Jessica Biel – Bitch Flicks

‘Bleeding Heart’ and All the Times It’s Probably Okay to Shoot Someone

Written and directed by Diane Bell, ‘Bleeding Heart’ is about class privilege, moral hypocrisy, and the arrogance of preaching nonviolence to people about to be killed. Mostly, though, it’s a chance to watch Zosia Mamet play someone other than Shoshanna and drink in a dark but gorgeous colour palette.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Written and directed by Diane Bell, Bleeding Heart is about class privilege, moral hypocrisy, and the arrogance of preaching nonviolence to people about to be killed. Mostly, though, it’s a chance to watch Zosia Mamet play someone other than Shoshanna and drink in a dark but gorgeous color palette.

Having premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2015, Bleeding Heart tells the story of an ashtanga yoga teacher named May (Jessica Biel), who makes contact with a half-sister she’s never known (Zosia Mamet), and quickly has a crisis of conscience over how she should behave.

May’s sister, Shiva, is in a much different financial position and living with a boyfriend who treats her badly. As May gets to know Shiva better, she finds out that this boyfriend, Cody, is also Shiva’s pimp, and doesn’t seem to care very much for her safety. May feels the need to get involved, and tries to help by giving Shiva money, giving her a place to stay when she can’t go home to Cody. She tries to convince her to leave him for good but, the longer the situation goes on, the less it looks like there’s going to be a peaceful solution.

May’s interaction with Shiva is complicated by the fact that her business and romantic partner, Dex, doesn’t think they should get involved in the drama unfolding between two people they don’t really know, as well as by the fact that Shiva doesn’t always tell the truth. In the end, though, May has to decide whether she really believes in ahimsa – the principles of nonviolence at the core of her spiritual beliefs and practice – to the point of letting someone else get killed.

Spoilers, but the final act involves a lot more guns.

I get what Bleeding Heart’s trying to do, and I think it’s really interesting, even if I don’t always buy the execution.

At its core, the story is about a really specific, new age hypocrisy in which we claim to heal ourselves and the world by ignoring the harsh realities and difficult choices less fortunate people face. The key conflict in Bleeding Heart isn’t between Shiva and Cody or May and Cody or Shiva and May – it’s between May and Dex. May wants to help Shiva even though she doesn’t know her very well, even though it makes her life difficult, and even though Shiva might not even be her sister – Dex wants Shiva to go away and stop disrupting his positive energy. He’d rather use his and May’s money to build a new yoga studio than help Shiva pay her rent, and the point he brings up, over and over again, is, “This doesn’t have to be our problem.”

Bleeding Heart plays May and Dex against each other to show us how May’s choices reflect a conscious move away from the beliefs she held at the start of the film – a move toward an understanding that there’s a kind of arrogance in preaching nonviolence to people who live in real physical danger. She’s struggling with the idea of what it really means to help someone, and whether it’s enough to say that she helps people by teaching yoga practice. Ultimately, she finds that the only way to make a difference in the world is to do things she never thought she would do – she finds that there are some situations where nonviolence just isn’t an option.

May’s personal journey comes across really well in the film, so I was disappointed that the other characters seemed a lot less rounded in comparison. Dex is so self-centered that he can’t even process the concept that May might care about something else in addition to the yoga studio. When May tells him that she wants to take a day off work to meet Shiva for the first time – having hired private detectives to search for her for months or years – he tells her that meeting Shiva will probably be emotional for her and distract her from the business for more than a day, so she shouldn’t go yet. Even taking into account that he’s supposed to be a hypocrite, I find it hard to believe that he would just casually tell his partner to blow off meeting a long-lost, long-sought relative to focus on building a new yoga studio. Just like I find it hard to believe later on that he completely doesn’t care that Shiva’s boyfriend is abusive, even if he doesn’t want to be involved.

It’s part of a larger pattern in the film where the details of the characters’ motivations don’t ring true and drain some of the power from the story. It often feels like Dex, Cody, and Shiva make their choices based on what the plot demands of them, so that May can learn something new and grow as a person.

Aside from that, the cinematography is gorgeous and Mamet and Biel are both stretching themselves as actors, which is fun to watch. I especially gained a new appreciation for Mamet – she’s so good at making her lines sound like something she just came up with that it’s easy to forget how much skill that really takes. There are times in Bleeding Heart when she doesn’t have a lot to work with but definitely makes the most of it.

You can find Bleeding Heart on DVD and VOD in North America and the UK, where it goes by the name Bound by Blood.

Also on Bitch Flicks: Paula Schwartz interviews director Diane Bell about Bleeding Heart

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies, TV and video games on her blog.

Director Diane Bell Chats about ‘Bleeding Heart’ Stars Jessica Biel and Zosia Mamet

During the festival I met with Bell at a restaurant in the Meatpacking district to chat about her film and following are edited highlights:

This is a guest post by Paula Schwartz.

Bleeding Heart, written and directed by Diane Bell, stars Jessica Biel and Zosia Mamet as two sisters who have never known each other. Biel plays May, a reserved and disciplined yoga instructor who has enlisted a private investigator to help her track down her long-lost biological sister, Shiva (Mamet). She discovers her younger sister is a prostitute in an abusive relationship with a boyfriend who is also her pimp. May feels protective and driven to rescue Shiva from her chaotic and dire financial and personal situation.

Bleeding Heart begins as a character study of two very different women and turns into a revenge thriller. The movie features two strong female roles by actresses who are usually typecast. A deglamorized Biel get a chance to show of her acting range instead of coasting on her looks, while Mamet is convincing as a hooker with a heart of gold trapped in a toxic relationship, a role world’s away from the whiny, privileged Shoshanna she plays in Girls.

The cinematography is particularly beautiful, especially in an early scene where May is practicing yoga and her body is framed by a gorgeous Los Angeles sunrise. In a shot that feels like it could only be directed only by a woman, the camera pans over every part of Biel’s body as she does her yoga routine and rather than sexualizing her, reveals her strength and power, something May is not even aware of at that moment.

Bleeding Heart recently premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, which screened 119 features, of which only 30 were by women filmmakers. Bleeding Heart was one of 12 narrative films by women directors screened. This is an improvement over the previous year but not good enough. (Biel, who is married to Justin Timberlake, had just given birth to a baby boy and was unable to make the movie’s premiere at Tribeca.)

During the festival I met with Bell at a restaurant in the Meatpacking district to chat about her film and following are edited highlights:

Talk about the opening shot of the film, where Jessica is practicing yoga and the sun rises. The camera focuses on different parts of Biel’s body and it feels like only a woman filmmaker could get a shot like this.

This is why we need more female filmmakers, because it’s a different perspective. Everyone’s got a different perspective, and we have different stories and different ways of looking at the world. I feel that the stories we have on film just don’t reflect our reality; they also create it. They also change how we see things.

I was very blessed with Jessica that when she got onboard the film she probably had about three months in which she completely immersed herself in the yoga practice.

Jessica hadn’t done much yoga before the film?

She’d done some yoga but like I was very specific with this film that she’s an Ashtanga Yoga practitioner, which is what I taught and which I practiced, so she immediately started practicing Ashtanga every single day. And she started working out in the gym. She completely committed to it and she became vegetarian, and she went the whole way with it.

The thing that’s different with Ashtanga than with other kinds of yoga is you do a self-practice. You learn the sequence of positions and you do them. So when she came to shoot it she knew the sequence… I’ve done it every day for 15 years or something. We knew what it was that we were doing. And I think the thing that really comes across in those scenes is her level of concentration. She’s in that zone.

And Zak (Mulligan) and I, my DP, was just phenomenal, and we knew the kind of lighting that we wanted. The film both starts and ends with that moment of dawn, of the sun coming up. Ashtanga yoga is typically practiced in the very early mornings so ideally you’re practicing from when it’s dark until when it’s light. And that was something that was really important to me, so in the opening sequence it goes back and forth between her teaching a class and also her doing her own practice. When she’s doing her own practice, it’s just that cool light of like pre-dawn, before the sun comes out when it’s a little bit blue. And then when she’s teaching, it’s light and it’s just past the sun coming out. And that’s typically what Ashtanga teaches.

Jessica Biel is usually typecast, especially in roles that focus on her looks and being sexy. In the film she hardly wears makeup and her hair is pulled back in a simple ponytail. Were you worried she’d be able to pull this off?

My concern when she was suggested was that she’s so glamorous. My impression was that she’s so perfect and glamorous and I didn’t think she’ll be able to do this, you know, and the first thing she said to me when I met her was, “I understand May because everybody thinks my life is perfect, but I’m a human being.” I asked her if she would be happy to have no make up and she said, “100 percent.”

What was your production schedule?

We shot the film in 19 days, 12 hours a day normally. As a director I will not go over time. It’s not fair to cast. 12 hours a day is plenty for everybody, and I’m absolutely rigorous, being lucky in both my films working with great first ADs, and then just absolutely rigorous about just keeping it going and keeping that momentum and getting our days every day.

Talk about the chemistry between Zosia Mamet and Jessica Biel since that is crucial for the story since it focuses on their relationship.

Everybody connected and bounded very quickly. And I think a lot of friendships came out of the film. I know Zosia and Jessie became really close. They didn’t know each other before, but the moment they met, and this is one of those things, you just say, “Oh my God, I’m so lucky!” They really clicked. They somehow brought out something great in each other. On set, as human beings too, they just had that connection. They were just like sort of goofy together. There were lots of laughs and you could see they had a bound.

Did you test them together?

No. The funny thing about that sort of chemistry between people, like I feel the movie is partly a love story. It’s about these two women falling in love with each other. And I knew it had to have that chemistry. It’s just like a love story. There’s got to be that sort of spark and I feel they really had it. I felt it every day on set. The two of them together are so charming and sweet and funny.

In the film their characters are both controlled by men although in different ways. Shiva’s boyfriend is her pimp, and he is violent and abusive, while May’s partner is gentle and good to her, but he also tries to control her life. Talk about that.

It was just something that I was interested in. There’s explicit violence and then there’s sort of like another kind of violence, which is sort of implicit.

May’s boyfriend wouldn’t identify himself as being a controlling person and would hate to think of himself as that, and she wouldn’t think of herself as being in that relationship, but that’s what they are. Those are the mechanisms of their relationship and that was definitely something I kind of wanted to say of these two women. They’re two opposites, yin yang, but they’re really the same.

In the production notes it says you are fascinated by violence. What do you mean?

There’s so much of it in our society. How do we actually deal with it? I don’t like violence at all. I absolutely detest it. I’m a complete pacifist. And for me one of the questions driving this film from my perspective was, okay, if you’re completely committed to peace, it’s easy to be peaceful if everyone around you is peaceful. It’s super easy, it’s great. But what if you have to deal with somebody who’s really violent? How far do you go to help someone, protect someone from someone who’s really violent?

In our society domestic abuse and the murder of women by spouses or boyfriends are epidemic. And it’s something we don’t want to talk about. I looked up the actual statistics of it before coming here because I thought, I better get it right. In my head I thought it was about 30 women a month are killed in America by their partners right? That was the figure I had in my head. I looked it up. It’s really three women a day. On average spouses or ex-boyfriends are killing three women everyday. That’s an epidemic!

What is your next movie?

The next one I’m going to shoot in July. We’re Crowdfunding right now in a totally off the grid way. It’s a micro-budget movie. It’s called Of Dust and Bones. It’s about a widow of a war journalist and her husband was killed in Syria. She had decided to just retreat from the world. She lives a monastic kind of life in the desert where she wants no part of what she views as this crazy world, basically. Then her husband’s best friend and colleague, Alex, who actually sent her husband to Syria, comes to visit her. He has come with an agenda. He wants the rights to her dead husband’s last photographs. She feels very strongly that there’s no hope to be good in this world and every time we try to make things better we actually end up making things worse creating more suffering. The film is about what unfolds between them in the desert over these days. It’s these two wildly different viewpoints clashing.

See also at Bitch Flicks: “Vive La Revolution!” by Diane Bell

Paula Schwartz is a veteran journalist who worked at the New York Times for three decades. For five years she was the Baguette for the New York Times movie awards blog Carpetbaggers. Before that she worked on the New York Times night life column, Boldface, where she covered the celebrity beat. She endured a poke in the ribs by Elijah Wood’s publicist, was ejected from a party by Michael Douglas’s flak after he didn’t appreciate what she wrote, and endured numerous other indignities to get a story. More happily she interviewed major actors and directors–all of whom were good company and extremely kind–including Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, Clint Eastwood, Christopher Plummer, Dustin Hoffman and the hammy pooch “Uggie” from “The Artist.” Her idea of heaven is watching at least three movies in a row with an appreciative audience that’s not texting. Her work has appeared in Moviemaker, more.com, showbiz411 and reelifewithjane.com.

Seed & Spark: Vive La Revolution!

In my own life, I’m embracing the idea that films can make a difference, and that they do. It’s not just the content of the film, but how we make them, how we finance them, how we share them.

Scene from Test Shoot for Of Dust and Bones — Scene from Test Shoot for *Of Dust and Bones*

This is a guest post by Diane Bell.

Last year, like many people I know, I was overwhelmed by the terrible events unfolding across our world. From Ukraine to Gaza, from the streets of Ferguson, Missouri to the ongoing war in Syria, it seemed like the world was reaching breaking point. It felt like it was all falling apart.

At the same time, I was facing my own small battles, finishing my second film, Bleeding Heart, which just premiered at the Tribeca Film Fest. Bleeding Heart is a kind of feminist fantasy thriller starring Jessica Biel as an affluent yoga teacher and Zosia Mamet as her biological sister, a young sex worker trapped in an abusive relationship. It was born from my desire to see on screen a story I rarely see: a woman rescuing another, a celebration of strength in sisterhood and the sacrifices we can and should make for it.

In the depths of my struggle to finish it, I wrestled with the question of why I make films. The process can be so long and hard, financial rewards so meager; what is the point? Why do it? In the face of so much real suffering and true hardship in the world, is it just a vanity? Wouldn’t it be better to pack it all in and do something truly meaningful? Something that could help the world be a better place? Isn’t that why we’re all here?

[youtube_sc url=”https://youtu.be/IB08M3b0rYM”]

Concept trailer from test shoot for Of Dust and Bones

As I meditated on these questions, I kept coming back to this belief: films can change our world. The stories on our screens don’t just reflect our reality, they create it. And that is why it is essential that many different voices are empowered to make movies and why as audiences we must seek out the voices that inspire us and support them however we can. We can’t let the only movies out there be those that support the Big Lies (no matter how entertaining those movies can sometimes be). We need films that tell small, honest truths, that shed light onto our shared humanity, that enable us to explore the problems we face individually and collectively, and help us see a way towards positive change in our troubled world.

After coming to these conclusions, with my producing partner, Chris Byrne, I launched the Rebel Heart Film Workshop to teach two-day intensives on how to make a standout indie film. These workshops are not only for people who already consider themselves narrative film directors, but also for storytellers of all kinds: actors, writers, producers, poets, activists, documentarians, artists. Based on our own experiences making our first film, the Sundance award winning Obselidia, we break down the process of making a film to 16 simple steps and provide a clear blueprint for how to make a stand out indie. My hope is that through these workshops we will empower diverse voices to tell their stories in films – and to do it successfully.

To that end, we share the honest truth about making films. There’s no gloss, no lies. We share our budget, our schedule, the amounts of money we made from different sources. Crucially: we share our mistakes as well as the things we did right, something incredibly rare in our industry – and in doing so, we give other filmmakers a shot at making better choices with their films, creating a situation where they can make films over and over, regardless of whether their first or second (or third or fourth for that matter) is as outwardly successful as they hoped.

Still from Bleeding Heart — Still from *Bleeding Heart*

Through teaching these workshops, I realized that I had to walk the talk. What I was teaching about building community, about making creatively risky films that come from the heart: this is what I had to do again myself. And so I wrote a film called Of Dust and Bones.

This film is as far from mainstream as you could imagine. It was borne totally from my reflections on the global situation last year, particularly the ongoing devastation in Syria, as well as my horror at the beheadings of journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff by ISIS. These are not sexy, easy to market, Hollywood subjects, but it’s where my heart was.

I started to dig into the idea of a film about the widow of a war journalist who–following his brutal murder–has retreated to a reclusive life in the desert. The only sane reaction to an insane world, she believes, is to have nothing to do with it (something I often feel myself). An uninvited guest arrives: her dead husband’s colleague, and he’s come with an agenda. He wants the rights to her husband’s last work for a film that he is making – rights that she doesn’t want to give him.

From Test Shoot for Of Dust and Bones — From Test Shoot for *Of Dust and Bones*

The film wrestles with the question: can a film change the world? Can a picture? What is worth sacrificing to get that picture or make that film?

These aren’t easy questions and I don’t think the film will give easy answers. In my own life, I’m embracing the idea that films can make a difference, and that they do. It’s not just the content of the film, but how we make them, how we finance them, how we share them. To that end, I’m trying to make this film in a far more community based way than my previous works. I’ve been blogging about it on my website and we launched a crowdfunding campaign, not just to raise crucial finance, but also to involve a village of people in the making of it.

The world still often seems like an incredibly dark, chaotic, violent place, but I honestly believe the only hope we have is to come together, support each other, and create strong community networks that are founded upon shared dreams and stories.

We can’t do it alone – any of us. But together we have a real chance to create the world we want to live in. Let’s do it.

Diane Bell is a writer and director. Her second film, Bleeding heart, a thriller starring Jessica Biel and Zosia Mamet, premiered Tribeca 2015. Her first feature, Obselidia, premiered in Dramatic Competition at Sundance 2010, winning two awards and was nominated for two Independent Spirit Awards. She recently launched the Rebel Heart Film Workshop, teaching how to make a stand out indie film, and is currently raising funds for her next feature, Of Dust and Bones.

Maternal Grief in ‘The Truth About Emanuel’

I have a thing for creepy/taboo relationships in fiction. All I had to hear was “baby obsession” and I was sold on The Truth About Emanuel. I’m also familiar with Kaya Scodelario from her Skins years and I was curious to find out if she had range beyond troubled teen queen. On that front I was a bit underwhelmed. Thankfully, the true focus of the story extended far beyond her.

Written by Erin Tatum.

I have a thing for creepy/taboo relationships in fiction. All I had to hear was “baby obsession” and I was sold on The Truth About Emanuel. I’m also familiar with Kaya Scodelario from her Skins years and I was curious to find out if she had range beyond troubled teen queen. On that front I was a bit underwhelmed. Thankfully, the true focus of the story extended far beyond her.

emreflects — Emanuel reflects on her tragic origins.

Scodelario plays 17-year-old Emmanuel, a jaded teen disillusioned by the death of her mother during her birth, resulting in perennial survivor’s guilt that always seems to crop up around her birthday. Guess what time of year it is! In her opening internal monologue, she describes how the doctor brought her back to life with “the same rhythmic motions he had used to jerk himself off that morning.” This is a nit picky thing, but I’m so sick of sexual omniscience and perversity being a marker of worldliness or psychopathic tendencies in teens. Psychology and sexuality do tend to go hand in hand (no pun intended), but did we really need such an irrelevant detail? Also, since when can you evoke suspected obscure third-party masturbation as a metaphor for your own sadness? She literally says “he came and I came… back to life.” That just sounds unsanitary. Was he masturbating and performing CPR on an infant at the same time?

Anyway, Emmanuel’s life is turned upside down by the arrival of her new neighbor Linda (Jessica Biel) and her baby daughter Chloe. Before that, we get a nice preview of the forthcoming dysfunction as Emanuel bizarrely accuses her stepmother Janice (Frances O’Connor) of thinking she’s a lesbian and passively aggressively insinuates that she has had sexual dreams about Janice. As someone who relishes queer undertones, even I have to say I was baffled by the repeated references to Emanuel’s supposed sexual ambiguity. Same-sex desire seems to exist to fan the flames of anxiety around the unfulfilled Oedipal complex. More on that later.

Linda is simultaneously evasive about Chloe, trusting Emanuel to be in the house alone with her despite never introducing the two. Linda and Emanuel bond one-on-one and it’s intentionally left unclear whether Emanuel is substituting her as a mother figure or developing romantic interest. The plot synopsis also piles on by pointing out the physical similarities between Linda and Emanuel’s late mother. Yes, because if I were mourning my dead mother and feeling responsible for her death, obviously the only logical way to cope with things would be to lust after her doppleganger. I’m fascinated by the thematic exploration of incest as arguably one of the deepest social taboos, but I’m really not feeling this compulsive equation of parental grief in itself to depraved Freudian sexual confusion.

To take some of the heat off the lesbian pseudo-incest, Emanuel has a boyfriend Claude (Aneurin Barnard) that she meets commuting on the train. It’s kind of a random place to have a romance and it screams try hard indie. The love interest aspect of this film in terms of Claude feels disjointed and doesn’t really add anything to the narrative, except to shore up Emanuel’s otherwise shaky heterosexuality. Clyde and Linda both spend a lot of time babbling reverent nonsense at Emanuel about her introverted mysteriousness to insist that the audience should continue to find her intriguing with very little character development. 21-year-old Scodelario has been stirring the rapidly cooling embers of stock manic pixie dream girl tropes (with the particularly offputting caveat of emotional unavailability) since she was 14, so the aloof informed attractiveness shtick is boring on a film-specific level and in the scope of her entire opus.

Something isn’t right about the baby from day one. Linda is initially reluctant to allow Emanuel to see Chloe and Emanuel frequently hallucinates ocean sounds or even rising water when near the nursery. We later learn this is an allusion to the peaceful swimming dream her mother had before starting fatal labor. It’s like a psychosis roulette! Emanuel soon discovers that “Chloe” is actually a lifelike doll, strangely contradicting a photograph she found earlier of Linda and her estranged husband holding a real baby. This is where a lot of critics checked out. The doll revelation is made 30 minutes in and the pacing of the remaining hour is admittedly clunky. If you can’t get past the LOL reflex of “I can’t believe they’re treating the doll like a real person,” this probably isn’t the film for you because everything after that becomes unbearably campy. And frankly, I think the impulse to treat things deemed inauthentic as laughable or not human exemplifies the callous ideology that the film is warning against. When viewed as a commentary on loss and mental illness, the story becomes poignant and heartbreaking.

Emanuel becomes increasingly occupied with caring for Chloe. — Emanuel becomes increasingly preoccupied with tending to Chloe.

Emanuel reacts to the doll with horror and disgust. Curiously, she stops short of questioning Linda, although she is mortified by and actively tries to thwart Linda’s attempts to introduce Chloe to the neighbors. Emanuel shrouds herself in secrecy as she and Linda develop a routine, caring for Chloe as if she were a normal infant. Her willingness to indulge Linda’s fantasy, perhaps a signal of her own dwindling sanity, increases as her infatuation with Linda intensifies. The parallel grieving metaphor here isn’t subtle. Emanuel always wondered what life would be like if her mom lived instead of her and she finds an unsettling possibility in Linda, surprisingly augmenting her guilt. By the same token, Linda states several times that she wants Chloe to grow up to be like Emanuel and sees Emanuel and Chloe as sisters, indicating that she perceives Emanuel as her child in a roundabout way. Emanuel appears to start independently believing in the realness of Chloe as she becomes more determined for her and Linda to rebuild their fractured families together, a shift cemented by her choosing to feed Chloe an actual bottle of milk when they are home alone.

Still, the lesbian element always remains forced back onto the periphery, for reasons I don’t understand. Emanuel’s stepmom even privately warns Linda that Emanuel might make a move because she didn’t have a mom and is therefore confused. Way to play on every gay stereotype ever. She awkwardly tries to confirm that Linda is straight and Linda hesitates for a second before we cut to the next scene. We get all of these cat-and-mouse subtextual moments throughout, but the weirdest thing is that none of it goes anywhere. Emanuel and Linda never act on their sexual tension, but it’s never denied or put to rest either. I question why that dynamic was included in the first place. Queer desire is demonized as facilitating incest and nothing more, which is extremely and almost needlessly unfortunate given the lack of narrative relevance.

Oh, and Janice (the stepmom) confides to Linda that she’s infertile and that’s part of the reason for her uneasiness with Emanuel. No one in this movie can have a positive relationship to childbirth.

Linda becomes distraught upon realizing that the doll isn't the real Chloe. — Linda becomes distraught upon realizing that the doll isn’t actually Chloe.

Things take an abrupt nosedive when Linda agrees to go on a date with Emanuel’s coworker, Arthur. Afterwards, she ignores Emanuel’s protests and excitedly suggests Arthur take a peek at the sleeping baby. He quickly points out that it’s a doll, shattering Linda’s carefully constructed bubble. She recognizes the baby as fake for the first time and immediately flies into a panic, demanding that Emanuel tell her Chloe’s true location and accusing her of stealing Chloe. I find it hard to believe that someone as delusional as Linda would snap back to reality the second someone brought up the tiniest shred of rational doubt, but Biel’s acting is phenomenal in this scene. Most intriguingly of all, Emanuel protectively cradles Chloe as both Arthur and Linda berate the doll as a lie, suggesting that she’s just as far gone if not more so than Linda.

Arthur drags Linda away and Emanuel curls up on the floor with the doll, suddenly finding herself swimming underwater. Emanuel’s mom appears in the distance and Chloe comes to life. The two of them swim away together, leaving Emanuel alone. After Emmanuel passes out and wakes up in the hospital, Linda’s husband explains that the doll was the culmination of Linda’s mental breakdown following the death of their infant daughter. Motherhood is just so healthy. Linda is sent to a mental institution.

Linda and Emanuel lay together calmly in the graveyard.

Undeterred, Emanuel enlists the help of her boyfriend to break Linda out. She tells Linda that Chloe isn’t okay, but she shouldn’t worry because Chloe is with her mom now. Together, they bury the doll on top of Emanuel’s mom’s grave and gaze at the stars together, their broken pasts now finally at peace.

2013 Oscar Week: ‘Hitchcock’ Turns the Master of Suspense into a Real Life Dud

Hitchcock

Guest post written by Candice Frederick, originally published at Reel Talk. Cross-posted with permission.

You’d think that any movie that involves the late great Alfred Hitchcock would be riveting, spectacular and painstakingly suspenseful to watch. But Hitchcock, Sacha Gervasi’s debut feature film that follows the days leading up to the production of the filmmaker’s classic film, Psycho, is none of the above.

Right out the gate, Hitchcock struggles to simply be interesting. Although Anthony Hopkins looks comfortable inside the physical girth of Hitchcock and the actor captures both his enthusiasm for movies while also basking in the perks of being “the master of suspense,” John J. McLaughlin’s trite screenplay gives him little to work with. It makes his performance look like a great imitation, at best (reminiscent of Meryl Streep in 2009’s Julie & Julia). Instead of offering a candid and enlightening view of Hitchcock outside of his work, or even his deeper psychological thoughts behind Psycho, we get an artless chronicle of Hitchcock’s financial straits and lack of support from the studio. After McLaughlin’s brilliant screenplay for 2010’s Black Swan, this is a real letdown.

Another thing the film focuses on is the infamous shower scene in Psycho. Arguably one of the finest shot scenes in film history, Hitchcock spends so much time enticing the audience with it that when it happens, it’s just not special and just a quick moment. It really just plays up Hitchcock’s satisfaction with the audience’s reaction to the scene. Then it all fades to black. You just don’t do Hitchcock like that.

Helen Mirren as Alma Reville (aka Lady Hitchcock), Anthony Hopkins as Hitchcock in Hitchcock

The one-dimensional character development doesn’t end with Hitchcock. Helen Mirren’s Lady Hitchcock (Alma Reville) is not much better realized. Mrs. Hitchcock’s story almost solely exists as an aside to her husband’s. Granted, the movie does show that she was more than just a wife; she was her husband’s right arm. She often helped rewrite his scripts, including Psycho, and appeared to be the glue that held her husband’s motivation for his career, even when he was deemed too old for Hollywood and the cards were stacked against him. Her talent was apparently overshadowed by her husband’s success. The arc is far too bland for an actress of Mirren’s caliber, but at least Mirren gets a few zingers to deliver to counter Hopkins’ “Try the finger sandwiches. They’re made of real fingers.”

Lines like that will undoubtedly give you a twinkle in your eye, since it’s easy to believe that Hitchcock the man might have had a fondness for perverse humor like that. But it just seems like lazy writing if you throw a couple of lines like that here and there when the rest of the film left much to be desired.

(L-R): Jessica Biehl as Vera Miles, Scarlett Johansson as Janet Leigh, James D’Arcy as Anthony Perkins in Hitchcock

With an impressive cast, including Toni Colette and Scarlett Johansson, and a rich subject, Hitchcock really should have been a better movie. Colette was completely underused as Hitchcock’s assistant, and Johansson’s portrayal of actress Janet Leigh provided nothing more than a few quips about her décolletage and screaming in the shower. Cloud Atlas‘ James D’Arcy as Anthony Perkins is a dead ringer for the actor, even if he only had one tepidly compelling scene with Hopkins that digs into the character. Even Jessica Biel as actress Vera Miles is decent, even though her storyline had such potential but was glazed over and ultimately flatlined.

Gervasi at least manages to recapture the essence of Hollywood in the 50s and 60s with a recreation of the vintage studio lot and classy Tinseltown fashion. But stripping the character down to a point where his fictional depiction is far less fascinating than the actual persona seems counterproductive. If Hitchcock himself was alive today, he’d undoubtedly turn his nose up.

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Candice Frederick is a former NABJ award-winning journalist for Essence Magazine, and the writer for the film blog, Reel Talk. She is also the TV/Film critic for The Urban Daily. Follow her on Twitter.

A Few Good Women

In honor of Veteran’s Day, I thought I’d highlight female veterans and some movies featuring female soldiers.

The news about female vets has been plentiful as of late, and none of it particularly good or encouraging. More female veterans than ever are homeless, and government-sponsored housing is in short supply, according to the Air Force Times.

The homeless female veteran is a relatively new phenomenon because only recently have so many women — more than 190,000 in Iraq and Afghanistan alone — been serving in the military, said Todd DePastino, a historian at Waynesburg University who wrote a book on the history of homelessness.
The number of homeless female veterans have gone up — from 3 percent of all homeless veterans a decade ago to 5 percent, the VA says.

“It’s a national embarrassment,” said Paul Rieckhoff, executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.

Last March, Salon.com published an article titled “The Private War of Women Soldiers” about widespread sexual assault in the military, which has currently serving women refusing to leave their cots at night for fear of being raped on their way to the latrines. Columbia professor Helen Benedict also writes of the intensity of dealing with Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD) from combat and sexual assault.

Not everyone realizes how different the Iraq war is for women than any other American war in history. More than 160,500 American female soldiers have served in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Middle East since the war began in 2003, which means one in seven soldiers is a woman. Women now make up 15 percent of active duty forces, four times more than in the 1991 Gulf War. At least 450 women have been wounded in Iraq, and 71 have died — more female casualties and deaths than in the Korean, Vietnam and first Gulf Wars combined. And women are fighting in combat.

Officially, the Pentagon prohibits women from serving in ground combat units such as the infantry, citing their lack of upper-body strength and a reluctance to put girls and mothers in harm’s way. But mention this ban to any female soldier in Iraq and she will scoff.

“Of course we were in combat!” said Laura Naylor, 25, who served with the Army Combat Military Police in Baghdad from 2003-04. “We were interchangeable with the infantry. They came to our police stations and helped pull security, and we helped them search houses and search people. That’s how it is in Iraq.”

Women are fighting in ground combat because there is no choice. This is a war with no front lines or safe zones, no hiding from in-flying mortars, car and roadside bombs, and not enough soldiers. As a result, women are coming home with missing limbs, mutilating wounds and severe trauma, just like the men.

With the surge of women serving in the military, there doesn’t seem to be a correlative rise in female soldiers depicted in film. Here are a few movies featuring female soldiers. All plot summaries are from IMDb.

Courage Under Fire (1996)

The pilot of a rescue copter, Captain Karen Walden, died shortly before her helicopter crew was rescued after it crashed in Desert Storm. It first appears that she made a spectacular rescue of a downed helicopter crew, then held her own crew together to fight off the Iraqis after her copter crashed. LT Colonel Serling, who is struggling with his own demons from Desert Storm is assigned to investigate and award her the Medal of Honor. But some conflicting accounts from her crew and soldiers in the area, cause him to be question whether she deserves it. Written by Brian W Martz {B.Martz@Genie.com}

Rent Courage Under Fire from Netflix

A Few Good Men (1992)

In this dramatic courtroom thriller, Lt. Daniel Kaffee, a Navy lawyer who has never seen the inside of the courtroom, defends two stubborn Marines who have been accused of murdering a colleague. Kaffee is known as being lazy and had arranged for a plea bargain. Downey’s Aunt Ginny appoints Cmdr. Galloway to represent him. Also on the legal staff is Lt. Sam Weinberg. The team rounds up many facts and Kaffee is discovering that he is really cut out for trial work. The defense is originally based upon the fact that PFC Santiago, the victim, was given a “CODE RED”. Santiago was basically a screw-up. At Gitmo, screw-ups aren’t tolerated. Especially by Col. Nathan Jessup. In Cuba, Jessup and two senior officers try to give all the help they can, but Kaffee knows something’s fishy. In the conclusion of the film, the fireworks are set off by a confrontation between Jessup and Kaffee. Written by Matt Curtolo {curt@epix.net}

Rent A Few Good Men from Netflix

G.I. Jane (1997)

When a crusading chairperson of the military budget committee pressures the would be Navy secretary to begin full gender integration of the service, he offers the chance for a test case for a female trainee in the elite Navy SEALS commando force. Lt. Jordan O’Niel is given the assignment, but no one expects her to succeed in an inhumanly punishing regime that has a standard 60% dropout rate for men. However, O’Niel is determined to prove everyone wrong. Written by Kenneth Chisholm {kchishol@execulink.com}

Rent G.I. Jane from Netflix

Home of the Brave (2006)

The day after they get the word they’ll go home in two weeks, a group of soldiers from Spokane are ambushed in an Iraqi city. Back stateside we follow four of them – a surgeon who saw too much, a teacher who’s a single mom and who lost a hand in the ambush, an infantry man whose best friend died that day, and a soldier who keeps reliving the moment he killed a civilian woman. Each of the four has come home changed, each feels dislocation. Group therapy, V.A. services, halting gestures from family and colleagues, and regular flashbacks keep the war front and center in their minds. They’re angry, touchy, and explosive: can a warrior find peace back home? Written by {jhailey@hotmail.com}

Rent Home of the Brave from Netflix

Lioness (2008)

Lioness presents the untold story of the first group of women soldiers in US history to be sent into direct ground combat, in violation of official policy. Told through intimate accounts, journal excerpts, archive footage, as well as interviews with military commanders, the film follows five women who served together for a year in Iraq. With captivating detail, this probing documentary reveals the unexpected course of events that began with using US women soldiers to defuse tensions with local civilians, but resulted in the women’s fighting in some of the bloodiest counter-insurgency battles of the war. Together the women’s candid narratives and scenes from their lives back home form a portrait of the emotional and psychological effects of war from a female point of view. Lioness is the first film to bridge the gap between perception and reality of the role women in the military are playing in Iraq, capturing an historical turning point for American society.

Read an interview with filmmakers Meg McLagan and Daria Sommers.

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Have we missed some good ones? Compared with the problems female vets face, most of these movies feel like token representations. Demi Moore actually won a Razzie for Worst Actress in G.I. Jane. I’ve left out the many depictions of female soldiers in science fiction films and TV shows (Starbuck from Battlestar Gallactica immediately comes to mind), perhaps unfairly. Tell us movies we’ve left out in the comments section.