Hailee Steinfeld – Bitch Flicks

Teen Girls Coming of Age in ‘Clueless’ and ‘The Edge of Seventeen’

These two women directors, Amy Heckerling (‘Clueless’) and Kelly Fremon Craig (‘The Edge of Seventeen’), use their films to give a focused examination on the insecurity and self-doubt teen girls face. Cher and Nadine’s personal struggles, as well as their relationships with older mentors, reveal how patriarchal expectations shape their lives as they come of age.

This guest post written by Emma Casley appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

The Edge of Seventeen’s protagonist Nadine (Hailee Steinfeld) says, “There are two types of people in the world: The people who naturally excel in life and the people who hope all those people die in a big explosion,” placing herself firmly in the second camp. Though Cher Horowitz (Alicia Silverstone) is the star of an entirely different film released 21 years before, there’s little doubt that Nadine would categorize the Clueless character in the first group. Despite differences in tone and the personalities of their leads, both films share a similarity in subject matter: teenage girls growing up. And both films are written and directed by women – a rarity in mainstream movies.

These two women directors, Amy Heckerling (Clueless) and Kelly Fremon Craig (The Edge of Seventeen), use their films to give a focused examination on the insecurity and self-doubt teen girls face. Cher and Nadine’s personal struggles, as well as their relationships with older mentors, reveal how patriarchal expectations shape their lives as they come of age. Though the two films both focus on a very particular demographic of white, well-off teenagers, they do point to the ways in which even these girls of relative privilege suffer under the boundaries of gender roles. The films do what they aim to do well: give depth and nuance to a demographic that is often written off as being frivolous and shallow. However there are obvious limits in what these films can portray. Though casting a critical look at male privilege, both films leave issues like racial and economic inequality untouched. The success of Heckerling and Craig’s films demonstrates the need for even more diversity of voices in film rather than being the end goal of more inclusive filmmaking.

The similarities between Clueless and The Edge of Seventeen can be most clearly seen in the parallels between their lead characters. Their actions reveal how they both struggle with the immense pressure that society places on young women. Cher sees herself as an expert and mentor for her family, fellow students, and teachers; Nadine frets over her social awkwardness and isolation. Cher spends her weekend choosing non-school books to read and workout regimens; Nadine’s nights off involve crying while throwing up into a toilet while her one friend (Haley Lu Richardson) holds her hair back. Cher uses strategically delivered flowers and chocolates to woo the object of her affection; Nadine sends a painfully awkward and explicit Facebook message to her crush about “doing it in the Petland stockroom.”

Cher might present herself as more put together through reading Fit or Fat and working out to buns of steel, but this urge to constantly “improve” herself and others demonstrates how she sees herself as something that needs to be improved upon. She complains about “feeling like such a heifer” after spending the day eating candy and snacks, and after her friend declines her suggestions for sex, she worries that she wasn’t presenting herself as attractive enough: “Did my hair get flat? Did I stumble into some bad lighting? What’s wrong with me?” While it’s a line played for laughs in the film, Cher clearly isn’t so different from Nadine as she despairs that she “feels so grotesque” and outcast from her cooler peers. They just have different ways of expressing this insecurity.

It doesn’t help that the few female role models Cher and Nadine have don’t provide much reassurance that things will get any better once they reach adulthood. Nadine’s mother (Kyra Sedgwick) seems to be constantly on the edge of breaking down – struggling between her job and taking care of her children and dealing with the emotional aftermath of her husband’s death. Cher’s mother has passed away, but her teacher Miss Geist (Twink Caplan) serves as an example of what the future might have in store for her. Similar to Nadine’s mom, Miss Geist is overworked and lonely. Though Miss Geist has a happier ending in Clueless, she still demonstrates the difficulties of living up to social expectations, even as an adult. Nadine and Cher are young women struggling with insecurity and feeling like they’re failing to perform femininity in the right way and they watch as their older female mentors struggle with the exact same performance. Nadine’s mother even tells her that she comforts herself thinking that everyone is as miserable and dead inside as she is – not exactly an “it gets better” message for the teenager.

Especially in comparison to many of the male characters in both films, the women in Clueless and Edge of Seventeen are unhappy and flawed, unable to provide support for the young female protagonists. While one reading might interpret this as plain old sexism in the writing, another way to look at it is that these films showcase the wear and tear that these women experience under a patriarchal society. While Nadine and Cher feel the pressure to twist and conform to impossible standards, their male counterparts (both teenagers and adults) are allowed to just simply be. This translates into many of the male characters being mentors or supportive figures for the female characters: Nadine has her teacher Mr. Bruner (Woody Harrelson); her mother has her son Darian (Blake Jenner); Cher has her father (Dan Hedaya) and Josh (Paul Rudd). Darian might express frustration with being the only “stable” one in the family, but The Edge of Seventeen never shows him struggle to live up to gendered social expectations as his mother and sister experience. Both films portray many of the male characters in a very positive way: they act as a sympathetic ear to Nadine and Cher’s problems without having much personal stake in the matter.

However, both films also demonstrate how a lack of awareness of societal pressures on women manifests a much less positive, and much more dangerous, way in other male characters. The Edge of Seventeen and Clueless contain very similar scenes that take place between the protagonists and a male classmate while they drive together in a car. In both cases, the girls reject the boys’ sexual advances and subsequently are stranded after leaving the car to escape the situation. In these scenes, from the boy’s perspectives, they were responding to “obvious” signs that the girls were interested in a romantic and/or sexual relationship with them. But the films suggest that actually the boys simply felt their own desires and assumed that the girls would accommodate them.

In this way, the male characters in both films, whether they are understanding mentors or aggressive sexual assaulters, are ignorant of their own power. Characters like Mr. Bruner and Cher’s father can be so “good” because they’re not dealing with the same kinds of social pressures as characters like Nadine’s mother and Miss Geist are, and can instead be pillars of stability in the main characters’ lives. But their pillar-like quality can be seen in a different way: as the men stay static, then women must constantly bend and be flexible to accommodate their positions. Cher’s father and Mr. Bruner remain ignorant to this dynamic, even when offering support to the two girls. This lack of awareness shows its darker side in the two car scenes. The two boys assume that they “know best” in these situations and expect the girls to acquiesce to their advances. Neither film gives credence to this assumption. They instead give a sympathetic view to Cher and Nadine’s hurt and betrayal, pointing the finger at the dangerous presumption of male privilege. Clueless and The Edge of Seventeen show empathy for the deeply flawed female characters and the societal oppression they face. They also demonstrate how men, as kind advisers or dangerous predators, have a tendency to assume the impartiality of their views — of course they can give good advice to their students and daughters, of course they know that when a girl gets in a car with them it’s an invitation for sex. One of the main functions of male privilege is men not even knowing that they have it.

Of course other kinds of structural oppression exist in conjunction with male privilege, and both Clueless and The Edge of Seventeen center on the lives of well-off, white, suburban girls. The two films focus on giving detailed portraits of a single character so it does make sense within the context of their stories for them both to have such a focus on a particular demographic and lifestyle. However, neither film deviates from the larger film canon’s intense fixation on the stories of the rich and the white and the otherwise privileged at the expensive of other narratives. Both directors have discussed their process in writing and directing their films; Heckerling details how she fought for Clueless to focus on the girls rather than the boys, and Craig used her own experiences with self loathing and insecurity to inform Nadine’s struggles. So while it might not have been essential that these films give nuance to female coming-of-age stories, in both cases, their role as writers and directors shaped the films into stories that echoed their own life experiences. What would other women, of different backgrounds, bring to their stories if they were given more opportunities to get behind the camera?

For both Heckerling and Craig, their efforts have translated into films that bring depth to the stories of teenage girls, but Clueless and The Edge of Seventeen shouldn’t be seen as the end goal of gender inclusivity in film direction. They represent two good examples of what can be accomplished when women directors are given more control over the stories they tell, but there are still a vast array of voices that have remained unheard.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Clueless: Way Existential

Emma Casley is a Brooklyn-based film writer. Last year she participated in the New York Film Festival’s Critics Academy. She can be found wandering the streets for good coffee and also on Twitter @EmmaLCasley.

‘Hateship Loveship’: Mehship

With a slight tonal shift, this could have been a really interesting story. There are all kinds of interesting places this could go, but ‘Hateship Loveship’ doesn’t take this route. It’s a shame, because it winds up being rather a non-story.

We all know, and are deeply offended by, this story: the bad boy who is redeemed by the love of a good woman. We’ve spilled oceans of ink in our feminist critiques of the harm perpetuated by this cultural narrative. The man is allowed to have dimensions, flaws, agency, character; the woman can only be meek, conventionally pretty, good at traditional feminine pursuits like cooking and cleaning. She sacrifices all sense of self, existing only as a prop for his betterment.

It’s such a tedious cliché, we don’t even really need to rehearse the critiques anymore, taking them for granted as a baseline of feminist criticism. But have you ever wondered what this story looks like from the perspective of the woman?

Me neither.

Hateship Loveship, the new film by Liza Johnson of Return (non-)fame, does an uneven job of answering this unasked question.

Kristen Wiig takes on her first fully non-comedic role as Johanna, the stiff and taciturn caretaker whose employer passes away in the film’s first scene. Johanna is hired to be housekeeper and vaguely parental influence for teenage Sabitha (Hailee Steinfeld), who lives with her grandfather in a fancy house where her deadbeat dad is persona non grata. After briefly meeting said deadbeat dad, Johanna enters into a passionate correspondence with an email address she thinks belongs to him, but is actually run by Sabitha and her smirking, bratty friend Edith. Emboldened by “his” professions of love, Johanna throws away everything in one daredevil move, and goes to live with a man who barely knows she exists.

This is right where you’d think the story would get really interesting. Unfortunately, it doesn’t.

Hateship Loveship isn’t wholly without its merits. The main draws for me were Wiig and Steinfeld, two actors I (alongside, it seems, every feminist on planet earth) adore. Wiig’s performance in Bridesmaids had enough emotional nuance to give me confidence that she could deliver on a purely dramatic role, and she is solid here, using pointed silences and soulful stares to convey a woman whose depths and complexities are deeply suppressed by a difficult past only hinted at. Steinfeld, who knocked all our socks off a few years ago in True Grit, succeeds in giving depth and plausibility to a role that in lesser hands would seem two-dimensional.

Sabitha (Hailee Steinfeld) and Edith (Sami Gayle), being teens

Now, I have not read the Alice Munro story on which the film is based, and perhaps if I had the plot would have been more palatable to me, but it’s a poor film adaptation that cannot stand alone. I want to like a story centered on a woman who goes after what she wants and gets it, I really do. It’s just that apparently what this woman wants is to be a housewife for a hot mess of a man.

With a slight tonal shift, this could have been a really interesting story: a woman who has always been mousy and obedient is finally spurred to take decisive action to get what she thinks she wants, and her pride won’t let her back down from what, increasingly clearly, was not a very good idea. There are all kinds of interesting places this could go, but Hateship Loveship doesn’t take this route. It’s a shame, because it winds up being rather a non-story.

The screening I saw included a Q&A with Johnson and Wiig, and I had to fight the temptation to ask them: what was the point? What is the film trying to say?

Does Guy Pearce really deserve that look from Kristen Wiig? — Does Guy Pearce really deserve that look of devotion from Kristen Wiig?

As a potential subversion of the “bad boy saved by the love of a good woman” trope, it doesn’t subvert enough: Deadbeat Dad is a junkie and a crook, whose life is literally cleaned up by Johanna. Centering her doesn’t change the trajectory of the story. As a character study, it doesn’t give us enough character to work with: Johanna’s arc from quiet housemaid to, um, quiet housewife is frustratingly underdeveloped. As an unconventional love story, it has too much unexamined ick factor: who would actually enter into a relationship with a near-stranger who showed up on your doorstep claiming to have received love letters you definitely didn’t write?

There are a lot of angles this film could have taken to be something interesting, but it takes none of them and ends up as little more than a disappointment.

______________________________________

Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

‘True Grit’: Ambiguous Feminism

Mattie wears dark, loose, practical clothing. She climbs trees and carries weapons. She shows utter disdain for male privilege or La Boeuf’s pervy allusions to sexual contact. She has no interest in the older men for romance or protection. She is only concerned with their usefulness to her task, and she uses her will and her reasoning rather than seduction to convince them. Steinfeld’s Mattie emanates competence and confidence.

This cross-post by Andé Morgan previously appeared at her blog No Accommodation and appears as part of our theme week on Child and Teenage Girl Protagonists.

Enter the Wayback Machine in your mind and go back to 2011. This was an era with only one Smurfs and only two Hangovers. More original fare like Rango and Super 8 was somewhat overshadowed by superhero movies, which were HUGE, and the sequelmatic masterpieces that were Transformers: Dark of the Moon and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. That’s OK, originality is overrated. For example, my favorite wide release of late 2010-early 2011 was True Grit. Based on the 1968 serial novel by Charles Portis, True Grit the movie had been done by The Duke in 1969. And by done I mean it did well; it was a financial and critical success and gave John Wayne his only Oscar. Nevermind that the script was less than faithful to the source material, or that Mammon possessed Paramount to spawn a horrific sequel, Rooster Cogburn.

Let me get my bias out front: I am a fan of the Coen Brothers, but I don’t always drink the Kool-Aid (am I the only person who thought Fargo and No Country for Old Men were just OK?). However, I loved True Grit. I don’t think it is hyperbole to call it a masterpiece. It represents an increasingly rare combination of excellent screenwriting, gripping cinematography, high production value, and masterful acting in a wide release film. Its story of vengeance is timeless, but the setting is as uniquely American as apple pie, Duck Dynasty, and gun violence.

To summarize: in the American Old West (Oklahoma and Arkansas were part of the Old West in 1877), Mattie Ross (played by Hailee Steinfeld in the 2010 film) loses her father when he is murdered by his hired hand Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin). She enlists the help of U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) and Texas Ranger La Boeuf (Matt Damon) to bring the fugitive Chaney to justice. Because she is an adolescent female, no one takes her seriously until the strength of her persistence wins out. Vengeance is hers in the end, but not without cost.

All of the incarnations of True Grit are popular fodder for analysis from a feminist perspective not only because it is well-known and well-respected as an “American” story, but also because it is an unusual story. It features a young, female protagonist with a single-minded focus on violent vengeance. Any analysis would be remiss to ignore that a) the serial was written in 1968, and Portis would undoubtedly be aware of the second-wave feminist movement and b) the 2010 film was written, directed, and produced by the Coen Brothers, who know how to do subtle development of nuanced characters and big-picture themes. The original 1969 film is less profitable for analysis. In their hurry to cash in on the popularity of the novel and John Wayne, the studio focused on the Rooster character. Mattie (referred to as a “tomboy” by promotional materials of the time) exists as a novelty and a variation on the damsel in distress.

While the 2010 film does pass the Bechdel Test on the slightest of technicalities, no one is going to confuse it with Melancholia. The plot of True Grit is an interesting variation of the Women in Fridges meme because the roles are a reversal of the usual young female victim and older male protagonist structure. In this way Mattie is much more of a Dark Knight than a Marvelous fighting fuck toy. The overarching patriarchal heterosexist concern is obvious: neither children nor women are allowed to crave bloody vengeance. Vengeance is a privilege reserved for good-but-violent men whose women-property are raped or destroyed.

Mattie wears dark, loose, practical clothing. She climbs trees and carries weapons. She shows utter disdain for male privilege or La Boeuf’s pervy allusions to sexual contact. She has no interest in the older men for romance or protection. She is only concerned with their usefulness to her task, and she uses her will and her reasoning rather than seduction to convince them. Steinfeld’s Mattie emanates competence and confidence.

While many in the blogosphere were quick to use Mattie’s stoicism, blood lust, and independence as examples of why True Grit should be considered a feminist movie, others, such as Anita Sarkeesian at Feminist Frequency, have remarked that those same attributes argue against that designation. Rather, the adoption of these characteristics by a female protagonist constitutes an enshrinement of male privilege and traditional action-movie-masculine vales rather than an assertion of feminist values. By contrast, a feminist True Grit would emphasize cooperation, empathy, and non-violent conflict resolution. Without delving into the deeper arguments raised by this argument (e.g., what exactly are feminist values and are they necessarily exclusive of all traditionally masculine values), I can say that my initial reaction was to agree with Sarkeesian. Too often we see action movies that “counterbalance” a “masculine” (and usually secondary) female character by either putting her in a skin-tight suit, giving her a fatal personality flaw, or by implying that she is worthy of death for her perceived masculinity (I’m looking at you, Kick-Ass 2).

However, after some reflection I tend to agree more with Amanda Marcotte’s argument that True Grit should not be analyzed in the same way as more typical westerns or action movies. The subtleties in the source material and in the Coen Brothers’ delivery lend themselves to deeper interpretation. True Grit comments on many things: the unfair treatment of Native Americans (the hanging scene); the corruption of justice in our legal system (the courtroom scene); and the fact that there is often very little space between the “bad” and the “good” in this world (Chaney’s dialogue with Mattie at the creek and mine; Ned’s dialogue with Rooster).

As Marcotte points out, to understand the commentary on the development of Mattie as a young woman, we must look to the ending. Marcotte notes the shared symbology of Rooster’s missing eye and (adult) Mattie’s missing arm. By engaging in violence and by accepting the traditionally masculine values of vengeance, both Mattie and Rooster literally and figuratively lost part of themselves. As viewers, we are left to wonder: did Mattie’s consumption by vengeance as a young woman rob her of spiritual wholeness in adulthood? Does the adult Mattie feel that she was wrong to pursue vengeance? I do disagree with Marcotte’s assertion that True Grit is a feminist movie because the bleakness of the ending serves as an ultimate repudiation of traditional action-movie-masculine values. Instead, I see the ending as commentary on the infectious, long-lasting, and ultimately detrimental nature of violence as a human trait. Consequently, I conclude that while Mattie Ross may be considered a feminist character (loosely) True Grit is neither a feminist movie nor a movie that reinforces the patriarchal heterosexist narrative. It is a human condition movie, and one worth watching.

As for Hallie Steinfeld, she’s been getting work, and recently played Petra Arkanin in the film adaption of Ender’s Game. I’d like to see it, but damn you Orson Scott Card!

Andé Morgan’s perspective stems from a life spent always on the boundary: white and black, rich and poor, masculine and feminine. She takes shelter under the transgender umbrella.

Guest Writer Wednesday: Happily Never After: The Sad (and Sexist?) Rush to Cast Some of Our Most Promising Young Actresses as Fairy Tale Princesses

Kristen Stewart as Snow White in Snow White and the Huntsman

This guest post written by Scott Mendelson was originally published July 2011 at Mendelson’s Memos. Cross-posted with permission.

There were a few interesting articles written over the last several months about the unusual amount of ass-kicking (or at least take-charge) young female roles being written into mainstream cinema. Whether it was Chloe Moretz in Kick-Ass, Hailee Steinfeld in True Grit, Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone, or Saoirse Ronan in Hanna, the last 18 months or so has seen a mini-wave of genre pictures where young females were basically the lead characters (or in the case of Kick-Ass the star attraction), ‘strong independent character’ (god, I hate that cliche) who not only could fend for themselves but were not defined in any way, shape, or form by their male love interest (not a one of them had a boyfriend). Yes, I would include Sucker Punch in this category, as it was basically a satiric examination of whether ass-kicking young women in pop culture were automatically sexualized by virtue of the salacious nature of such imagery (stop whining and read THIS). The somewhat negative undercurrent of this trend is that these actresses were generally under 18, often barely passed puberty. Point being, what would become of these actresses once they reached adulthood? If recent developments are any indication, Hollywood has a genuine desire to roll back the progress clock and turn these actresses into fairy tale princesses.

At the moment, we now have two competing variations on Snow White set to be released in the next year. One, pictured below, will star Lily Collins (from The Blind Side and soon to be seen as Taylor Lautner’s token girlfriend in Abduction) as the titular princess, while the other will star Kristen Stewart as the ‘fairest of them all’. Both are claiming to be somewhat revisionist, and for the moment I shall take them at their word. But no matter how much armor and battle-axes you give Snow White, you’re still hiring one of our more talented actresses (say what you will about Twilight, but she absolutely sells Bella Swann and shines in the likes of Adventureland) to play a woman whose primary job is to run away from an evil witch, play house with a bunch of asexual dwarves, then finally bite a poison apple and await rescue from a theoretical Prince Charming. Of course, you could argue that Ms. Collins isn’t one of the ‘great actresses of our time’ yet. But the fact that we have two competing projects based on Snow White is a sad commentary on our times, both as a statement about how obsessed the studios are with any kind of brand recognition as well as the kind of roles available for actresses on the cusp of adulthood.

Lily Collins as Snow White in Mirror, Mirror

And it gets worse. What was Hailee Steinfeld’s reward for earning an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress for a film where she was unquestionably the lead? What was her follow-up project for stealing True Grit from Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, and Josh Brolin? She gets to play Sleeping Beauty in (yet again) a revisionist variation on that old-chestnut. And we’ll see who gets to play Princess Aurora in the other competing project, Maleficent (allegedly starring Angelina Jolie as the villain) which was to be directed by Tim Burton before he came to his senses. Worst of all (and the catalyst for this rant) is the news that Emma Watson, who portrayed one of the great feminist icons of recent times, Ms. Hermione Granger herself, is being wooed for the lead role in Guillermo del Toro’s live-action variation of yes, Beauty and the Beast. Never mind that Guillermo del Toro certainly has better things to do with his time. Never mind that we have no real need for a live-action version of “Stockholm Syndrome: The Movie” (even my 3 year old dismissed the Disney version, because she stated that the Beast was mean and a grouch). It is sadly predictable that, as soon as Ms. Watson (a fiery feminist in her own right) was able to basically play adult roles, she would be shoved into the helpless fairy-tale heroine box.

Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried in In Time

And that is really the point. To be fair, it’s not an all-encompassing issue. Chloe Moretz remains fairy tale-free at this point, and Saoirse Ronan has yet to be cast in a theoretical live-action version of The Little Mermaid. She does have a ‘teen girls as hit-women’ caper with Alexis Bledel, Violet and Daisy, that I desperately want to see. And Dakota Fanning has yet to be cast as the token hot girl quite yet. But there remains a disturbing trend that allows young actresses to be vibrant and active in their onscreen fates only until they reach young adulthood. Once they are old enough to be legally sexualized, their worth as empowered heroines is seemingly lost and they end up being tasked with playing the token love interest (SEE Emily Blunt be pulled by the hand by Matt Damon in The Adjustment Bureau!), helpless hostage/potential woman in refrigerator (SEE Blake Lively as the kidnapped girlfriend of both Taylor Kitsch and Aaron Johnson in Oliver Stone’s Savages!), or both (SEE Amanda Seyfried as Justin Timberlake’s hostage who learns to love him in In Time!). It is as if female roles can only be worthwhile when they are too young to be viewed exclusively as sexual objects. Now there is a new category for which to pigeon hole these actresses: perfectly pretty princess. Once they are old enough to be cast in stereotypical female roles, it’s straight to the ‘token’ box, with an occasional diversion in fairy tale theater. Is this new mini-fad simply another variation on tokenism, or a more insidious attempt to keep said young actresses virginal and pure?

It is telling that bloggers and pundits bemoaned Jennifer Lawrence passing on Savages and picking The Hunger Games instead. Maybe, no matter how prestigious an Oliver Stone film might be (because he writes SO well for female characters…), Lawrence chose to be a lead in her own action franchise rather than play a random hottie who is abducted as a pawn in a drug spat involving her dueling boyfriends (on the surface, it seems like a prestige variation on Double Dragon). And it is telling that no one seems to notice or care that a number of our most promising young actresses are being jammed into the ‘girl cage’ just at the age when they would be old enough to play quality adult female roles. Of course, roles such as that are few and far between. For the likes of Watson and Steinfeld, it appears once again that the choice is between no mainstream roles or regressive token roles or playing a live-action Disney princess. Oh well, I’m sure they can find an episodic television series when the time comes. When it comes to quality roles for adult women, for too many actresses, it is television instead of film that is the pathway to happily ever after.

Scott Mendelson is, by hobby, a freelance film critic/pundit who specializes in box office analysis. He blogs primarily at Mendelson’s Memos while syndicating at The Huffington Post and Valley Scene Magazine. He lives in Woodland Hills, CA with his wife and two young kids where he works in a field totally unrelated to his BA in Film Theory/Criticism from Wright State University.

Best Picture Nominee Review Series: True Grit

True Grit (2010)

This is a guest review from Cynthia Arrieu-King

The Coen Brothers have triumphed in recognizing that their particular wifty and broad take on American violence could better the classic Western film True Grit. The original 1969 version drew from the campy Western novel True Grit by Charles Portis, and had a play-time, hokey quality. On initial comparison, the Coens made a shot for shot remake. Lucky for us, they don’t skimp on corpses, pith and the comic relief that witless people who think they are witty and witty people used to being considered witless both provide. Jarmusch could have made a mystical emotional version of this film à la Dead Man. But that is not the point of this film. The point is un-sentimentality and a little bizarre humor in the face of ruthless, emotionless terrain, a terrain the Coens know well.

I cannot talk about the feminist angle of the film without major spoilers, but suffice it to say, I could not believe what I was seeing in the main character of Hailee Steinfeld’s Mattie Ross. First, a brief discussion of the men and the scenery: it’s hard to say who was not stealing the scene from whom, man or woman or child, the length of this movie.

Jeff Bridges has taken his knack for laconic, comic outrage (The Big Lebowski) and muffled it down. His face has obliged us with a certain amount of real age. Towards the film’s end we understand that his emotion or caring will always be submerged in deference to what must be done, duty carried out with bodily instinct. Somehow Bridges never quite makes you consider whether or not Cogburn is a good or bad man. He is perpetually moving forward and comes to terms with what is and what is not possible without showing the sweat of a single emotional calorie. But you can sense that emotion is happening somewhere within, far within. There are plenty of John Wayne fanatics who post web comments on the Duke’s superiority to any possible actor in the role of Rooster Cogburn. This is nostalgia.

Matt Damon, the other main male character in this film, does his fake-nosed straight-man in shades of ridiculous pride and earnestness (as seen in The Oceans movies, Inside Job). He sees the law and is seized by it in a way Bridges’ Cogburn never is, and proves how thinking within the law will never get the job done. I mean, something pretty bad happens to his tongue; this never gets him to stop nattering on with supposed reasonableness. If everyone in this movie is a variation on the idea of true grit in a nation of True Grit, his Texas Ranger LaBoeuf might have a few grains less than the others and can live with his own humiliations.

The West looks more Zen, bosky, and alien through Roger Deakins’ cinematography; when things go wrong they are comic in an impromptu, a limitless space.

There is a dentist who pretty much steals the movie for at least 4 minutes, but I won’t spoil that for you.

Now for the main character of the story: Mattie Ross, also the narrator.

When watching the sloppily lethal Rooster Cogburn and the persistent young narrator of this movie interact, one can sense a power dynamic both odd and pleasing. I felt as if an old favorite doll had been put up at the dining room table with a real plate finally—Mattie Ross as Cogburn’s—as he calls her—“baby sister”.

Fine. I don’t know yet how to adequately express my astonishment that not only is the main character of this movie a 14 year-old girl, she is not a 14 year-old girl who gets swept aside, despite the men trying to sweep her aside—and actually dumping her off in the middle of nowhere with some gnarly thugs—for most of the movie. Her resolve is not plucky, it is near maniacal. They can’t get rid of her because she is irrationally rational. My jaw hung open a few times. This of course doesn’t necessarily confirm a feminist message about girl-child power, because she is not exactly a woman, she is a child entertaining in her single-mindedness. The story mostly emphasizes that if you want to be gritty, don’t get side-tracked in the vagaries of your emotion; have forethought and a long-range plan and wield a lawsuit adamantly until you are a nuisance that can’t be ignored. Steinfeld too never shows the processing of her emotions; the comebacks come as if her brain is mostly Intel Inside Core i5. The little black stable-boy in this movie has a conversation with Mattie as she retrieves a horse that ends with something like, “I can’t tell my boss what you said because he told me never to utter your name again.”

This spectacle of bullheaded feminine autocracy disguised as reason isn’t quite human and doesn’t necessarily do the male gender any favors either. The film’s minor men get to be idiots and the most reasonable and faintly kind ones get shot or maimed extra. To get ahead as a man, don’t think, don’t be kind; your best bet is to be emotionless too.

Okay, really, SPOILER ALERT. This girl wants to kill the man who killed her father. There is only an opening shot on this father’s dead body being snowed on. There is no narrative ramp-up besides this. And holy cow if she does not KILL, all by herself, messily, with purpose, her father’s killer—Tom Chaney. You think for a second someone else will do it. You think for a second Rooster will come back and save her. You are not totally wrong, but he really does leave her alone with this killer who turns out to be the most human of them all; remorseless and real. You might even think it’s a Coen movie, something god-awful is about to happen to her. I don’t know if it’s the shock this delivers to the viewer that a girl could grab the brass ring in this way, or relief that finally a girl gets to carry out the climactic plot point of a movie, but she does it. I didn’t even let myself think the Coens would allow this, which says more about my forgetting that one of them is married to Frances McDormand. Then Mattie falls into a giant hole and gets her girlish shrieks out that way. Well, she’s not a fucking Marine now, is she.

Is it a feminist movie? I think that it satisfies on many levels: the main character is a woman/girl, she wants revenge, to exercise her will, and she does it. She gets a little help, and some protection and some shot-up cornbread for her fifty dollars (which she actually never has to pay to Rooster). Though we have no narrative slip on which to fit our emotional understanding of her motivations, we go along with it. (To handicap myself as a reviewer: I have lost my father, I wanted to kill someone, I was a Daddy’s girl; as far as illustrating motivation goes, I’m like; what is there to explain?) But standing back, I can see that this sentimental premise was really nothing to have feared and the Coen Brothers didn’t have room or make room to deliver one of their painful montages or confrontations that sucks the emotion out of a wound and spits it in the viewer’s face as an explanation for Mattie’s drive.

So what to make of Mattie and Rooster’s relationship? Are they brother/sister, since he refers to her as baby sister? Are they weirdly, latently romantically linked? Are they father/daughter or uncle/niece? The movie gifts the weirdness of their dynamic and never allows it to settle into anything other than what it is. By the time Mattie (spoiler alert) dunks her water bucket erroneously into the creek and sees Tom Chaney for the first time, there isn’t much Rooster can do but ride away at the behest of her captors. And so he is neither a father, because what father would leave his child be? And he is not a brother, for the same reasons. He is not a friend. It is the coolness of his relationship to his own feelings that permits him both to enable her revenge and protect her with soldier-like strategy. Money never changes hands: perhaps it is only possible to be a woman who owns her revenge if she is actually only a child and if one steps out of capitalism’s systems.

In fact, this lack of sentimentality in the girl and the man allows them to be mirrors and strangely see themselves in each other. Their only credibility with each other: overarching determination. As Cogburn says when Mattie rides across the river on her horse—though this is obviously bullheaded and wreckless–he says, “She reminds me of me” and this is the first time he bothers to heed her. They work as a team because Mattie provides the reasonableness and Cogburn provides the instinct.

In the end it is the thrilling climax of the movie, the death of Tom Chaney, that pulls the biggest feminist punch, for I never saw it coming. This says more about viewer expectation and all westerns about revenge, and all those portraying high-pitched know-it-all girls in campy movies of any era. I think I might have had tears of happiness. Because the movie extends the reach of true violence and decision to a girl, it offers us a vision of grit as all-permeating to the people who truly have it: they can’t be otherwise.

Luck is another story.

The movie as much as it confounds ideas about what a cinematic-girl can be and can do, is also a story about luck. One can imagine that Cogburn gets Mattie through her final trial by determination, but given the nature of their story’s last legs, I’d say this tenacity had little to do with decision and more to do with uncontrollable factors. Mattie never marries. And sad to say, the movie seems to decide that a woman’s triumph is informed by her ability to control her emotion, and be invulnerable, and dumb luck falling helps.

The closing vignettes of Mattie as an adult feel like they’re there because the backstory of her father got lopped off. We are spared seeing Cogburn again, and spared seeing her marry and diminish some poor husband or herself. Cogburn is eventually buried next to her not as a lover, and not, as it might make sense to assume, as part of the family. He was someone as reliable and tough as herself, the one person who could match her and deserve a place next to her. This was a different, ongoing brand of love only expressed through action. In other words, perseverance.

Cynthia Arrieu-King is an assistant professor of creative writing at Stockton College. Her book People are Tiny in Paintings of China was just released from Octopus Books. Her late father loved John Wayne and her family has boxes of John Wayne videos that nobody watches but that no one can throw away.