering in their plans to sweep the Nazi regime, while Shosanna plots, schemes, threatens, and even fraternizes with the enemy in her mere disguise as a woman to bring the Third Reich to its knees. It is because no one expects her to plan such an attack that she is not viewed as a threat and able to get away with it. Shosanna’s womanhood is both her handicap and her ultimate weapon.”

Precious, Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire reviewed by Carrie Polansky

“Certainly, all of the issues addressed in the film — including (but not limited to) rape, incest, teen pregnancy, poverty and illiteracy — have been addressed before by other films, and when addressing such topics, it’s all too easy to come off sounding preachy or melodramatic. Precious does not fall in to this trap. Precious addresses these topics honestly and directly, never undermining the horror of it all but still making it clear that these are real aspects of life, and that they aren’t death sentences. Though the character Precious is forced to deal with a huge number of issues that no young woman should ever need to face, the audience is not supposed to pity her. Precious is too strong a character for that.”

A Serious Man reviewed by Lesley Jenike

“The Coens are, in my book, among the most consistently innovative filmmakers working today. And I don’t mean “innovative” in the sense that, as directors, they splice and dice filmic conventions the way Baz Luhrmann or Danny Boyle do, for example. Rather, they’re consummate storytellers, fancy jump cuts be damned, and their stories, no matter how dark, how disconcerting, become somehow universal, funny, and true. What’s ultimately so disconcerting about this movie, however, is its skeptical take on the Judeo-Christian tradition of parable and storytelling as illustration and explanation. The Coen brothers are undermining their own profession here, their own modus operandi, and call into question narrative’s effectiveness in light of a chaotic universe and incomprehensible suffering. It’s a dangerous move but ultimately a rewarding one.”

Up reviewed by Travis Eisenbise

“Insert Pixar dilemma: Pixar has a girl problem. I don’t want to dwell too much on this, as the blogosphere has already run Pixar through the dirt (as it should). Noted in Linda Holmes’ blog on NPR, after 15 years of movie making, Pixar has yet to create a story with a female lead. Ellie is the only female voice in this entire movie and she is dead and gone within the first ten minutes. She’s not even allowed an actual voice as an adult. (see PT: #3). The entire story is told by a male octogenarian and a boy, Russell (voiced by Jordan Nagai), who is seventy years Carl’s junior, and who—instead of being a real-world boy scout—is a Wilderness Explorer (see PT: #2). It is devastating to watch this movie in a theatre of mothers and young girls who are forced to stretch their own experiences into the identities of these stock male characters. (PT #4: Employ an inordinate amount of male writers.)”

Up in the Air reviewed by Kate Staiger

“Bingham’s other female sidekick is Alex (Vera Farmiga), a sexy, strong-corporate-woman. She meets Bingham, a fellow super-traveler, in a hotel bar. They hit it off, do the deed, and she becomes the love interest. They exchange contacts and meet for booty calls in cities where they happen to cross paths while on business. As their relationship progresses, he goes through the formal “sworn-bachelor-stumbles-into-love” process, schlepping it all with sentimentality and making it confusing to understand the direction of this movie. Aren’t I supposed to be watching a movie about the tragedies of people losing their jobs? Or am I supposed to be focused on Ryan Bingham’s thawing heart? Or no, it’s this: Ryan Bingham has a hard job and travels a lot. It makes his life experience void of human connections. He is now in the process of making it better as a result of his pesky sidekick on one shoulder, and his hot woman-equivalent on the other. YES!”

And you can read all the reviews of the Oscar-nominated films for 2011 in our Best Picture Nominee Review Series: 2011 Roundup. 

Movie Review: An Education

*This is a guest post from Jesseca Cornelson.

An Education is a perfectly fine film. The performances are pleasant enough to watch, but much of the plot and characterization seemed to me to be yet another retelling of the popular “how to make a proper woman” story, complete with yee olde stereotypes of the necessary dowdiness of smart women in popular films and a shot of Carey Mulligan, dressed like Audrey Hepburn, shrieking with joy at winning at the dog track à la My Fair Lady. The “how to make a proper woman” story has as much to do with class as it does gender. In this incarnation, Jenny (Carey Mulligan) is a smart, pretty girl being groomed for Oxford by her middle-class family—or rather, I should say, by her father Jack as her mother does almost no talking. The whole family’s being seems to pin its hopes on Jenny’s hoped for acceptance into Oxford. The family’s aspirational longing is as keenly felt as any teenage lust, though for Jenny it means living the life of an intellectual bohemian, and for her father it means marrying her off to a lawyer. This longing renders the whole family vulnerable to the charms of smooth-talking David, impeccably played by Peter Sarsgaard, a sometimes art thief who turns out to be married (oh noes!). Predictable stuff predictably ensues. Both Jenny’s English teacher and the uptight school headmistress warn her that her Mr. Rochester figure (of course there are Jane Eyre reference—this movie is highfalutin!) will likely disappoint her and worry that Jenny (wait, Jane E?) may squander her chance at Oxford before she comes to her senses. Jenny, of course, will have none of it and, of course, David disappoints. So, of course, she once more pins her hopes for the future on Oxford. Wanna guess whether or not she gets in? The last few minutes play out with all the suspense of an uplifting afternoon special of redemption.

I had high hopes when I saw that the screenplay was adapted by Nick Hornby. His story “Nipple Jesus” ranks among my favorite ever, and I was impressed with his book How to Be Good, which is written from the first-person point of view of a doctor mother who strays from marriage to her househusband. In each of these—the story, the novel, and the film—I find his presentation of the moral ambivalences to be the most striking element. Each, it turns out, is concerned with how people negotiate the appearance of morality with actual morality, and each implicates pretty damningly middle-class values of maintaining an appearance of morality while being oh so quick to compromise any actual morals the moment it becomes convenient or self-serving. It makes me wonder how much of Hornby himself we hear in David and Danny when first one tells Jenny not to be bourgeois in her moralizing and then the other turns her moral condescension around on her by noting that she had watched them steal from little old ladies without saying much either. I guess I should admit that I’m using “morality” and “moralizing” to stand in not only for everyone’s obsession with Jenny’s virginity and the various duplicities perpetrated in the film, but also for that middle-class form of snootiness that is so quick to judge others in its desire to be respectable.

An Education is at its best when it subtly complicates and plays against audience expectations. The scenes where Alfred Molina’s jolly but domineering Jack practically stutters and falls over himself as he is charmed by David are delicious. We, wise audience, see how easily the big man’s desires for upward mobility are used to seduce him as well. Dominic Cooper’s Danny, David’s art thief buddy, is worried enough that Jenny will get hurt that he says something to David about it, but then doesn’t actually do anything about it except dance flirtingly with Jenny.

What bugs me is how tidily Hornby’s script draws on familiar types for characterization and sets up a whole series of foils. Take Olivia Williams’ portrayal of Miss Stubbs, Jenny’s English teacher. The movie tells us in a conversation that Miss Stubbs is both smart and pretty (unlike some films which present pretty actresses as ordinary—Kate Winslet is a Plain Jane in Little Children, puh-lease!). And yet the film presents Miss Stubbs as dowdy, as if smart women are incapable of doing anything other than wearing severe buns (or, for one all-too-brief scene, a ponytail that manages to be both severe and sloppy) or compulsively quaffed with prim bobs, like the headmistress’, something like an upper-class, executive severity. Yawn. And how convenient that after Jack’s rant about Oxford trees, school trees, private tuition trees, and pocket money trees growing out in the garden, David justifies his art theft by saying that “these weekends [in Oxford and Paris], and the restaurants and the concerts don’t”—here it comes!—“grow on trees.” Convenient, too, the discussion in Jenny’s English class on Mr. Rochester’s blindness in Jane Eyre and King Lear, with its own themes of blindness. When it comes to David, Jenny and her family are so hungry for the world he offers that they are willingly blind to his deceits. Jenny watches gleefully as he forges the signature of C.S. Lewis, whose acquaintance he falsely claims in order to get Jenny’s parents’ permission to take her to Oxford for a week, and Jack later tells Jenny that he and her mother Marjorie (Cara Seymour) had heard on the radio that Lewis had long since moved to Cambridge and rather than accept David’s lie they convinced themselves that the radio announcer had it all wrong.

The script isn’t bad. After all, if movies didn’t routinely take shortcuts by using familiar, stylized codes for characterization, they couldn’t tell their intricate tales in about 100 minutes. It’s just that the script is so tidy and effective that it doesn’t come anywhere close to transcending its form. At times I wondered if the film would have felt as artful if it had been cast with more familiar Hollywood types, say Julia Roberts as Miss Stubbs or Anne Hathaway as Jenny, both of whom I find exude a sweetness that always makes me aware of how terribly charming they are. Would the film have been as engaging if everyone had American accents? I wonder if audiences’ own aspirations to sophistication might make us a bit blind to how ordinary this film is.

And here’s where I want to shift gears and put An Education in conversation, however briefly, with another film from this year that blew me away, Lee Daniel’s Precious, which also features a young woman, who’s been manipulated by an older man and whose hopes for the future are likewise pinned to her education. I know Precious has been accused of being exploitative, and maybe it is, but it is a far more interesting film, in terms of characterization alone. Here we have another female teacher who reaches out to her young student. And while Paula Patton’s Ms. Rain is also smart and pretty, she’s a fully developed character and not just a type. She in fact is presented as pretty and well groomed (a pretty, neatly dressed, well-groomed lady English teacher, oh my!) and, in another surprise, she’s a lesbian! Ms. Rain’s relationship with Precious, far from being limited to a few words of encouragement or knowing warnings, is central to the film. In An Education, all of the relationships seem comparatively superficial. Jack’s semi-mock anger at having to pay for so many lessons and longing for social standing is nothing compared to Mo’Niquie’s brilliant turn as Precious’ self-loathing and enraged mother, who is herself starved for affection.

And back to that ending. Holy voice over! It’s never a good sign that all of a sudden you need a voice over to close a movie after a minute-long montage of redemptive studying. How tidy, how comforting: see Oxford was the way to go after all! I would have preferred if the film had ended with the long closing shot of Jenny hugging her knees on the stairs, her face caught somewhere between relief and worry, not fully capable of enjoying her victory. Yeah, I know: The Graduate. But we all get off easy when the movie lands very near where it would have had Jenny never met David. Oh, sure she’s now been to Paris and all the boys she dates at Oxford are, we’re told, really boys. But her earlier questions about the value of an education and the limited options for women go unanswered. She was right to tell Emma Thompson as the headmistress that “it’s not enough to educate us anymore. You’ve got to tell us why you’re doing it.” It is indeed “an argument worth rehearsing”—an argument that the film fails to rehearse even as it resolves with Jenny’s acceptance to Oxford. What is the value of an education if the only things you can do with it are teach or go into civil service? Compare that to Precious, whose closing moments of victory aren’t tinged with yet another level of superior condescension, but rather present a young woman, HIV-positive before the AIDS cocktail, walking into the sunlight hand-in-hand with the children fathered by her own father. It’s a much more genuine ending. What do I mean by that? I suppose that the victory is both more humble and more hardly earned. As Precious walks down the street, we know her life cannot help but hold more difficulty and heartbreak. As Jenny cycles carefree down a different street, we suspect that the Oxford education will serve her just fine. So maybe what I mean by genuine is that Precious offers up the rare ending that opens out, leaving the audience with a sense that the character’s life and struggles will continue in spite of her current moment in the sun.

And isn’t that more like real life anyway? I know boatloads of smart, pretty women who find disappointment in their careers and relationships as much as those of a plainer sort, but we don’t really get the sense that Jenny will struggle with the difficulties of being a smart woman in 1960s Britain that she had so clearly articulated earlier in the film. And that seems a bit counterfeit.

Jesseca Cornelson is currently working on a collection of documentary poems about the history of Mobile, Alabama, which will serve as her dissertation for a doctorate in English and Comparative Literature from the University of Cincinnati. She blogs about her research and writing at Difficult History.