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