BLANCHETT STEALS THE SHOW
Invigorating Mrs. America portrays the dark side of the women’s movement
Mrs. America Wednesdays, FX/FX Now
Mrs. America, FX’S invigorating, infuriating and only faintly inspiring dramatic miniseries about the near-passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, tries to accomplish a lot of things at once. For any viewer under the age of about 40, it’s meant to be a compelling recap of the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s, as seen mostly through the rise of a conservative backlash that very nearly stamped out feminism in mainstream politics. That’s a lot of territory to cover in nine episodes.
For others, the series can be viewed as another admirable effort by the makers of prestige TV to dive back into contemporary history and resurface with the sort of bold, contextually fresh pearl of hindsight that only time and creativity can provide.
For narrative purposes, some characters are real, a few fictional, and whole swaths of dialogue have been imagined.
I’m fine with the liberties
Mrs. America rightly takes. For those of us who’ve come simply to watch a TV show, the news is essentially good, with a pace and story momentum that’s often surprising, enlightening and satisfyingly saucy.
Created and co-written by Dahvi Waller (whose resumé includes work on Mad Men and Halt and Catch Fire), Mrs. America is ingeniously structured around its perceived villain, the late right-wing activist Phyllis
Schlafly, played with a commanding and deliciously precise steeliness by Cate Blanchett.
She’s an Illinois wife and mother, powerfully intelligent, who at first scratches her itch for politics by championing Barry Goldwater, writing about the Communist threat and endorsing nuclear armament. She made an unsuccessful run for Congress, all with the “permission,” she always notes, of her attorney husband, Fred (John Slattery).
A PTA friend (Sarah Paulson as the fictional Alice Macray) helps turn Phyllis’s laserlike attention, in 1971, to the emerging effort to pass an Equal Rights Amendment, which would constitutionally ban sex discrimination. Phyllis immediately finds great pleasure in repeatedly pressing the hot button of gender politics, riling up her sister homemakers into a counter-liberation movement with fears of unisex bathrooms and women being drafted into war. This brings Phyllis her first, addictive taste of liberal tears and gives her the attention she clearly craves.
There’s no mistaking that Mrs. America is Schlafly’s show (and boldly so), giving her everything she lacked as a media caricature: shape, complexity and even some empathy for her personal struggles and her own experiences (whether she acknowledges them or not) of being discriminated against as a woman. Blanchett turns someone many people would like to forget into someone who is wickedly unforgettable.
Yuck, is one understandable reaction, but you also have to admit: It’s much more interesting to figure out what made Phyllis tick than watch nine episodes of veneration for the women’s rights movement. On that note, in the first three episodes, the supposed heroes of this story seem to get the shorter shrift.
The titles of most of the episodes bear the first names of women who each played key roles in a national culture clash, starting with Phyllis and moving on to Gloria (Steinem, played by Rose Byrne), along with Shirley (Chisholm, played by Uzo Aduba), Betty (Friedan, played by Tracey Ullman), Bella (Abzug, played by Margo Martindale), and Jill (Ruckelshaus, played by Elizabeth Banks), but the story never drifts too far away from Phyllis and her massing army of conservative support. Along the way, the women’s liberation movement endures fractious arguments over race and sexual orientation, thoughtfully recounted here and still very much germane.
So, too, Schlafly finds division in her ranks.
Paulson delivers yet another knockout performance — this time a subtle, slowly burning one — as the composite character, Alice, who experiences an almost-epiphany, heavily emphasizing Mrs. America’s central theme: Even the conservative women who said they didn’t want to work were all working tirelessly, at cross purposes, in a male-dominated world that never gave them their full due, and still doesn’t.