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Best Picture Nominee Review Series: Inception

This review of Inception originally appeared on Bitch Flicks in August 2010, when the film was in theatres.

The plot of Inception is deceptively simple: a tale of corporate espionage sidetracked by a man’s obsession with his dead wife and complicated by groovy special effects and dream technology. As far as summer blockbusters and action/heist/corporate espionage movies go, it’s not bad. Once you get beyond the genuinely beautiful camera work and dizzying special effects, however, you’re not left with much.

One thing that really bothers me about the film–aside from its dull, lifeless, stereotypical, and utterly useless female characters (which I’ll get to in a moment)–is that nothing is at stake. Dom Cobb (Leo DiCaprio) and his team take on a big new job: one seemingly powerful businessman, Saito (Ken Watanabe), wants an idea planted into the mind of another powerful businessman, Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy). Specifically, Saito wants Fischer to believe that dear old dad’s dying wish was for him to break up the family business, so that, we assume, Saito wins the game of capitalism. Should the team go through with the profitable job? We aren’t supposed to care about the answer to this question or what is at stake in the plot.

It’s assumed that, of course we want Cobb to win because he’s really Leo, and, you see, Leo is talented but Troubled. What troubles him? You guessed it: a woman. A woman whose very name–Mal (played by Marion Cotillard, an immensely talented actress who’s wasted in this role)–literally means “bad.” Who or what will rescue Cobb/Leo from his troubles? You guessed it again: a woman. This time, it’s a woman whose very name–Ariadne (played by Ellen Page in a way that demands absolutely no commentary)–means “utterly pure,” and who is younger, asexual (a counter to Mal’s dangerous French sexuality) and without any backstory or past of her own to smudge the movie’s–and her own–focus on Cobb/Leo. So, it’s not a stretch here to say that Cobb needs a pure woman to escape the bad one. Virgin/whore stereotype, anyone?

SPOILER ALERT

So, what makes Mal so bad? In life, she was his faithful wife (for all we know) and mother of his two children. In the film, she’s not even a real woman, but a figment of Cobb’s imagination, haunting him with her suicide. (Note: For a better version of this story, see Tarkovsky’s Solaris, or the crappy Soderbergh adaptation starring George Clooney.) Her constant appearances threaten Cobb’s inception task, and while we can imagine a suicide haunting this hard-working man, we learn the much uglier truth later: while developing his theory of “inception,” Cobb used Mal as his first test subject–planting the idea in her mind that reality was not what she believed it to be. Now we have a main character who exacted extreme emotional violence on his wife, driving her kill herself–yet she’s the evil one.

What makes Ariadne so pure? It’s simple, really. We know she was a brilliant student of architecture, and…and…and…that’s it. The film needed an architectural dream space that wouldn’t be marred by trauma, or memory, or the like, so the natural choice would be for a computer program to design it, right? But a computer program couldn’t also counsel Cobb through the trauma of his wife’s suicide and, ultimately, coach him through killing her apparition. She is invested in getting through the job, as her life depends on it, but why does she give a damn about Cobb? Because she’s a woman architect, and women are nurturing creatures, right? So, we have a main character who exacted extreme emotional violence on his wife and threatens to kill his entire team through self-sabotage over guilt, but luckily he has one good woman to pull him through.

Is it possible to look differently at these two characters? Even if you read the movie as an allegory of filmmaking/storytelling, we’re still left with women who are sidekicks, and who serve merely as plot devices. Maria of The Hathor Legacy writes

Both Mal and Ariadne are symbols, not real characters, and I think this is reflected in the kinds of lines and characterization each is offered. In a movie where businessmen are dryly humorous, several million dollars are devoted to a man’s daddy-issues, and Dom’s nostalgic love for family is symbolized through a honey-heavy shot of golden light haloing his young moppets’ heads, the wooden-ness and flatness of the lines offered these characters is startlingly noticeable.

In other words, even if you refute the realism of the film and its characters, you’re still left with some major gender trouble. Is Cobb a sympathetic character? No. Do we want his big inception job to work? Don’t care. What I care about, for the purposes of this review, is that we have–yet again–a successful mainstream movie that relies on tired tropes of female characters.

Other interesting takes on Inception:

Inception Regrets Nothing on Feminist Music Geek
Five Non-Spoiler-y Things About Inception on the Bitch Magazine website
Inception: A Feminist Review on Clarissa’s Blog

Best Picture Nominee Review Series: The Social Network

The Social Network (2010)

This is a guest review from Carrie Polansky.

There are two ways to read women in the universe of The Social Network:

1. As unnecessary set dressing, existing solely for the aesthetic and sexual pleasure of men; or
2. As vital to the invention of social networking and, by extension, to the progression of the film’s plot.

The first reading is actually the one I prefer. The truth is, the female characters in The Social Network are so poorly written that it is easy to ignore them entirely. They are relegated to the roles of girlfriends, ex-girlfriends, one-night stands, groupies and lawyers out to destroy Mark Zuckerberg’s empire. None of them are directly involved in the creation of Facebook or any other social networking site – they are the scenery that accompanies the male protagonists (and antagonists) as they go about reinventing human communication. In fact, if you removed the women from the story entirely, nothing would really change.

My fiancé, who also writes movie reviews, likes to refer to this as “superfluous woman syndrome.” He points out the fact that such treatment of women has become a standard film cliché, and I tend to agree. I think that’s why it didn’t take away from my enjoyment of The Social Network. Yes, it’s maddening that so many films lack positive, three-dimensional roles for women, but perhaps there just wasn’t room for women in The Social Network. It’s based on a true story, after all – could it just be that no women played important roles in the real-life creation of Facebook? If that is indeed the case, I can’t fault Aaron Sorkin or David Fincher for leaving three-dimensional women out of the film.

And this brings us to the second potential reading of women in The Social Network. I typically hope that women fill vital roles in movies, but in the case of The Social Network, that reading is incredibly troubling. The film is bookended by Mark Zuckerberg’s relationship with his girlfriend, Erica. The first scene depicts Mark and Erica on a date, during which Mark is particularly rude and dismissive to Erica, and she, deciding she’s had enough of this treatment, dumps him. This leads Mark to write a highly inappropriate blog post about his ex-girlfriend, which leads him to create a website comparing the attractiveness of Harvard co-eds…which ultimately leads him to create Facebook. Which, by extension, means that Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook because his girlfriend broke his heart.

Again, this would be fine, if it was really how Facebook came into being. Except it wasn’t. Mark Zuckerberg has had the same girlfriend since 2003. And this brings us back to the first reading of The Social Network. The fact that no women do anything significant aside from giving Mark Zuckerberg motivational angst doesn’t mean that no women played significant roles in the creation of Facebook, because we already know that the truth has been altered in the transition to celluloid. All it means is that the filmmakers could not think of anything interesting for any woman to do, other than provide the male leads with enough angst to fuel the film’s action. And that’s the most horrifying reading of all.

Carrie Polansky is one of the Editors and Founders of Gender Across Borders. She graduated from Emerson College in 2008 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Visual and Media Arts (and a minor in Women’s and Gender Studies). Her review of P recious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire appeared in last year’s Bitch Flicks’ Best Picture Nominee Review Series. She vows to produce films with much, much better roles for women than the roles in The Social Network.

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.

Best Picture Nominee Review Series: The Fighter

The Fighter (2010)

This is a guest review from Jessica Freeman-Slade.

The adage of “Behind every good man is a great woman” is worn out, particularly in the realm of boxing movies. You can reduce the entirety of Rocky to the battered Stallone’s anguished cry of “Adrian!” as he wraps up a brutal fight. We’re meant to believe that what kept him alive was passion, love, a desire to see life through to the closing bell. It’s a hackneyed way of suggesting that though Rocky pounds with his fists, he really leads with his heart. This is the kind of boxing movie that writes itself, and one that doesn’t really need to be seen more than once. Luckily for everyone, David O. Russell’s The Fighter is not that kind of movie. Instead of being a movie about masculine physicality and power, we get a subversive movie about the women that wage real battles outside the ring, the kind of battles aren’t cleanly won.

The same idea is suggested in David O. Russell’s The Fighter, which tells the true story of boxer Mickey Ward’s comeback from next-to-nothing welterweight to one of the most admired fighters in the ring. Micky, as portrayed by that yummy hunk of Irish soda bread Mark Wahlberg, is a softie who finds himself losing fight after fight under the coaching of his half brother Dicky Eklund, a former boxer and current crack-addict (played by a wiry, skittish Christian Bale) and his domineering dye-job of a mother, Alice (the always wonderful Melissa Leo). Behind Dicky and Alice looms Micky’s seven sisters (the most foul-mouthed Greek chorus you could ever come upon), and beyond them the town of Lowell, a neighborhood that treats Dicky like the prizefighter he believes he once was. What defines Micky as a fighter is not so much his hesitation to throw a punch as his willingness to suffer them. In a fight shown early in the film, Micky is beaten so hard his cheek is punched clear through—a beating he takes because his brother and mother placed him against a much larger opponent, and one he takes because unless he fights, no one gets paid. Micky is punished as a boxer and as a son because he is obligated to his family—to his mother, a manager without any managerial tendencies; his brother, bossy in the ring but willing to jump through windows to escape being caught on the crack pipe. (Both sons seem more terrified of disappointing their mother than they do of getting arrested or beaten down.)

And they’re right to fear her: with her steely nerve, Alice is as brazen a coach, Mama Rose in the boxing ring, Joey LaMotta in a push-up bra. When Micky goes absent from her immediate purvey, she shows up on his porch with the sisters in tow, posing questions that put him right back in the place of the apologetic son. “What’re you doing, Mickster?” she asks, her eyes all hard with disdain and disappointment. “Who’s gonna look after you?” Alice knows that mother love—and filial obligation—is one of the most powerful weapons she has. “I have done everything, everything I could for you,” she mutters. Her life is bound up in her children, and her coaching mantra is entirely one of maternity. When she catches Dicky sneaking out of a crackhouse, she shakes her head, on the verge of tears, and he has to sing to her like a little boy to pull her back to sanity.

It’s not easy being the son of such a demanding mother, and while Dicky gets to joke his way back into favor, all Micky can do is fight—fight and lose, but fight nonetheless. So it makes sense, given his messed-up family history, that Micky first starts to move out of the nest after falling for Charlene, a local bartender and the first person to call “bullshit” on his family-as-manager situation. (As portrayed by an utterly unglamorous Amy Adams, Charlene is one of the few college-educated characters in the film—due to an athletic scholarship for high-jump.) Charlene’s power in this movie is not as a love interest, but as someone who doesn’t treat Micky like a son or like a brother. She tells him he has to seize control of his career, toss Alice and Dicky off his team, and get serious with a real coach. We think she’s imagining him as a full-grown, self-sufficient man, but she also can’t help but place herself as an equal contender for the managerial job. She gives him a reason to go looking for new management, but she also seats herself decisively by the side of the ring. This is not a woman content to show up after the fight is finished—she is very much an active participant. “You got your confidence and your focus from O’Keefe, and from Sal, and from your father, and from me,” she declares, and there’s not an ounce of hesitation in what she says. It’s thrilling to watch the formerly meek mouse known as Amy Adams get to play someone so fierce.

It’s when the instincts of the protective mother and the defensive girlfriend go up against each other that all hell breaks loose. Alice decides to storm over to Mickey’s house with her daughters in tow, ringing the bell and banging on the door just as Micky and Charlene are doing the nasty. The bell rings and rings, and Charlene, furious at being interrupted, throws on a t-shirt and storms downstairs. Alice pleads with Micky to leave and come back home, but Charlene accuses Alice of allowing her son to get hurt, instead of stepping in and protecting him. In the midst of a boxing movie, what we get is a treatise on how women are the only ones that really know how to fight. Alice calls Charlene a skank, an “MTV Girl” (because clearly all MTV girls are hefting pitches of lager and fending off crude bar patrons), and Charlene lands a solid punch on one of the Eklund sisters. Her fists crunch into the girl’s face, red hair flying wild and legs kicking, and we know that none of these women can be fucked with.

Dicky is manic, and Micky is panicked, but it’s the women who are the real pillars of strength. Thus Micky and Dicky are forced to mediate through their female counterparts—Alice, who can’t stand to let her son give up, or Charlene, who forces Dicky into conceding some deeply held delusions. The dual strength of these women are what define the movie, what separates The Fighter from its fellow inspirational tales of athletic triumph, and what catapults it into a movie about athletic effort, and the force of will. And in the movie’s final joyous fight, we still get a triumphant romantic kiss…and it feels anything but hackneyed.

Jessica Freeman-Slade is a writer who reviews and blogs on book culture at [tk] reviews, and has written reviews for The Millions and The Rumpus. She edits cookbooks and is the assistant managing editor for Alfred A. Knopf. She lives in Morningside Heights.

Director Spotlight: Sofia Coppola

Sofia Coppola with her Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for Lost in Translation

Sofia Coppola is one of only four women ever nominated for a Best Director Academy Award, and was the first woman from the United States to achieve the honor. Her nomination was for Lost in Translation, for which she won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. (The only woman to win the Directing Oscar is Kathryn Bigelow; other nominees have been Jane Campion for The Piano and Lina Wertmüller for Seven Beauties.)

In her four feature films, Coppola has maintained quite a bit of creative control by not only directing but writing each one. Her career began as an actress, and in 1999 she directed her first feature, The Virgin Suicides. Coppola has received a lot of criticism over the years, from her family wealth and industry connections (because no men in Hollywood got where they are today through connections, right?) to the subjects of her films. While I admit to personally thinking that emptiness is sometimes mistaken for profundity in her films, I admire her hard work, vision, and success in Hollywood–and find each of her films lovely and interesting.

Here are the feature-length films that Coppola has written and directed. She has also directed the short films Lick the Star and Bed, Bath and Beyond.

Somewhere (2010)

Coppola’s most recent film, Somewhere, is currently playing in theatres and won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

From the official film website, here is the synopsis:

You have probably seen him in the tabloids; Johnny is living at the legendary Chateau Marmont hotel in Hollywood. He has a Ferrari to drive around in, and a constant stream of girls and pills to stay in with. Comfortably numbed, Johnny drifts along. Then, his 11-year-old daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning) from his failed marriage arrives unexpectedly at the Chateau. Their encounters encourage Johnny to face up to where he is in life and confront the question that we all must: which path in life will you take?

Dana Stevens, in her Slate review, “My Sophia Problem,” shares my frustrations with a director who doesn’t transcend “individual filmic moments that transport and transform both the characters and the viewer. She’s the queen of fleeting brilliance, little glimpses of beauty and sadness and truth.”

But I don’t think it’s revealing too much (no more than the elliptical trailer does) to say that this is a movie about a father and daughter who are learning, however haltingly and briefly, to connect. As they do, there are lovely moments along the way—I adored a casual, improvised-sounding scene in which Cleo and her dad play a video game while Johnny’s childhood friend Sammy (Chris Pontius) heckles them from the sidelines. But there’s no discernible trajectory that joins one epiphany to the next, making Johnny’s last-scene revelation—and his ambiguous final gesture—feel unearned and underwhelming.

Ann Hornaday, writing for The Washington Post, has a more positive take–and I think accurately calls Coppola’s films “tone poems” in her review, “A Hollywood daughter’s daddy issues”

As with every Coppola tone poem, “Somewhere” is laced with moments of pure loveliness — Cleo swirling on the ice in a dreamy pastel-colored cloud, or playing Guitar Hero with Johnny on an idle afternoon — and snippets of knowing humor. The inane questions Johnny entertains at a press junket, which range from his workout routine to post-global colonialism, are depressingly accurate (take it from someone who’s asked them). Later, when he sits with his head encased in goop for an hour to make a latex mold of his face, the scene is played both for its comic absurdity and, when he sees the results, intimations of mortality.

Watch the trailer for Somewhere:

Marie Antoinette (2006)

Most of us know the story of Marie Antoinette, though this film is less biopic than exploration of a life of wealth and teenage excess. Marie Antoinette won an Oscar for Costume Design. Here’s the synopsis from Rotten Tomatoes:

Biopic of the beautiful Queen of France who became a symbol for the wanton extravagance of the 18th century monarchy, and was stripped of her riches and finery, imprisoned and beheaded by her own subjects during the French Revolution that began in 1789.

Carina Chocano, writing for the LA Times, nicely characterizes the theme at the heart of this (and other) Coppola films:

Coppola has a soft spot for characters who live their lives at once cut off from and exposed to the world. And she captures the gilded-cage experience, in all its romantic decadence, like nobody else. The movie is at its strongest when it focuses on Marie Antoinette’s private, sensual world, which — as she drifts into her much-mocked Rousseau-inspired pastoral phase, in which she attempts, in her inimitably artificial way, to connect with her natural self — becomes ever more abstract and cut off from reality. Dunst’s sleepy, detached quality is perfectly suited to the character. What Marie Antoinette wants is to lose herself in a dream.

Amy Biancolli’s review for the Houston Chronicle is less forgiving of Coppola’s chosen subject:

Oh — and that business about feudalism, ignoring the hunger of a nation, losing her head to the guillotine, etc., etc. All that bother. Who cares! It has no business in a movie about Marie Antoinette, queen of rock and sugar baby par excellence. Sofia Coppola‘s latest film doesn’t much care about the sociopolitical genesis of the French Revolution, choosing to zero in on M.A.’s Imelda Marcos-scale shoe collection and 80-foot hairdos rather than the scruffy masses who overthrew the monarchy.

Watch the trailer:

Lost in Translation (2003)

Lost in Translation earned Coppola the Best Director Oscar nomination and Best Original Screenplay win, and received dozens of other nominations and wins, including the Golden Globe for Best Picture, Musical or Comedy, and BAFTA Awards for Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson.

Synopsis from Rotten Tomatoes:

Bob Harris and Charlotte are two Americans in Tokyo. Bob is a movie star in town to shoot a whiskey commercial, while Charlotte is a young woman tagging along with her workaholic photographer husband. Unable to sleep, Bob and Charlotte cross paths one night in the luxury hotel bar. This chance meeting soon becomes a surprising friendship. Charlotte and Bob venture through Tokyo, having often hilarious encounters with its citizens, and ultimately discover a new belief in life’s possibilities.

With its success on the film festival circuit and with the award attention it garnered, it’s no surprise that Lost in Translation is Coppola’s most critically-acclaimed film. Entertainment Weekly’s Lisa Schwarzbaum says:

But much of what’s astonishing about Sofia Coppola’s enthralling new movie is the precision, maturity, and originality with which the confident young writer-director communicates so clearly in a cinematic language all her own, conveying how it feels to find oneself temporarily unmoored from familiar surroundings and relationships. This is a movie about how bewilderingly, profoundly alive a traveler can feel far from home.

Speaking of the two main characters, played by Johansson and Murray, Eleanor Ringel Gillespie writes:

What follows is a non-affair to remember, which maintains a delicate balance between friends, lovers and something ineffably greater than either. They are made for each other in a million ways, with sex being one of the lesser ones (though that tension is ever-present).

Their relationship — sometimes tender, sometimes hilarious — is the heart and soul of the movie.

Watch the trailer:

The Virgin Suicides (1999)

Adapted from Jeffrey Eugenides’ poetic novel of the same name, The Virgin Suicides was Coppola’s feature film debut, which received several nominations and an MTV Movie Award for Best New Filmmaker.

The synopsis, again from Rotten Tomatoes:

On the surface the Lisbons appear to be a healthy, successful 1970s family living in a middle-class Michigan suburb. Mr. Libson is a math teacher, his wife is a rigid religious mother of five attractive teenage daughters who catch the eyes of the neighborhood boys. However, when 13-year-old Cecilia commits suicide, the family spirals downward into a creepy state of isolation and the remaining girls are quarantined from social interaction (particularly from the opposite sex) by their zealously protective mother. But the strategy backfires, their seclusion makes the girls even more intriguing to the obsessed boys who will go to absurd lengths for a taste of the forbidden fruit.

In a review as interesting for its discussion of female filmmakers as for its actual commentary on Coppola’s film, Stephanie Zacharek of Salon writes:

What’s interesting in particular about “The Virgin Suicides” isn’t just that it was made by a woman, but that it’s a case of a woman’s adapting a novel about a group of young men’s nostalgia for the unattainable girls of their youth. In the old days, you might have said those girls were imprisoned in the male gaze. But Coppola’s picture is completely nonjudgmental about the narrators’ love for the Lisbon girls (although it should go without saying that love shouldn’t be subject to anyone’s judgment).

The picture has a feminine sensibility in terms of its dreamy languor, the pearlescent glow that hovers around it like a nimbus. (It’s beautifully shot by Edward Lachman and features a willowy score by Air.) But there’s also a clear-eyed precision at work here, almost as if Coppola subconsciously wanted to make sure she captured Eugenides’ vision, while also giving a sense of the Lisbon sisters as real live girls.

Watch the trailer:

Best Picture Nominee Review Series: Toy Story 3

Toy Story is the fourth film featured in our series of reviews leading up to the 2011 Academy Awards ceremony. Be sure to check out our reviews of Black Swan, Inception, and Winter’s Bone.

Third Time Still Not the Charm for Toy Story’s Female Characters

This guest post also appears at the Ms. Magazine Blog and Professor, what if …?

Toy Story 3 opens on a woman-empowerment high, with Mrs. Potato-Head displaying mad train-robbing skills and cowgirl Jessie skillfully steering her faithful horse Bullseye in the ensuing chase. And that’s the end of that: From there on, the film displays the same careless sexism as its predecessors.

Out of seven new toy characters at the daycare where the majority of the narrative takes place, only one is female–the purple octopus whose scant dialogue is voiced by Whoopi Goldberg. Although two of the toys in the framing scenes with Bonnie, the girl who ultimately becomes the toys’ new owner, are female, the ratio is still far worse than the average in children’s media of one-female-to-every-three-males (documented by The Geena Davis Institute on Gender and Media). And these ratios have a real effect: Decades of research shows that kids who grow up watching sexist shows are more likely to internalize stereotypical ideas of what men and women are supposed to be like.

Toy Story’s latest installment revolves around now-17-year-old Andy leaving college. His mom (who has yet to be given a name) insists (in rather nagging fashion) that he store or get rid of all his “junk.” The bag of toys mistakenly ends up in the trash, resulting in the toys landing in a prison-like daycare (way to turn the knife on working parent guilt).

In typical Pixar fashion, male characters dominate the film. Though it ends with young Bonnie as the happy new owner of the toys, making way for more sequels, Woody would have to become Wanda, and Buzz become Betty, in order for the series to break Pixar’s male-only protagonist tradition (think Wall-E, A Bug’s Life, Cars, Monster, Inc, The Incredibles).

Bo Peep is inexplicably missing in this third installment, leaving even fewer female figures. Barbie has a larger role this time around though, as an overly emotional, often crying girlie-girl. She is also a traitor of sorts, breaking away from the gang to go live with Ken in his dream house.

As for Ken, he is depicted as a closeted gay fashionista with a fondness for writing in sparkly purple ink with curly-Q flourishes. Played for adult in-jokes, Ken huffily insists, “I am not a girl toy, I am not!” when an uber-masculine robot toy suggests so during a heated poker match. Pairing homophobia with misogyny, the jokes about Ken suggest that the worst things a boy can be are either a girl or a homosexual.

Barbie ultimately rejects Ken and is instrumental in Woody and company’s escape, but her hyper-feminine presentation, coupled with Ken’s not-yet-out-of-the-toy-cupboard persona, make this yet another family movie that perpetuates damaging gender and sexuality norms.

While the girls in the audience are given the funny and adventurous Jessie, they are also taught women talk too much: Flirty Mrs. Potato-Head, according to new character Lotso, needs her mouth taken off. Another lesson is that when women do say something smart, it’s so rare as to be funny (laughter ensues when Barbie says “authority should derive from the consent of the governed”), and that even when they are smart and adventurous, what they really care about is nabbing themselves a macho toy to love (as when Jessie falls for the Latino version of Buzz–a storyline, that, yes, also plays on the “Latin machismo lover” stereotype).

As for non-heterosexual audience members, they learn that being gay is so funny that the best thing to do is hide one’s sexuality by playing heterosexual, and to laugh along when others mock homosexuality or non-normative masculinity.

Yes, the film is funny and clever. Yes, it is enjoyable and fresh. Yes, it contains the typical blend of witty dialogue as well as a visual feast-for-the-eyes. But, no, Pixar has not left its male-heterocentric scripts behind. Nor has it moved beyond the “everyone is white and middle class” suburban view of the world. Perhaps we should expect no more from Pixar, especially now that Disney, the animated instiller of gender and other norms (a great documentary on this is Mickey Mouse Monopoly), now owns the studio. Sadly, Toy Story 3 indicates that animated films from Pixar will not be giving us a “whole new world,” at least when it comes to gender norms, anytime soon.

[Note: the comments on this post at the Ms. Magazine Blog make a great companion to this review!]

Natalie Wilson, PhD is a literature and women’s studies scholar, blogger, and author. She teaches at Cal State San Marcos and specializes in areas of gender studies, feminism, feminist theory, girl studies, militarism, body studies, boy culture and masculinity, contemporary literature, and popular culture. She is author of the blogs Professor, what if …? and Seduced by Twilight. She is a proud feminist mom of two feminist kids (one daughter, one son) and is an admitted pop-culture junkie. Her favorite food is chocolate. Her other guest posts at Bitch Flicks include Let Me In, Lost, Nurse Jackie, and The United States of Tara.

Review in Conversation: Black Swan

Sometimes a movie needs more than a review–it needs a discussion. See our previous Reviews in Conversation here and here.

Nina is cracking…

Amber’s Take:
There’s a lot to say about Black Swan, and the more I think about it, the fewer definitive, and perhaps positive things I have to say. Before getting too ahead of myself, though, I must say that the performances–particularly Natalie Portman’s–were amazing, the dance sequences were compelling and seemed very well done, and the film was, overall, visually stunning. This is the most intensely visceral film I’ve seen in some time, and simply remembering certain moments still causes me to cringe. I loved the image of the goose flesh appearing on Nina Sayers’ (Portman’s) skin, as she began to physically embody her role as the Swan Queen, and the nod to Cronenberg’s The Fly when thick, black feathers began to sprout from Nina’s skin (as the hairs sprouted from Jeff Goldblum’s Seth Brundle during his physical transformation into, well, a fly).

On a literal level, the film seems to be about the transformation of an artist–in this case, a dancer–into a role. It also is, very specifically, about the physical rigor of ballet, and the lengths an artist will go to in perfecting her performance. Ballet is a physically grueling art form that seems diametrically at odds with the female body. Like gymnasts, from what I understand, a ballet dancer must fight against a mature woman’s body, maintain an impossibly thin-yet-strong physique, and endure at times severe physical pain. On a more metaphoric level, this is what society expects all women to endure, though I don’t think we can read the white swan/black swan as a direct metaphor of the virgin/whore dichotomy or expectation for women in our culture. There are several other things going on in the film, one of the most problematic being (s)mother love.

What on Earth is Barbara Hershey’s character doing in this film? In a near-deranged, over-the-top role, we see a woman who couldn’t make it out of the corps during her own ballet career, and who blames her daughter for the unhappy end to that career. Erica Sayers infantalizes her daughter, dominates her life, pummels her with guilt for under-appreciating her (the cake scene, anyone?), and generally serves as the movie’s biggest villain–worse than an artistic director who sexually assaults and torments Nina. Oh, that’s nothing compared to Mommy Dearest. So what do we make of Nina’s mother–and why was she even in this movie?

Stephanie’s Take:
While I share some of your concerns with (s)mother love, and Barbara Hershey’s character in general, I really enjoyed the film. So before I respond to some of the issues you mention, let me say what I liked so much about Black Swan:

First, a fairly obvious but no less interesting way to read the film is as an indictment of prescribed femininity. Nina’s entire existence is wrapped up in an attempt to be perfect, whether it’s striving to be the perfect ballerina or the perfect daughter. We see what her breakfast looks like, grapefruit and a hardboiled egg (if I remember correctly), and as you mention, the struggle to maintain a child’s body resonates throughout. While that may be particularly important for careers in ballet and gymnastics, it’s also our society’s ideal body type for all women, so I very much like that Black Swan delves into (however metaphorically) the potential consequences of restrictive and unattainable “perfection” in women.

When Nina can’t live up to the casting director’s Perfect Ballerina or her mother’s Perfect Daughter, she basically loses her shit. Thomas (the casting director, played by Vincent Cassel) wants her to embrace her sexuality, to seduce the audience with it (channeling the Black Swan). Erica (her mother) wants her to remain childlike and innocent (channeling the White Swan), and both Thomas and Erica represent the double-edged sword that all women face: be sexy, but not slutty; be sweet, but not a total prude. In the words of Usher, “We want a lady in the street but a freak in the bed.”)

When Nina can’t fulfill both these roles simultaneously, as much as she tries, the film shows us her breakdown: her body betrays her in literal ways, with bleeding toes and scratch marks that suggest self-mutilation (another hallmark characteristic of young women struggling to cope with similar stress); and her body betrays her in ways that suggest hallucinations: pulling “feathers” from her flesh, or ripping off her cuticles, only to discover moments later that her hand is fine. I found that part of the film, the hallucinatory transformation into the Black Swan, super interesting because it seems to happen to her accidentally—as she experiences the transformation, she doesn’t understand what’s happening, and it frightens her.

In fact, I would argue that her body isn’t her own at any time during the film. Thomas wants to control her body in a sexual way, often groping her and kissing her against her will. And when Nina attempts to explore her sexuality, to take ownership of it through masturbation, she suddenly realizes her mother is in the room (to the gasps and laughter of audiences nationwide), and she buries herself under her covers like a child. Erica constantly explores Nina’s body either by looking at her or physically touching her, often insisting that she remove her clothes—creating an inappropriateness in their relationship that I don’t quite know what to do with.

Regardless, I like that Black Swan implies that these ideals for women can’t actually exist without women destroying themselves in the process of attaining them. We live in a society where women’s bodies exist as pleasure-objects for men, as dismembered parts to sell products, as images to be dissected, airbrushed, made fun of, all under a government that continues to chip away at women’s rights to bodily autonomy. In that kind of environment, when does a woman’s body ever feel entirely her own? Black Swan sets up that metaphor quite well, asking the viewer to experience Nina’s struggle to live up to society’s ridiculous expectations for women through several cringe-worthy moments.

That rocks. But I wonder if that effort gets trumped by some of the more objectifying scenes, like the “lesbian sex scene” and the masturbation scene. Is it possible to comment on society’s expectations of women and beauty without also objectifying women in the process? Does Aronofsky linger a little too long at times? And, in response to your second paragraph, why can’t we read the Black Swan/White Swan as a direct metaphor for the virgin/whore dichotomy? (Oh, and yeah, I’ll throw it back to you—what the hell is happening with Nina and her mom?)

Amber’s Take:
You make a lovely and convincing reading of the film as an exploration of the impossibility of society’s contemporary take on womanhood. I think my resistance to this reading—or, more specifically, my dissatisfaction of this being the ultimate reading—has everything to do with Erica Sayers, though neither of us is certain how to exactly read her character. More on that in a moment (ha ha). Though meaning doesn’t end (or begin, necessarily) with a director’s intention, I also think this reading gives Aronofsky too much credit; in other words, I don’t know that the film is that good—that altrustic, that interested in women’s experience—or that cohesive.

Aronofsky has a clear interest in the limits of the human body. While watching Black Swan, I thought about his previous movie, The Wrestler, and the ways in which that solitary person pushes his body to limits most us of (those of us who aren’t professional wrestlers or ballerinas) find absurd and painful to even see. We could extend our conversation indefinitely by bringing in other movies as objects of comparison (The Red Shoes), but I do see some structural similarities between Black Swan and The Wrestler that warrant at least a cursory comparison–and I’m sure others have done this comparative work in reviews around the web.

An important question to ask when we’re trying to figure out Black Swan is this: How do we see Nina Sayers at the end of the film? Is she a victim of her society/mother/creative director? Or is she victorious, in that she conquered the perceived limits of her body to achieve her own stated goal: to be perfect in her Swan Lake performance. (Did we see the protagonist of The Wrestler as victorious or defeated in his final leap?) Nina masters her performance, nailing the Black Swan to the point she imagines her arms transforming into wings. This was the most thrilling sequence in the film—her performance was beautiful, and much more impressive than any of the other dance sequences. Is the Black Swan a villain? In the ballet, yes, and the White Swan is the tragic heroine. Films generally tend to do a better job of making the villain more compelling than the hero, but if both roles are (metaphoric) unattainable goals, how do we read those final moments?

It’s not that I disagree with your reading—I really want that to be what the movie is ultimately about, but there are too many half-baked ideas competing with each other to allow me to say Okay, it’s about X. And, frankly, there’s an awful lot of pleasure to be had by gazing at tormented bodies in the film for me to wholly believe its feminist message. Before Nina gets the lead role in Swan Lake she looks hopefully at a woman walking toward her at a distance, and sees herself in the face of a stranger. So, she’s looking for her a reflection of herself, evidence of her own existence in other people. I don’t think this is a statement about a woman’s unstable identity; I think it’s what an artistic performer does. And possibly a person grappling with mental illness. What about Lily (Mila Kunis)? Her cheeseburger, ecstasy, and alcohol-fueled night with Nina, leading to empowered club dancing (sarcasm), random dude-kissing, and imagined sexy lesbian action between the two, does…what, exactly? Neither the skeezy artistic director’s advice (masturbate!) nor San Francisco Lily’s trite transgressions work to sexually liberate Nina…or do they? At least they bring her into active conflict with her mother.

Now. Nina lives with a mother who is basically a lunatic. I mean, let’s just say it: Nina’s mother is fucking nuts. Why (in the world of the film) does Nina need to have a mother who is fucking nuts? Couldn’t she have been moderately nuts, like most of us, with contradictions, who acts in moderately selfish ways which can moderately mess up a daughter? That would’ve allowed the themes we’ve discussed to be played out just as intricately and interestingly. How does this character fit into the movie? Taken literally, Nina’s mother is at fault for her child’s problems. As mothers tend to be in films made by men, and as psychiatrists believed in the 1960s (I’m thinking of the concept of the schizophrenogenic mother here–the idea that an oppressive mother could actually cause schizophrenia in her children). While we might be seeing a version of Erica Sayers from Nina’s untrustworthy perspective, what good is it—even if it’s not an accurate representation—for Nina to see her mother this way? Taken metaphorically…what? There’s no feminist reading I can discern in a film that I want to be feminist.

Stephanie’s Take:
I completely agree that it might not be useful, or even possible in a film as complicated as Black Swan, to come up with a definitive reading. But I still believe so much is at stake with regards to women and identity and the fluidity of that identity, in a culture that forces women to possess multiple, often contradictory identities. Maybe I’m giving Aronofsky too much credit, but I disagree with your suggestion that Nina’s literal reflections aren’t a statement about a woman’s unstable identity.

Yes, this film comments plenty on the artist and how performance can impact an artist’s life, how the artist must take on certain traits to enhance her performance, and how that act might impact her life when she isn’t on stage. However, given the fact that we’re all “performing” our identities to an extent (like the prescribed gender roles we’re taught from birth to perform), it’s worth looking at how Nina, a character whose identity seems so wrapped up in the expectations of those around her, copes—or doesn’t cope—with the pressures of womanhood and what’s required of that particular role.

It’s impossible not to notice Nina’s reflection everywhere. She sees herself reflected in mirrors as she dances, or when she’s reading the word “whore” on the bathroom mirror of the dance studio, or when she sees her face in the subway car windows. And as you mentioned, she sees her face superimposed on the faces of strangers in public—and even in the mirror at her own house, where she and Lily’s faces are superimposed.

It happens again during the sex scene; Lily’s face becomes Nina’s own face at one point, and we can hear Lily creepily whispering the words of Nina’s mother, “my sweet girl” over and over. Since we learn later that this sex scene is most likely Nina’s hallucination (and I think there’s enough evidence to even make the argument that Lily’s entire existence is a hallucination), it’s useful in interpreting the film to think about why Nina sees Lily, hears her mother’s words, and even sees her own image during a sex scene.

All this swapping of voices and faces (identities, if you will, haha) lead me to read all these people, Erica, Beth (Winona Ryder), and Lily as facets and projections of Nina’s identity. Beth, Thomas’s first “little princess,” is the aging ballerina who gets replaced by Nina, the younger ballerina. Erica, her mother, is the ballerina who slept with her director, got pregnant, and had to end her dancing career as a result. And Lily is the ballerina who embodies everything Nina tries so desperately to find within herself. She’s a carefree, sexual woman who repeatedly threatens Nina’s role in the ballet. Both when Nina is late to rehearsal and when Nina is late to the show’s opening—Lily stands in the background, threatening to take Nina’s place.

Keeping that in mind, it’s interesting that Nina “murders” Lily; on one hand, Nina seeks to absorb Lily’s empowerment, but on the other, the only way she can ultimately accomplish that is by killing it. Since murder is a pretty empowered act, I guess I get that. In fact, I think I liked it. Because Nina basically says Fuck You to the idea that Lily, who represents Nina’s unattainable sexual identity, is separate from herself, her whole self. In that moment, Nina transforms fully into The Black Swan, allowing Lily’s metaphoric death to push Nina to do what she previously thought herself incapable of accomplishing.

You argue that the alcohol-fueled, “imagined sexy lesbian action between the two” does nothing to really sexually liberate Nina. I struggled with this scene in the film probably more than any other scene because it feels exploitative and objectifying in the same way most Hollywood faux-lesbian sex scenes do. But I also believe it’s important to pay attention to all the stuff I mentioned previously. There’s tons of identity-shifting in this scene. Nina’s eventual sexual liberation (if we equate her successful transformation into the Black Swan with sexual liberation) begins here; when identities become interchangeable in this scene, we get the first images of the gooseflesh appearing on Nina’s skin. Something empowering seems to be happening. Whether it’s actual sexual liberation or the first signs of Nina embracing all these facets of herself (Beth, Erica, Lily), it complicates things. But what does it mean?

Well! I’ll go back to my original argument: Black Swan implies that these ideals for women can’t actually exist without women destroying themselves in the process of attaining them. How many identities can we effectively perform before we forget entirely who we are? Women struggle with that in a way that men never will. More often than not, it’s women who have to give up careers for children (Erica). They get pushed out of their professions when they get older (Beth). They’re expected to balance innocence with sexuality and to know when (and when not to) express them (Nina/Lily). And the attempt to balance, express, and suppress these prescribed roles often doesn’t work without having a detrimental impact on women individually and as a whole.

Interestingly, Nina and Lily both “die” in the end. So women in this film end up visibly crazy, hospitalized, or dead. In a less complex film, that would seriously piss me off. But the death and/or disappearance and/or insanity of these women make a larger point: if they’re all separate facets of Nina’s own personality and identity, which I believe they are, it’s necessary to watch each separate character struggle—it reinforces the idea that these performed identities aren’t possible without sacrificing one’s entire self.

You asked: If the Black Swan/White Swan “roles are (metaphoric) unattainable goals, how do we read those final moments?” Good question. It fascinates me most of all that Nina claims, after the White Swan’s suicide, that her performance was perfect. But, it wasn’t. She fell down in the middle of the damn ballet. To a gasping and appalled audience (not to mention, director). If her “I was perfect” claim applies only to the ballet, then she’s referring only to her performance as the Black Swan; after all, it’s the Black Swan whose dance partner whispers “wow” as she’s walking off stage; it’s the Black Swan whose audience gives her a standing ovation; it’s the Black Swan whose director beams with pride when she leaves the stage.

So yeah, I see Nina as a victim at the end of the film. Because she wasn’t perfect; she was never perfect. The conquering of her role as the Black Swan comes at a great sacrifice to her role as the White Swan (her fall during the ballet and her metaphoric death at the end of it). The two identities can’t coexist perfectly, as much as she wants them to. In the end, she still hasn’t attained the superhuman ability to perform competing identities for a critical audience. Sure, the audience may have loved Nina’s empowered, sexualized Black Swan, clearly enough to forgive the earlier screw up as the White Swan, but that isn’t surprising if you read the audience as a metaphor for society (why not?), a society that loves more than anything to be seduced by its women.

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We still have more to say! Let the conversation continue in the comments section, and leave links to reviews you’ve written or read.

Ripley’s Pick: ‘Winter’s Bone’

Winter’s Bone

I first saw Winter’s Bone last summer. I remember leaving the theatre feeling that I’d never seen a film quite like the one I’d just watched. The viewing experience had left me mentally exhausted; more than an hour-and-a-half of tension and suspense made me incapable of arguing exactly why the film was so astounding. After watching it again on DVD, I think I can discuss it with more clarity; however, this remains one you must see for yourself.

Spoilers ahead!

The Dolly family lives in rural Missouri, in the bleak, eerie, and impoverished Ozarks countryside. Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) needs to find her father, who has recently been arrested again for cooking methamphetamine–seemingly the only profession in her community. She’s 17, has already left high school to care for her two younger siblings and chronically-depressed mother, and learns that her father put their house and property up as collateral for his bail. She clearly does not live the life of the so-called average American teenage girl; she teaches her siblings to shoot (both to hunt for their food and protect themselves) and skin a squirrel, she gives away their starving horse, chops firewood, and has precious few moments of camaraderie with someone her age–and even in these moments, the film’s ominous tone doesn’t lift.

This is a patriarchal world of heightened gender roles, where women operate as shields to protect their men, and have little power independently. Ree, having no one to speak out for or protect her, becomes an investigator, and thus an agitator. Instead of keeping the peace, keeping quiet, and knowing her place, she refuses to allow herself and her immediate family to be the victims of an irresponsible and criminal man–even if he is her father. She visits the homes of people she’s known her father to associate with, beginning with a low-level junkie and dealer, and her father’s brother, Teardrop (John Hawkes). As she continues her determined climb through the countryside, the men become less accessible as woman after woman warns Ree against pursuing her father, and warns her, implicitly and explicitly, that there will be harsh consequences for asking questions.

What becomes clear, fairly early in the film, is that her father may be dead. This is, at least, the story her neighbor would have her believe, when he shows her a burnt meth lab. As with all characters in the film, however, he has his own motives. While her father’s death may seem like a solution–or the end of the story–it is not. For Ree–and those in her community, if you can call it that–simply knowing her father is dead proves nothing to those ready to seize her home; to them, he’s just a criminal on the run from his debts. Small acts of kindness (a joint, small amounts of cash, a borrowed pickup truck from a friend) help Ree along the way, but each is met by the cruelty of people desperate to protect their livelihood. We see a tenuous relationship develop between Ree and her uncle, a man who uses and seems always a breath away from violence, as the cast expands to include the county sheriff, a bail bondsman, and a powerful figure in the local trade. Cruelty and kindness collide in a climax so powerful that I won’t give it away here,

Rarely do films–mainstream ones, at least, with distribution deals and Oscar buzz–depict poverty–real poverty. Our main character has no resources. People in this situation exist in America–whether we like to think so or not. They’re not all criminals and they can’t all just remove themselves from bad situations by getting a corporate, minimum-wage job. In this film we see a teenage girl navigate a hostile and dangerous world which she had no hand in making. Despite her maturity and toughness, she hasn’t turned to “cooking crank” to financially survive, nor has she developed a “taste for it yet” to temporarily escape. Instead, she relies on the charity of neighbors (though we see little altruism from them; every instance is a coded threat, warning, or new debt to repay) and naively hopes join the Army and bring her family along. (We see Ree visit a recruiter in hopes of receiving a signing bonus she’s heard about–plenty of money to save her home. The even-handed scene plays straight and with little emotion, but nonetheless breaks your heart.)

Winter’s Bone was shot on location in Christian County, Missouri, with mostly non-professional actors–some of whom went back to regular, blue-collar jobs the day after filming their scenes, which likely adds to its authentic feeling. With a budget of only $2 million, Winter’s Bone was written by Debra Granik and Anne Rosellini, and directed by Granik. It has already won several awards–including the Grand Jury Prize and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, and the Best Ensemble Cast and Best Film Awards at the 2010 Gotham Awards–and has been nominated for numerous more, including seven Independent Spirit Awards (cinematography, director, feature, female lead, screenplay, supporting female, and supporting male), two Screen Actors Guild awards, and a Golden Globe. Oscar nominations come out Tuesday, January 25, and Winter’s Bone is expected to garner several nods from the Academy as well (although its odds for winning major awards–Best Picture and Best Director–don’t seem great, I’m still pulling for it).

Watch the excellent trailer below. Even after seeing the film twice, its trailer still gives me chills.

Guest Writer Wednesday: Boardwalk Empire

With its first season complete and two Golden Globes under its belt (Best TV Drama and Best Actor in a TV Drama), Boardwalk Empire, HBO’s prohibition-era Sopranos/Mad Men hybrid, has gotten plenty of attention. And it’s something feminists should be paying attention to as well. Like Mad Men, the show doesn’t gloss over the sexist elements of the era, but instead exposes them in both stark contrast and comparison to how we view women in our society today.

The Peggy Olsen of the series is found in Margaret Schroeder (played brilliantly by Kelly Macdonald), who is wise beyond her era, yet remains limited by her gender. At the start of the series, we see her suffer physical abuse by her husband (so much so that she miscarries, and not for the first time). When she appeals to a wealthy politician (our protagonist Nucky Thompson, played by Steve Buscemi) to find work for her husband, he takes her under his wing, eliminating her abusive husband and setting her up with a job in a fancy dress shop. It is here that we encounter the division of class between the clientele and Margaret, an Irish immigrant whose boss assumes is uneducated and dirty (other ethnic and religious tensions abound in the turf wars between the Irish, Italian, and Greek mobs throughout the season). Soon Nucky takes a romantic interest in Margaret and offers to put her and her children up, though he won’t marry her. Margaret must weigh the costs/benefits of this situation (security for her and her children versus her neighbors thinking she’s a whore), but in the end she doesn’t have much of a choice, like most women in this show and of this era. But despite the boundaries around her, Margaret remains well-read, involved in local politics and with the Women’s Temperance Movement, and takes control of her sexuality (in the 1920s, birth control meant douching with Lysol). It is her struggle for both mere survival and to retain her honor in a time when the odds are against her that make her journey and triumphs so satisfying and enjoyable to watch.

The other female characters are similarly dependent on men, and either try to escape this grip or find power within it. Angela (played by Aleska Palladino), who has a baby with Nucky’s protege Jimmy, dreams of running off to Paris with her lesbian lover, but she feels trapped by Jimmy, who overpowers her in every way. Jimmy’s mother, Gillian (Gretchen Mol), who had Jimmy young by a much older man, offers to take care of Angela’s son for her so that she can have a life of her own. Perhaps Gillian wished someone had offered her the same.

Though Gillian is a grandmother, she is still very young and works as a showgirl (this is an age where the only jobs for women seemed to be as dancers, prostitutes, or nannies – they either worked in childcare or for the pleasure of men). When Jimmy gets into trouble, Gretchen helps the only way she knows how – by seducing his enemy for information. Nucky’s old mistress similarly uses pregnancy as power against a prohibition agent she sleeps with. One could argue that all the women on the show use their sexuality as a type of currency, as there was little other option at the time.

There also remains the notion that women’s reproductive choices were not theirs to control. Nucky chides Margaret for using the Lysol like “any common whore,” the prohibition agent tells his barren wife to pray instead of considering an invasive medical procedure, and Jimmy decides without consulting Angela that they should have more children. This backwards thinking, however, is not far from the discussions happening today in which restrictive laws prohibit women from freely controlling their own bodies.

NYMag had argued that aside from Margaret’s character, all the other women appear to be nude decoration for the HBO premium. Upon further reflection, I’ve realized that the show doesn’t quite yet pass the Bechdel test. For those unfamiliar, to pass the test a show must 1. Have two women, 2. Who talk to each other, 3. About something other than a man. All of Margaret’s conversations are about Nucky. She speaks with Nucky’s mistress about how they’re fighting over Nucky; she speaks with a fellow “concubine” about how to keep Nucky; she even speaks with her temperance leader about whether she should accept Nucky’s offer. Even in a scene with Angela and her lover the two women talk about how they couldn’t be seen together or Nucky would cut off their money. On the one hand, this proves how so very dependent women were forced to be in this time period. On the other hand, the show’s writers could do a better job developing their female characters.

As for me (and the Golden Globes), I think this show has plenty of potential, especially when it comes to its women. What do you think? Do you watch the show? Do you root for Margaret like you do for Peggy and Joan? Leave your comments below!

Amanda ReCupido is a writer and arts publicist living in New York City. She is the author of the blog The Undomestic Goddess and can be found on Twitter at TheUndomestic.

Ripley’s Pick: ‘Tiny Furniture’

Tiny Furniture. Starring Lena Dunham, Laurie Simmons, Grace Dunham, and Jemima Kirke. Written and directed by Lena Dunham.

The film follows Aura (played by writer/director Lena Dunham), a 20-something self-described misanthrope who, after graduating from a film program at a small liberal arts school in Ohio, moves back to New York City to live with her famous-artist mother, Siri (played by Dunham’s real-life mother Laurie Simmons) and her budding-genius sister, highschooler Nadine (played by Dunham’s real-life sister Grace Dunham). The film wants to show that Aura is, in fact, Having a Very, Very Hard Time, as the tagline reveals, and it puts her through the typical hell that’s common in the heterosexual coming-of-age stories of early twenties womanhood: the struggle to find a reasonably paying job, a desire to make that college degree mean something, and, of course, a few random hookups with emotionally unavailable men.

But more than anything, Tiny Furniture is a film about the relationships among women.

When Aura arrives home from college, she’s immediately confronted with her mother photographing her younger sister among a setup of, literally, tiny furniture. And, while the first indication of sibling rivalry appears, it already seems more refreshing and complicated than the traditional cliched portrayal of sister-hate and woman-on-woman divisiveness. The women converse with one another as if Aura hadn’t been in Ohio for four years; in fact, the casualness of their interaction–her mother barely looking up from her photography, her sister making sarcastic comparisons about her slender legs versus Aura’s heavier frame–suggests a comfort with one another that transcends their almost performed familial coldness.

Perhaps most intriguingly, the on-screen relationships feel so authentic that the unmentioned absent father is hardly noticeable. Who cares, after all? Women rock the screen, and, unlike a couple of recent woman-centric films (The Kids Are All Right, Winter’s Bone–both arguably feminist) it has nothing to do with a need to compensate for the failings of the men in their lives.

Almost immediately when Aura moves back to New York, she meets up with her childhood friend Charlotte (played by Jemima Kirke) at a party. Charlotte is portrayed as a spoiled, drama-craving brat, but Aura clings to her, at one point even referring to Charlotte as her best friend. (Her mother later says sarcastically in response, “After two weeks?”) They hang out in Charlotte’s apartment, getting high together and talking about art, men, joblessness, addiction, their parents–and they flatter each other; the audience is never encouraged to view these women as rivals. The point of their friendship is to illustrate the absolute aloneness of being an aimless twenty-something and not knowing what the hell to do in life. In several hilarious scenes, Charlotte begs Aura not to leave, once going as far as to roll around on her bed saying, “Please stay,” which the audience is meant to find both endearing and pathetic.

And while the relationship between Charlotte and Aura works mainly because of their shared loneliness and need to connect, the onscreen relationship between the two sisters thoughtfully investigates the obstacles inherent in familial relationships. In fact, it didn’t surprise me at all when I discovered that they’re actually real-life sisters because their sibling rapport feels incredibly authentic. While Aura drinks bottle after bottle of her mother’s wine with her friends, Nadine runs on the treadmill, does crunches while reading a book, writes award-winning poetry, and teases Aura about her directionless existence. But the back-and-forth nitpicking between them is perfectly juxtaposed against scenes exhibiting such tenderness as can only occur in close relationships.

One of my favorite scenes in the movie involves Nadine throwing a party while her mother is out, leaving Aura to supervise things. Of course, the party gets out of hand–we’re dealing with a slew of highschoolers railing against Aura-as-Authority-Figure (because, let’s face it, if Aura is anything, Authority Figure isn’t on the list)–and Aura starts to have a panic attack. She does the only thing she can think to do, call Charlotte to come over and help her get the party under control. Which is hilarious. Because Charlotte is more of a disaster than Aura is. So, it isn’t surprising at all when Charlotte starts giving lap dances and Aura starts walking around the party in her underwear.

The screaming match that ensues between Aura and Nadine could’ve been taken from a direct transcript of a real-life sibling fight. I cringed at the truthfulness of Nadine’s accusations as she criticized Aura for craving the attention of high school boys. (Those boys, however, reciprocated by making fun of Aura and dissing her body.) And when Nadine starts smacking Aura with a spatula and storms off, the audience feels sympathy for both sisters; neither is the villain in this film, and Dunham’s navigation of that terrain seems effortless from beginning to end. I won’t spoil the brief make-up scene between Aura and Nadine because the film is worth watching for that moment alone.

Aura spends much of the film, when she isn’t fighting with her sister, thinking of herself as somewhat of an artist/filmmaker, as evidenced by her YouTube videos (where she usually wears only her underwear or a bathing suit). Since Aura isn’t traditionally beautiful, and isn’t a size two like most of the half-naked women we’re used to seeing onscreen, at first it’s almost shocking to watch her walk around barely clothed throughout the film (which further illustrates the level of comfort and intimacy she feels with her mother and sister). But Dunham doesn’t include those scenes merely for shock value. The comments left on her YouTube videos consistently make fun of her weight and her looks. She reads the insulting feedback aloud to Charlotte, and they both try to blow it off, but not without Aura remarking on how difficult it is to put that negativity out of her mind.

For anyone who’s ever browsed the comments on YouTube videos, it’s impossible not to notice the disgusting misogyny and homophobia that plague them. Not only does Dunham subtly comment on that, but she also manages to reinforce the importance of supportive women friendships as a way to help combat the barrage of bullshit women deal with daily, especially when it concerns unattainable beauty ideals. It’s interesting to note, too, that Charlotte is traditionally attractive, and yet their friendship never digresses into any sort of competition, least of all one that involves some stereotypical competition over men.

The film doesn’t completely shy away from the subject of men, though, and the two men Aura meets both basically suck. One spends the first half of the movie mooching off Aura–and she lets him–staying in her house, eating her food, drinking her mother’s wine, but when she tries to take their “friendship” to the next level, he refuses. For Aura to attempt to hook up with such a caricature of a loser further drives home her loneliness and desire for connection. With anyone. So it isn’t surprising either when she goes after the chef she works with, who likes “Asian tentacle rape” pornography–whatever the hell that is–and exploits Aura’s obvious crush on him to get her to give him pills (even though he has a girlfriend).

Watching the film, one can’t avoid thinking, “C’mon, Aura, you know better than this.” But the material is so impossible not to relate to–who hasn’t lusted after the entirely wrong person, and known it?–that one can’t fault her for putting herself through it.

Those interactions with men accompanied by Aura’s reading aloud of her mother’s diary (written during her twenties) give further insight into the relationship Aura has with her mother. In many ways, regardless of how often the two women clash, Aura admires her. She’s a successful artist who’s clearly independent. She’s rich. She has no apparent need for a man in her life. Yet her diary reveals many of her obsessions in her twenties: with body image–she constantly journaled her food choices, with men and their inadequacies, and particularly with feeling like she wasn’t living up to her potential as an artist.

The final scene of the film, with Aura curled up with her mother in her mother’s bed, discussing the diary, openly discussing Aura’s horrid sexual encounter from earlier in the evening (completely absent of judgment from her mother–her only concern is that Aura practices safe sex), discussing Aura’s own fears of failure, which her mother squashes with, “Oh, you’ll be much more successful than I am,” feels so heart-wrenchingly honest it’s almost difficult to watch. And the ending, which features a literal ticking clock that could’ve felt contrived and artificial, totally works. It isn’t that the two women desire to stop time; they just don’t want the obvious reminder of its passing.

As Aura struggles with all these issues, reading her mother’s diary (and sharing it with the audience) serves to remind us that even though coming-of-age ain’t fun, particularly for young women navigating the patriarchy, it’s still possible to come out on the other end fairly unscathed.

Quote of the Day: Sirena J. Riley

From her essay “The Black Beauty Myth,” which appears in the anthology Colonize This! (published in 2002):

As a women’s studies major in college, body image was something we discussed almost ad nauseam. It was really cathartic because we embraced the personal as political and felt safe telling our stories to our sister feminists. Whenever body image was researched and discussed as a project, however, black women were barely a footnote. Again, many white feminists had failed to step out of their reality and see beyond their own experiences to understand the different ways in which women of color experience sexism and the unattainable beauty ideals that society sets for women.

Discussions of body image that bother to include black women recognize that there are different cultural aesthetics for black and white women. Black women scholars and activists have attacked the dominance of whiteness in the media and illuminated black women’s tumultuous history with hair and skin color. The ascension of black folks into the middle class has positioned them in a unique and often difficult position, trying to hold onto cultural ties while also trying to be a part of what the white bourgeois has created as the American Dream. This not only permeates into capitalist material goals, but body image as well, creating a distinctive increase in black women’s body dissatisfaction.

White women may dominate pop culture images of women, but black women aren’t completely absent. While self-deprecating racism is still a factor in the way black women view themselves, white women give themselves too much credit when they assume that black women still want to look like them. Unfortunately, black women have their own beauty ideals to perpetually fall short of. The representation of black women in Hollywood is sparse, but among the most famous loom such beauties as Halle Berry, Jada Pinkett Smith, Nia Long, Iman and Angela Bassett. In the music scene there are the young women of Destiny’s Child, Lauryn Hill and Janet Jackson. Then, of course there is model Naomi Campbell and everyone’s favorite cover girl, Tyra Banks. Granted, these women don’t necessarily represent the waif look or heroin chic that plagues the pages of predominately white fashion and entertainment magazines, but come on. They are still a hard act to follow.

Ripley’s Pick: Parks and Recreation Seasons 1 & 2

Two seasons of the NBC comedy Parks and Recreation have already aired, and it returns for a third season on NBC next Thursday, January 20th. If you haven’t yet watched Parks and Recreation, you should really consider it–because it’s the best comedy on network television. (Both seasons are available for streaming on Netflix, all episodes are available on hulu, and you can watch the final episodes from season two on nbc.com. See how much I want you to watch?)

A small-town political satire, shot in the same documentary style as The Office, the show is laugh-out-loud funny, smart, and cuttingly feminist (and we know how rare it is for network TV to even pass the Bechdel Test). To compare it to The Office doesn’t really do it justice, however, as The Office really depends on its one-bit-gag of inept office manager Michael Scott (Steve Carrell) and other caricatures working together.

Parks and Recreation centers around Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler), who is smart and capable, yet who sometimes suffers from grandiose delusions and tragically funny missteps in her position of Deputy Director of the Parks and Recreation Department in Pawnee, Indiana. With her friend Ann Perkins (Rashida Jones), boss Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman), intern April Ludgate (Aubrey Plaza), and rest of the crew, Leslie sets out to build a new park in the small town and climb the political ladder.

Leslie Knope is openly feminist and politically ambitious. Her office is decorated with framed photos of female politicos, including Madeleine Albright, Condoleeza Rice, Hillary Clinton, and Janet Reno–along with her mother, who holds a higher political office than she. She struggles to accomplish anything in her bureaucratic position, fit in with the boys’ club of government, and navigate the social world of her small town. The supporting cast is equally good, with nearly all characters fully formed and three-dimensional. One of several great performances is Offerman’s anti-government Ron Swanson, the head of the Parks & Rec department, whose primary goal in his position seems to be the complete privatization and elimination of the department. Equally funny is April the intern, an ironically detached hipster who gradually grows annoyed with her gay boyfriend and comes around to sincerely connecting with her coworkers.

Season One was a short six episodes, while Season Two had twenty-four. At the end of the second season, the government was facing a shutdown due to budget concerns. Season Three (again, premiering next week) begins with the re-opening of the Parks and Recreation department. Here’s a sneak peak at Season Three, featuring guest stars Rob Lowe and Ben Scott. The preview relies heavily on these and other guest stars, and I hope they don’t dominate the series this season, superseding Poehler’s excellent comedic performance.

And here’s a clip from one of my favorite episodes, “Hunting Trip.”