Gutsy female leads are in, but not completely
In The Favourite, Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone play Queen Anne, Sarah Churchill and Abigail Hill, three women sparring, seducing and strategising their way through the corridors of power in 18th-century England.
More cynical than the bleakest House of Cards episode with twice as many deliciously nasty zingers, The Favourite is just the latest sprout in a bumper crop of movies depicting women, if not at their best, then at least in some form of sisterly solidarity.
From the depraved sisterhood of Suspiria to Viola Davis coolly leading a team of henchwomen in Widows, 2018 has been a year singularly devoted to the vicarious pleasures of feminist troublemaking.
Throw in such tough protagonists as Emily Blunt in A Quiet Place,
Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween,
Melissa Mccarthy in Can You Ever Forgive Me? and Rosamund Pike in
A Private War and the trend is clear: good girls are out. Difficult women – preferably ones who can defy social expectations to drink, swear, misbehave and screw up a storm – are decidedly in.
We saw Charlize Theron’s gorgeously androgynous Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road or Frances Mcdormand’s fierce, foulmouthed, Oscar-winning turn in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri as galvanising outliers, their grim machisma a welcome antidote to the hypersexualised or tiresomely passive roles usually on offer from Hollywood.
Now, what was once transgressive has become a trope: just wait until you get a load of Nicole Kidman playing a bruised, beat-uplooking alcoholic in Destroyer or Natalie Portman’s unattractive and unrepentant diva in Vox Lux.
In the upcoming films Ben Is
Back and Vice, as well as Private
Life, playing on Netflix, even conventional wife-and-mother roles come spiked with generous doses of spiky anger or quiet political manoeuvring.
As delicious as these characterisations can be, they also perpetuate notions of “subversiveness” that are relegated to whispered asides and neurotic machinations, with strategy reduced to scheming, process to petty manipulation. Face it: simple professionalism, competence and skill are rarely deemed sexy enough to qualify as entertainment.
Then again, perhaps the contradiction is in synch with a time when the public – especially men – still report discomfort with the idea of a female president and when women account for a vanishingly small number of corporate leaders.
Will this year’s fiercely capable heroines make us more willing to accept female power, or more frightened of it? For now, it’s clear that we have the cinematic trope this era deserves, one that encapsulates aspirations and ambivalence in maddeningly equal measure.
| The Washington Post