SCREEN GRAB
Girl power takes on Hollywood
THIS is the year of the woman. In Hollywood, that is. Sort of. According to box-office statistics, films that celebrate women and womanhood are attracting almost as many paying viewers as movies about stubble and guns. But do the figures speak the truth in what is still overwhelmingly a man-centric industry?
In the latest money rankings, films featuring strong female leads are snapping at the heels of the action flicks that traditionally outperform them. Jurassic World has outstripped its rivals in the dollar stakes. Behind it come The Avengers: Age of Ultron, Furious 7 and American Sniper.
The next five films at the top of the current-earnings chart at the time of writing are all dominated by female characters. Granted, two of these are animated films aimed at children — Inside Out, about a little girl trying to deal with her emotions; and Home, about a little girl trying to save the world — but little girls are women too.
Compare this with last year’s list, where just two of the top 10 earners (in the US and Canada) were films based on women. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 came in second (after Guardians of the Galaxy), and Maleficent, starring Angelina Jolie as a wronged fairy, made it to No 6 overall.
Bob Mondello, film critic for National Public Radio in the US, was so astounded by the turnaround in femalefocused fortune that he sifted through the past three decades of film and found that “in 13 of the past 30 years, not a single top 10 box-office hit was centred on a female character”.
When Mondello broadcast his report in June, Mad Max: Fury Road was still in the top 10 (it has since slipped to No 11). Much has been made of Charlize Theron’s performance as the ironarmed Furiosa, but reports praising this as a feminist film seem slightly overcooked. Furiosa might have the lioness’s share of screen time, but the dim beauties she rescues, who have never been allowed to go out shopping and hence must wander around in filmy wisps of fabric, are hardly indicative of a changed world in which women are accorded more respect.
A closer look at the new wave of socalled girl power in Hollywood reveals a few more anomalies. At No 6 so far this year is Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella , starring Cate Blanchett. It is a pretty and pleasing film that deviates hardly at all from the original fairytale. Unlike Maleficent, it does nothing to challenge the good-girl-gets-prince ideology.
Pitch Perfect 2 has been the most surprising hit of the year and is in many ways the most feminist of the lot. Outperforming Mad Max: Fury Road, and still at No 7 on the chart, it is a film about women, written and directed by women.
The same could be said of Fifty Shades of Grey, now at No9. Leaving aside the fact that this blockbuster is about the subjugation of an asinine woman inexplicably besotted with her gormless tormentor, some are calling it a triumph for women’s rights because director Sam Taylor-Johnson is female. But it is really just Cinderella with bondage gear instead of glass slippers.
Fifty Shades is not exactly Oscar material, but another factor undercutting the premature celebration of women behind the screen scene is the absence of accolades (and jobs) for female directors.
Spy!, which topped the US box office in its opening week and is now at No 15, is a comedy about a feisty woman, starring Melissa McCarthy. It is directed by Paul Feig, who also directed the 2011 smash hit Bridesmaids.
In an interview with The Telegraph, Feig said: “Half the movies out there should be starring women. It is not happening fast enough.
“Part of me hoped that Hollywood was going to crack open more after Bridesmaids, and that more people would be doing what I was doing . . . guys have dominated everything in movies forever.”
Feig, who is working on a remake of Ghostbusters with women in all the lead roles, might be the last to suggest that women directors are less than equal, but a look at the history of the Academy Awards shows that women behind the camera have not exactly been encouraged by the establishment.
In 87 years, only four women (Lina Wertmüller, Jane Campion, Sofia Coppola and Kathryn Bigelow) have been
ON SONG: The cast of the surprise hit movie ’Pitch Perfect 2’— a film about women, written and directed by women nominated for the best director Oscar. Bigelow is the only woman to have won the award, for The Hurt Locker in 2010.
Last year, punters were betting on Angelina Jolie and Ava DuVernay receiving best director nominations, Jolie for her prisoner-of-war epic Unbroken and DuVernay for the civil rights biopic Selma. Neither was nominated.
There was much public outrage about the snubbing of DuVernay, not because she would have become the first woman of colour to be nominated in this category, but because Selma, nominated for best picture, was widely acclaimed by critics, who in particular praised the skills of its director.
It seems that even when women direct films about men, they are not good fellows enough for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
A 2012 study showed that of the 6 000odd academy members eligible to vote for nominees, 94% were white and 77% were male, with a median age of 62. There were 377 members eligible to vote in the directing branch of the contest. Of those, only 36 were women.
In June, however, the Academy Award organisers invited 322 new members to join its ranks. The 90 new women invitees (of whom four are directors) include British actress Gugu Mbatha-Raw, whose father is South African; and Pitch Perfect 2 director Elizabeth Banks.
The significantly higher number of women on the invitation list may or may not have something to do with a letter sent last month by Meryl Streep to members of the US Congress. Streep urged lawmakers to push through the Equal Rights Amendment, which guarantees equal pay and rights for women. The amendment was passed in 1972 but is still three states short of the minimum 38 needed to ratify it as part of the US constitution.
At this year’s Academy Awards, the three-time Oscar-winner cheered loudly when Patricia Arquette made a rousing call for wage equality during her acceptance speech for best supporting actress. Streep, who will play Emmeline Pankhurst in the upcoming film Suffragette , is just one of many Hollywood heavyweights supporting this cause, so things might well be looking up for women in the movie game.
Putting aside arguments about who directs what and who gets rewarded, more films are focusing on women, and roles for actresses are on the rise.
But if films reflect the reality of the world, and if the world is still a place in which women are often sidelined, or worse, then perhaps it is unrealistic to expect Cinderella to suddenly start bossing the prince around.
Let’s start with giving her equal pay and see where it goes from there.