Lisa Cholodenko – Bitch Flicks

Frances McDormand Shines As a Complicated, Frustrating Woman in HBO’s ‘Olive Kitteridge’

With her gray curls and thick, veined ankles, unadorned on screen as she is in the book, Olive, captured by McDormand, is a fascinating and complicated character. She is ferocious, intelligent, tactless, cruel, and achingly kind, sometimes all at once. The actress is not physically alike Olive, who Strout described as stout and big, but she inhabits the spirit of the character so completely – a fact sure to be recognized awards season – that you cannot take your eyes off her even as you wonder what cringe worthy thing she will say or do next.

This is a guest post by Paula Schwartz.

Frances McDormand is magnificent as the title character of the four-part HBO miniseries Olive Kitteridge, based on the Pulitizer Prize-winning novel by Elizabeth Strout that chronicles the illicit affairs, crime, hilarity and tragedy that ensures in the seemingly placid and hardscrabble New England town of Crosby over a 25-year time span.

The story begins when Olive is in her early 40s and teaches seventh-grade math. She is married to the kindly pharmacist, whom she often badgers and insults. The miniseries is as much a story of Olive’s journey as a portrait of an ordinary marriage with its trials and tribulations, petty resentments, and minor victories. Richard Jenkins is terrific as Olive’s long-suffering husband, Henry, who is as easy-going and relatively sunny as Olive is curmudgeonly and negative.

The action continues until Olive is in her early 70s, retired, and reconciled to the rhythm of an uneventful but relatively happy marriage. During the years she tries to find balance in her relationship with her son (John Gallagher Jr.), whom she loves but who resents and fears her sharp tongue and mood swings. Life takes cruel and typical twists for Olive as it does for most people.

Romance enters unexpectedly in late life in the form of wealthy widower Sam (Bill Murray), a bald-headed old man with a big belly she discovers one morning slumped over on her walking path, possibly from a heart attack. “Are you dead?” she asked him. “Apparently not,” he replied. Tragedy and comedy co-exist naturally in Olive’s world.

McDormand and Tom Hanks executive produced the miniseries, which hews to the spirit of the book that has been gracefully adapted by Jane Anderson and expertly directed by The Kids Are All Right director Lisa Cholodenko. Except for Hanks, they all turned up last week at the show’s premiere at the SVA Theater in Manhattan, along with cast members Rosemarie DeWitt and Cory Michael Smith.

On the red carpet, I asked author Elizabeth Strout who inspired her for the character of Olive:

“People always wonder if it’s my mother. It’s not. I grew up in Maine. Even though I’ve lived here for over 30 years I grew up on a dirt road with many older relatives, old aunts, mostly aunts, often grumpy, and it was just the air I breathed as a child, so it was sort of natural for me to find that character as a compilation I think of many of these different people that I grew up with.”

I asked Strout how she came up with Olive’s physicality, her large size and ungainliness:

“Olive just came to me as somebody who was large. She’d gotten larger and she knew that and was uncomfortable with that, but wasn’t going to stop her from eating. I could almost feel it and sometimes, even now, I guess because there’s been so much written about Olive, all of a sudden – this is already a few years ago in my writing career – I just looked at my ankles the other day and I thought, ‘Oh, they’ll get bigger, like Olive’s,’” she laughed. “There wasn’t any particular person that I based her on. I just saw her and felt her.”

At the end of the book Olive seems to be embarking on a romance. I asked Strout if she had any plans for a follow-up book on Olive:

“I’ve actually found some old Olive stories that I hadn’t used. I’m such a disorganized person but I don’t know. I think maybe I better just let her go and have people hope the best for her.”

Strout told me the project for the series became with a phone call three years ago from her agent who told her,

“You know, Frances McDormand is interested in this,’ and I was like, ‘Really? Wow! That’s great.’ I met with Frances a few times in New York and we talked about Olive. We talked about different things. She’s an amazing person and actor and she got it. She knew about it because Olive’s very interior. There’s a lot that goes inside without her speaking it. And Frances does that. She shows us in her minimalist motions and her facial expressions.”

I asked if McDormand asked for tips on portraying the character but her only questions were unsurprisingly about adapting the book:

“She asked me about the timing. Like how did I think they would get the 25 years in? I said I had no idea. I don’t know anything about film. I was no good,” Strout laughed.

The author told me she never envisioned her book as a movie:

“No. I did not. The Burgess Boys, which I just wrote, I actually can see that as a movie because the narratives much clearer and the characters are very distinct in certain ways. But with Olive I didn’t. I did not think of it, so it’s extra special for me.”

I asked screenwriter Jane Anderson about how she became involved and about the challenges of adapting the book:

“I read the book for pleasure and when Fran called me up and said, ‘Are you interested in adapting it?’ I said absolutely. But it took me a couple of years to get it right because it’s a great piece of literature and the better the piece of literature, the more profound and subtle the piece of literature, the harder it is to adapt for screen. And because my parents are in Olive and Henry I saw the theme of the book as the theme of making a marriage work and I think ultimately they do work as a couple. I think often the pessimistic, difficult people and tender, easy people often work together as a unit. They need each other.”

The main goal was to be true to the book’s lack of sentimentality. Olive is a character you can’t stand at first but she grows on you. Anderson agreed:

“That first chapter she’s terrible. You can’t bear the woman. She’s cranky. She’s cruel. She’s dismissive. But then there’s the brilliance of Fran. Because Fran didn’t just want to just make her sentimental. Fran didn’t care if you liked her not and that’s what made her so good. Fran has no vanity. It was lovely to have her voice, the voice of Olive.”

Poster for Olive Kitteridge — Poster for *Olive Kitteridge*

Jenkins, who is so terrific as Olive’s husband, told me he didn’t worry about his character coming across as one-dimensional or too much of a milquetoast:

“I think the time made it possible, the movie’s four-hour length. You get to see a complex life, not just certain characteristics of a person. You get to see the whole person. Nobody is just one thing, so I think that helped.”

Director Lisa Cholodenko told me how she became involved in the project when McDormand called her three years ago and told her about the book, which she then sent:

“She said read it. I’m going to play it. It hasn’t been published. I’m going to deal with HBO, see if you’re interested in adapting it.” The director told me she loved the book and heard McDormand’s voice but the timing wasn’t right for her. “I told Frances, I don’t know how to adapt this. Go with God. I hope you find somebody awesome to do it. I don’t think I’m the person to do it now, but I would love to talk to you if you get a script. And three years later I got a call form HBO saying hey we have this script. Are you still interested? I said yeah I’ll read it. I was hooked.”

I asked about the casting choice of Bill Murray as Olive’s possible love interest. He has a legendary reputation for being difficult to contact and refusing most movie parts, so his casting is particularly intriguing.

“What’s not to love about Bill Murray?” Cholodenko chortled. “What was more wonderful is you never know if he’s going to show up, so you’re like, Yeah, Yeah, no Bill’s going to do it! Yeah let me know when he lands. And he did!”

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.

After The Brat Pack: Ally Sheedy in ‘High Art’

Although a few who had fallen under the brat pack sobriquet (like Demi Moore) continued in mainstream star-vehicles well into the 90s (and Rob Lowe, dismissed as another pretty face in the ’80s, was able to sustain a TV career into the present), most had faded from the public view by then, including Ally Sheedy (after starring in 1987’s ‘Maid to Order,’ her own ‘Weekend At Bernie’s’) –though earlier in her career she, of the whole “Pack,” received some of the best reviews for her work. Sheedy went on to reinvent herself–and make good on her earlier promise–in a series of meaty roles in independent films in the late 90s: the most well known one (for which she won several awards) was Lucy Berliner in writer-director Lisa Cholodenko’s 1998 feature debut ‘High Art.’

This post by Ren Jender appears as part of our theme week on The Brat Pack.

I was already an adult when the term “Brat Pack” was coined to refer to 1980s young actresses and actors who, in spite of being slightly older than I was, usually came to prominence playing high school kids. As the ’80s petered out. most of these actors starred in progressively crappier movies (Weekend at Bernie’s is one notorious example) and audiences became clued in to how bad these films were–and stopped showing up for them.

Although a few who had fallen under the Brat Pack sobriquet (like Demi Moore) continued in mainstream star-vehicles well into the 90s (and Rob Lowe, dismissed as another pretty face in the ’80s, was able to sustain a TV career into the present) most had faded from the public view by then, including Ally Sheedy (after starring in 1987’s Maid to Order, her own Weekend At Bernie’s) –though earlier in her career she, of the whole “Pack”, received some of the best reviews for her work. Sheedy went on to reinvent herself–and make good on her earlier promise–in a series of meaty roles in independent films in the late 90s: the most well known one (for which she won several awards) was Lucy Berliner in writer-director Lisa Cholodenko’s 1998 feature debut High Art.

Radha Mitchell’s Syd is the main character, a young, ambitious hard-worker at an arty NYC photography magazine. She tells the receptionist of her promotion (one of the many ways to tell this film was made in the 90s: she got her job after working at the magazine as an intern), “I’m not really assisting anyone. I’m an assistant editor,” but we see the male editor uses her as a glorified go-fer. Reading for work in the bath at home she feels water dripping on her from above and interrupts the constant (if subdued) 24-hour drug party going on in the apartment of her upstairs neighbor, Lucy (Sheedy) to find the source of the leak. Lucy lives with her strung-out German girlfriend Greta (Patricia Clarkson, hilariously out of it for much of the film, evoking the equally heroin-addled, famous blonde, Nico, even as she name-drops gay addict-director Rainer Werner Fassbinder). While Syd wraps duct tape around the leak she notices and compliments the framed photos all around the apartment, which are Lucy’s.

Although the style of these photos (and the ones Lucy takes later) look, to contemporary eyes, like the faux-realism of American Apparel and some Calvin Klein ads, in 1998 they seemed to reference the photographer Nan Goldin who also used elements of her own life (including drug addiction, the queer community and domestic violence) as documentary fodder for her work.

Lucy turns out to have been someone who was making a name for herself before she left town a decade before. The clueless male editor Syd reports to has no idea who she is, but his boss Dominique (Anh Duong) does, as does the hot, young male photographer of the moment working on the magazine’s upcoming cover. Through Syd Dominique enlists Lucy to do their next cover instead, even though Lucy had insisted to Syd, “I don’t really do that anymore.” Lucy makes Syd her editor.

Syd had, at first, tried to get close to Lucy for professional reasons, but she finds herself snorting heroin with Lucy, in the company of Greta and her drug friends, and, while her live-in boyfriend (Gabriel Mann) cools his heels at a party in Lucy’s living room, Syd makes out with Lucy in the bedroom. Greta rouses herself long enough to notice the attention Lucy is paying to Syd, dismissing her as a “psycho-phant.”

Sheedy herself famously had her own struggles with drugs and because of them had stopped working for a time. The monologue she has in which Lucy explains to Syd how she “fucked up” seems very real. Sheedy’s face is seemingly naked of not just of makeup but of flesh, the point of her chin and cheekbones stretching her pale skin, leaving circles under her eyes. She’s startlingly thin (not merely very slender, as she was in the mid to late 80s, which in turn was a slimming down from her more full-faced look in the early 80s) in the fashion of a lot of downtown types (and junkies): her shoulder blades under thin t-shirts and tank tops are so prominent they seem ready to sprout wings.

One of Lucy's photos of Syd — One of Lucy’s photos of Syd

Sheedy also has great chemistry not just with Mitchell (who was fresh from playing another queer woman in her native Australia in the light-to-the-point-of-complete-forgettability Love and Other Catastrophes) but also with Clarkson (in the film role where critics first took notice of her). In spite of Greta often being on the verge of nodding off, she is still luscious and playful in her black lingerie and long, blonde hair partially piled on her head, like a vintage Brigitte Bardot gone awry. The film’s treatment of women’s sexuality is a nice contrast to the lesbian-bed-death clichés (and anti-chemistry) of Julianne Moore and Annette Bening in Cholodenko’s more recent The Kids Are All Right.

Cholodenko made a couple of spot-on, very funny shorts about queer women before High Art, so I was disappointed with the “tragic lesbian” turn the film takes at the end–both when I first saw the film in 1998 and rewatching it now. In a way tragedy seems like an easy out–and rings less true than the gradual relationship burnout experienced by the main gay couple also impacted by drug addiction) in Ira Sach’s excellent, autobiographical Keep The Lights On. Substance abuse in the queer community is perhaps a more pressing issue than we think it is: I wonder about the “coincidence” of two of the most closely observed, relatively recent films about drug addiction and art both made by openly queer writer-directors. But artist careers ebb and flow for reasons that are more complicated than a drug overdose: shortly after her run as the newly crowned queen of indie films, Sheedy played the lead, then walked out of an off-Broadway production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and though she’s still around (you can follow her on Twitter @allysheedy1) she hasn’t starred in many films since.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdRkafIrh_c”]

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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

LGBTQI Week: The Kids Are Terrible, The Sex Is Worse

(Pour me another … this is going to be a long night.)

This is a guest review by Nino Testa. When The Kids Are All Right came out in 2010, it was widely considered one of the best films of the year. (I happen to think the movie kind of sucked, but there is no accounting for taste.) The film was written and directed by Lisa Cholodenko, who is best known for her 1998 film High Art, perhaps giving Kids queer cred in LGBT and straight circles. Kids tells the story of two queer mothers, Jules and Nic (played by Julianne Moore and Annette Bening respectively), whose annoying teenage children initiate contact with the donor whose sperm was used to impregnate each of the women. The mothers begrudgingly allow the contact, and in the middle of the movie Jules begins an affair with the sperm donor, played by the calm, cool and scruffy Mark Ruffalo. The emotional crux of the narrative revolves around Nic’s discovery of the affair, her subsequent emotional breakdown and the restoration of family tranquility as Nic decides to salvage her marriage despite Jules’ infidelity. Also: this is supposedly a comedy.

The film wasn’t just lauded as a cinematic achievement, it was also celebrated as a “positive” and “honest” representation of quotidian lesbian life in an age where gay marriage dominates any discussion of LGBT people. In addition to multiple Academy Award nominations—for acting, writing, and best picture, but not, interestingly enough, best director—the film has 93% positive reviews on rottentomatoes, so pretty much everyone who gets to decide that movies are good told us that this one was worthy of our time. Many of the reviews focus on the film’s supposedly groundbreaking “realistic” depiction of lesbians (I guess these people have never seen The Hunger.) Eric Snider from film.com refers to the characters as “realistically portrayed.” A.O. Scott from the New York Times writes: “The performances are all close to perfect, which is to say that the imperfections of each character are precisely measured and honestly presented.” Tom Long of the Detroit News called it “one of the year’s most honest and endearing films.” (“Honest” is the key word in all of these reviews. We might want to think about what it means to call a work of fiction “honest.” To say that it is “honest” means that it confirms, in some way, our worldview; it proves something we think to be true.) And then there is this gem from The Wall Street Journal, which really sums up the self-congratulatory, progressive reviews of this film: “The basic joke here, and it’s a rich one, is that the dynamics of gay marriages differ little from those of straight marriages.” This is, of course, the ultimate compliment that the mainstream press can make about queer people—that they are just like straight people. Judging from the film, what seems to be at stake is whether or not gay married couples can be as unhappy and passive aggressive as straight married couples, thus making them more deserving of legal protections.

In a Shewired.com article by Kathy Wolfe, the founder of Wolfe, the world’s largest exclusive distributor of lesbian and gay movies, Wolfe sings the film’s praises for its place in lesbian film history, calling it, without a shred of irony, “The Lesbian Brokeback Mountain”:

For a variety of reasons, The Kids Are All Right will be the most widely distributed lesbian-themed mainstream movie in history. Like that beloved yet sad gay cowboy movie, it has major stars in the gay roles: Julianne Moore and Annette Bening as lesbian moms. This ensures that the film will reach a wide audience. Most exciting of all — with its entertaining yet ultimately politically powerful message of putting a lesbian family front and center — the film will open hearts and minds very much like Brokeback did on its theatrical release.

Let’s read that statement again: “the politically powerful message of putting a lesbian family front and center.” What makes the film a positive political intervention, for Wolfe, is that lesbians exist as subjects, never mind the content of the film. Wolfe goes on to discuss “how far we’ve come” in the representation of lesbians in cinema and express her gratitude for the wide release of this film—suggesting that the sheer existence of LGBT-themed films by LGBT people (Cholodenko is queer-identified) is an unquestionably good thing for LGBT people, no matter what the films are about.

OK—so that’s the story about the film. Now, what of the film itself?

Let’s start with perhaps the most memorable scene in the movie, which finds Jules and Nic trying to make whoopee, but unable to get into the groove. They call in the big guns, as it were, and pop in some outdated gay male porn to get their juices flowing. Nic watches the porn while Jules—completely covered by bedding, because, you know, why would anyone want to see themselves having sex with Julianne Moore? So much for realism—takes care of business. Their annoying son catches them in the act and has a few questions about their choice of aphrodisiac. The entire sexual encounter has been a letdown from the get-go, but the interruption by the annoying son ensures that nobody will be getting off tonight. In one of the film’s funniest scenes, Jules comments on the “realism” of lesbian pornography, suggesting that it isn’t erotic because the women in the film aren’t lesbians, which is, I’m assuming, a kind of joke about the film we are watching, in which two A-list straight actors are playing gay. What is so interesting about that joke is that it complicates the film’s own politics of representation (as articulated by Wolfe): Jules’ comment debunks the myth that any representation of queerness is as satisfying (sexually or otherwise) as any other.

(Headache? Great. I hate having sex with women.)

Contrast this underwhelming sex scene with the two opposite-sex sex scenes in the film. At the risk of generalizing and making normative claims about what constitutes good sex, both of the opposite-sex sex scenes—one with the Hulk and Julianne Moore, the other with the Hulk and Yaya DaCosta—are, objectively speaking, super f’ing hot. I mean, they are legit sex scenes. People are naked. People are getting off. Bodies are touching. There are noises. And rhythms. When Mark Ruffalo has sex with women, it is sweaty, passionate, multi-positioned, ass-baring, the-hills-are-alive-with-the-sound-of-heterosexuality sex; when Jules and Nic have sex, it is sad, lifeless, awkward and unsatisfying for literally everyone involved. It is unsatisfying for the women, who have a grin-and-bear it look on their faces; it is unsatisfying for the audience if they came to see cunnilingus so realistic that it would make them regret going to see the film with their parents (luckily Black Swan also came out in 2010); and it is unsatisfying for the women’s children, for whom their moms’ sexuality is a perpetual source of embarrassment: their porn, their toys, their PDA all elicit disgust from their children. And not just the typical “Ew gross my parents have sex” response, but legitimate mortification that the movie suggests feeds the children’s desire to meet their sperm donor. Their parents, according to the narrative, just aren’t enough for them—and they certainly aren’t enough for each other.

(Lesbian heartthrob, Mark Ruffalo.)

The contrast is, of course, the point. Jules and Nic are in a marriage-funk—Lesbian Bed Death and all that—thus Jules’s decision to look for new sexual thrills. I don’t think there is anything wrong with showing an unsuccessful or disappointing sexual encounter between queer women. I don’t think there is anything wrong with the fact that in a movie about queer women, the women need gay male porn to get off, or even that they desire and engage in sex with men, something to which some LGBT blogs and writers took exception (“girl, do you” pretty much sums up my philosophy on consensual sexual activity in movies or real life). But it does give one pause that a movie ostensibly about lesbians cannot imagine the possibility of satisfying sex between women, even as opposite-sex sex is portrayed as reliably orgasmic (newsflash: it ain’t). This film, which is being called the “the Lesbian Brokeback,” is organized almost entirely around the rise and fall of Mark Ruffalo’s penis. The narrative is phallocentric in much the same way as pornography featuring a male-female-female threesome (or any hetero-aimed porno) is phallocentric: the man’s penis is depicted as the most satisfying sexual toy, the most direct line to women’s pleasure. Sure, women can do some stuff to each other…but it’s basically foreplay, if it amounts to anything at all.

Further proof of the film’s phallocentrism comes from a quick search on IMDB where the plot key words listed for this film are:

Sperm | Sperm Donor | Biological Father | College | Restaurant

There is no mention of lesbians, motherhood, marital problems, or women at all. The fact that Mark Ruffalo’s character owns a goddamn restaurant seems to have more relevance than the fact that this is a movie about queer women. Moreover, the title of the film, which is the name of a Who song, emphasizes the well-being of the children—(See, gay moms can produce annoying, maladjusted and ungrateful teens, just like you!)—and deemphasizes the women who are supposedly kept “front and center.” For a movie that is being called a crowning achievement of lesbian cinema, lesbianism always seems to be not quite the point.

(They are the worst.)

Now, a movie about lesbian moms and the grown children who resulted from their insemination could, one would imagine, take on many forms. What we should be asking is: why this form? Why this story, and why this story as the one that we elevate to an enshrined place in lesbian cinema (It made the top 30 on an IMDB list of the “Best Lesbian Movies”). When critics call the depiction of lesbians “honest” what worldview has the film confirmed for them? It seems to me to confirm the lesson espoused by another “classic lesbian-themed” film, Chasing Amy—that all lesbians really want, all they really need, is sex with men. And none of this would bother me nearly as much if people didn’t talk about movies like this as “changing hearts and minds” and battling homophobia. It’s Glee-syndrome. If everyone involved in the movie—including the critics who reviewed it and the audiences who raved about it—weren’t so self-congratulatory, you might just be able to experience this as the mediocre film it is and relish in Annette Bening’s mastery of awkward tipsy dinner conversation.

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Nino Testa is a doctoral candidate in English at Tufts University, in Medford, Massachusetts. He also works at the Tufts Women’s Center and LGBT Center.