OUTSTANDING MOVIES, DESPITE THE ODDS
‘Do you think this will change things?” More than one person has asked me that question over the past few months. What they — what so many of us — want to know is whether the allegations of sexual abuse and harassment against some of the biggest men in the entertainment industry will have lasting repercussions. Invariably, I say yes, though with hesitation. I yearn to believe that both these accusations and the anger that’s surged in their wake will make a difference. But I wonder how this anger can be directed to effect real change, specifically in an institution that’s been as historically rigged against women as the U.S. movie industry. Because anger alone isn’t enough.
What now? Sexual predators can be fired; assaulters presumably punished. These measures may bring relief and perhaps justice to victims, and they may scare abusers from doing more harm. But we are talking about the movie business, an industry that has systematically exploited some women while shutting others out of positions of power. Integrating more women into this male-dominated sphere may not automatically right the balance. At the same time, we know that the board of the Weinstein Co. was all male, and John Lasseter, now on leave from Pixar (for undisclosed “missteps”), has presided over a company that produces overwhelmingly male-driven stories.
Until this year, the industry’s biggest scandal in recent memory had been the 2014 Sony hack. Memo by memo, the disclosures peeled away some of the institutionalized thinking that helps perpetuate “the big lie” of women’s inferiority, as film critic Molly Haskell put it in her 1974 book, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies. The Sony hack revealed pay disparities between female and male performers ( and male and female executives), and suggested that women were not even discussed for prime directing gigs. At the time, Amy Pascal was the co-chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment and ran Sony Pictures, but, then, there have been female chiefs of major Hollywood studios since 1987 when Dawn Steel became the first.
In July 2014, months before the Sony hack, I interviewed Pascal. ( She was fired in 2015.) Several weeks later, I interviewed Hannah Minghella, a Sony executive who, the hack would reveal, was being paid considerably less than a male colleague with the same title. Each woman expressed concern about female directors. Minghella was especially thoughtful. “I don’t think there is a deliberate or conscious action to prevent women from becoming filmmakers,” Minghella told me. “But I think it’s going to require deliberate and conscious action to change it because good intentions for 30 years or more now have done nothing to change the numbers.”
Minghella was right about good intentions, which some movie people have plenty of. The discrimination in the industry isn’t about oversight or a matter of one man giving another a job. It is about systemic bias, some of which can be traced back to the old studio days. From roughly the late 1920s to the mid-1960s, only two women directed for the big studios. And while the studios tended to treat all actors like chattel ( some more prized than others), women were treated especially harshly because the same sexism outside the industry can be as unforgiving inside it. We know some of the victims. We also know the immortal female stars who helped build the industry.
In her book, Haskell brilliantly articulated the contradictions that haunt the movies, with their dispiriting truths and transporting fictions. And she wrote of the contradictions that also haunt us: “Through t he myths of subjection and sacrifice that were its fictional currency and the machinations of its moguls in the front offices, the film industry manoeuvred to keep women in their place; and yet these very myths and this machinery catapulted women into spheres of power beyond the wildest dreams of most of their sex.” Moguls like Louis B. Mayer perpetuated the big lie, but stars like Bette Davis also set us free.
I’ve always known that, even when an older woman blew my young teenage mind by saying she didn’t like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies because she thought they were sexist. I knew what sexism was; the wonderful feminist teachers at my allgirls school made sure we all did. But I didn’t simply love Fred and Ginger films, I also listened to their soundtracks and watched them whenever they played at Theater 80 in the East Village, our local rep house. ( I even took tap- dancing lessons!) I was one of those kids, deep in her head and quite content to spend a lot of time alone watching movies in the dark, kind of like now. Years later, I struggled with that love when I started reading feminist film criticism.
I’ve been wrestling with the contradictions of movies ever since, sometimes with pleasure and satisfaction, at other times with frustration, exasperation or rage. It can be exhausting. Sometimes, you just want to watch a movie, not keep a running inventory of each affront, every offensive line or beat. Did women direct, write, produce, star? Does the female lead have anything of interest to say? Why is she taking off her underwear for the lovemaking scene while the guy keeps his on? Why is her breast showing? Why is she smiling ( always smiling)? Why is she a hooker? Or dead?
So, I take inventory. Although if I’m lucky, I also bliss out on beauty, grace and art. And I continue to struggle, including with the question of whether it’s possible to separate the art from the artist. My preference has been always to engage with the cinematic object, the visible evidence, as I like to think of it. There is, as we know, plenty of damning evidence right there, in the choices that filmmakers have made, including where they’ve put the camera and who they have put on camera and how. Then there’s the fact that once that title is released, it no longer belongs strictly to the people who own it — it belongs to viewers, who are the ones who finally give a work its meaning.
I’m especially grateful for this year’s good and great movies. Filmmakers create despite often- crushing odds and some make movies while also struggling against prejudices. The revelations of sexual harassment and abuse — and the stories of victims who faded away — is further appalling proof of the extent of these biases. That there are so many outstanding movies despite those odds and biases can feel like a miracle. Here are my Top 10, all of which received a theatrical release or soon will.
1. Dunkirk (directed by Christopher Nolan)
Most war movies are about winning. Dunkirk is about surviving. With peer- less craft and technique, Nolan puts you in the air, on the sea and on the ground during a Second World War rescue mission and, once the rescue is over, makes it harrowingly clear that the fight goes on.
2. Ex Libris: The New York Public Library ( Frederick Wiseman)
In his wonderful, expansive and wholly absorbing documentary, Wiseman goes deep into the New York Public Library — down grand and humble halls, and past open and seeking faces — for a portrait of an institution that is democracy incarnate.
3. Faces Places ( Agnes Varda and JR)
In this glorious, vividly personal work, Varda both wanders through France and into the past alongside the visual artist JR, meeting new friends and seeking out old. Varda is often described as one of the greatest female directors alive, which is true. She is also one of greatest.
4. The Florida Project ( Sean Baker)
Baker makes heartbreakers about people usually ignored by movies: a porn actress and the forgotten elderly woman she befriends in Starlet; two transgender female prostitutes in Tangerine. In The Florida Project, he tells a deeply U. S. story of children and adults struggling at the margins of Disney World, creating a 21stcentury Grapes of Wrath with psychedelic colour and gobs of spit.
5. Get Out (Jordan Peele)
A meme generator, a social critique and a metaphor for our times — Get Out is all of these. It’s also an exceptional feature directorial debut. Peele does much that’s right and it’s worth remembering t hat what makes his movie memorable isn’t only what he says, but also how he makes meaning cinematically with finely calibrated timing, a sense of alienated space and an indel- ibly haunted, haunting image of the void.
6. Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig)
The anguished teenager has been a cinematic cliché since James Dean bellowed about being torn apart in Rebel Without a Cause. Gerwig’s tender, thrilling movie about an adolescent girl has plenty of drama: Our heroine throws herself from a car. Thereafter, she does more than simply survive; she becomes a person in a movie that insists female artistic self- creation isn’t a matter of sacrifice but of being.
7. Okja ( Bong Joon- ho)
Filled with lapidary visual touches and pictorial splendour, Bong’s l ovely, often funny and achingly soulful movie about a girl and her pig didn’t receive the theatrical release it deserved because it was bought by Netflix, which largely seems committed to shovelling product into its pipeline. That may be the future, but it’s infuriating that — like this movie’s villain — it can’t see past the bottom line.
8. Phantom Thread ( Paul Thomas Anderson)
Two lives — and two perversities — become one in this ravishingly beautiful, often unexpectedly funny film, which traces the relationship between an eminent couture designer (a magnificent Daniel Day-Lewis) and his younger, surprising muse ( Vicky Krieps). It’s a story about love and about work, and finally as much about its own creation as the romance onscreen.
9. A Quiet Passion ( Terence Davies)
In this exquisitely directed biography of Emily Dickinson ( a sensational Cynthia Nixon), Davies turns images into feelings. With delicacy and transporting camera movements, he brings you into Emily’s everyday life, touching close to the people that she deeply loved and into the rooms that they shared. He shows you the beauty, grace, light and shadow that flowed into her and right through her pen.
10. Wonder Woman ( Patty Jenkins)
I love all the movies on my list, but more than any other this year, Wonder Woman reminded me that we bring our entire histories when we watch a movie — our childhood reveries, our adolescence yearnings and adult reservations. I’ ve always loved Wonder Woman in all her imperfection, including in the old TV show, and I loved her here because all my adult reservations were no match for this movie.
Other favourites: After the Storm; The Big Sick; Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story; Call Me by Your Name; The Challenge; Dawson City: Frozen Time; The Death of Louis XIV; Escapes; Girls Trip; Good Time; The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Maki; I Am Not Your Negro; Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond — Featuring a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton; Kedi; The Lost City of Z; Mother!; Mudbound; My Journey Through French Cinema; Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer.