Movies Gamble On Gender Flips
Back in the summer of 2016, when the female “Ghostbusters” remake hit theaters, aggrieved fans of the original regarded the new film as a politically motivated assassination.
Replacing their childhood comedy idols with women was a kind of narrative murder, committed by a cabal of Hollywood moguls and humorless feminists.
This summer’s splashy female reboot, “Ocean’s 8,” channels such histrionics with a deliciously literal twist. As the orange jumpsuited Debbie Ocean (Sandra Bullock) attempts to talk her way out of prison — a scene that mirrors the opening parole hearing of Danny Ocean (George Clooney) from the 2001 “Ocean’s Eleven” — she reveals that Danny is her brother, and that he’s dead.
But as Debbie mounts her own heist — lifting $150 million worth of Cartier diamonds off a celebrity at the Met Gala in New York — she half- expects him to return. We spend the film anticipating his appearance, too.
Even when a film franchise is retooled around women, it still revolves around men — the story
In the all-female remakes, the men are still lurking.
lines they wrote, the characters they created, the worlds they built.
This summer produced three gender- swapped films. Joining “Ocean’s 8” is the Melissa McCarthy film “Life of the Party,” which cribs its premise from Rodney Dangerfield’s 1986 comedy “Back to School” — a midlife crisis inspires a parent to join his or her kid at college. There’s also “Overboard,” with Anna Faris as the working- class single parent ( played by Kurt Russell in the 1987 original) who exacts revenge on a playboy after he falls off his yacht and forgets who he is ( Eugenio Derbez is in the Goldie Hawn role).
And more are on the way, including gender-flipped adaptations of “Lord of the Flies,” “Splash” and “What About Bob.”
The gender-swapped film allows Hollywood to reanimate lucrative old properties, while recasting them with diverse casts and woke politics. That has resulted in a boom in comedic parts for women, but they come with baggage.
These reboots require women to relive men’s stories instead of fashioning their own. And they’re subtly expected to fix these old films, to neutralize their sexism and infuse them with feminism, to rebuild them into good movies with good politics, too. They have to do everything the men did, except backward and with ideals.
“Ocean’s 8” conjures the corporate-feminist imperative of women seizing capital, like a kind of equal-pay initiative for female thieves.
Also, by giving women the sexual upper hand, these remakes neutralize the most offensive aspects of the originals. When Mr. Russell kidnaps an amnesiac Ms. Hawn and convinces her she is his wife in the 1987 “Overboard,” he amuses himself by gesturing at raping her. But in the remake, it’s the playboy played by Mr. Derbez who tries to initiate sex with an uninterested Ms. Faris.
These films seem to be working as symbolic correctives to Hollywood’s mistreatment of women. But the social acceptability often comes at the expense of the story. When the “Ghostbusters” scientists sexually harass their hunk of a receptionist (Chris Hemsworth), it strains credulity. And when Anna Faris’s single mom Kate hauls the womanizer who recently physically assaulted her into her home to live with her three girls, the choice feels actively insane.
Though these remakes are often referred to as “all female,” they typically retain men in a key role: that of the antagonist. (For some reason, men get to direct all of these movies, too.)
“Ocean’s 8” wraps its plot around a male mark: Claude Becker (Richard Armitage), the slick art dealer who pulls Debbie into an art fraud scheme (and a relationship) and then turns on her.
As much as these films free women from old Hollywood expectations, they box them into a new one: Their female protagonists must be admirable. No such requirement was placed on the characters of Bill Murray or Mr. Dangerfield, who gained admiration through their thorough commitment to offending.
For women, the demand often manifests itself as typically feminine behavior — acting nice, and looking it. In “Life of the Party,” Ms. McCarthy gets a makeover; in “Ocean’s 8,” the women slip into gowns at the Met.
But as the novelty fades, these movies will begin to be assessed not on their politics, but on their merits. The men of “Oceans Eleven” got to do one thing the women of “Ocean’s 8” do not: star in a good movie. The construction of Debbie’s heist is so sloppy that the one rule she sets for it, no men in her crew, is betrayed in the climax, when a male actor executes its most strenuous element.
Note to Hollywood: When women complained that they aren’t afforded the same roles that men are, they weren’t speaking literally.