NURSING A GRUDGE
‘Promising Woman’ has no patience for abusive men
It’s a familiar scene: A group of khaki-clad men circle a very drunk woman at a bar until one nice guy steps forward to make sure she gets home safely.
Only in this case the saviors are predators and the damsel in distress is stone-cold sober and ready to rumble.
Carey Mulligan describes her character in “Promising Young Woman,” as an “avenging angel,” whose job is to make predatory men see the error of their ways.
“She gets this moment of gratification, the feeling like she’s corrected some injustice for a moment. I think that feels really good for, like, a day or half a day, and then it doesn’t anymore and the need to do that again builds up. She feels like she’s proactively doing something,” Mulligan, who plays the lead role of Cassie Thomas, told the Daily News.
As “Promising Young Woman,” which hits theaters on Friday and on-demand in 2021, moves forward, creator Emerald Fennell unravels Cassie’s motivation — a years-long feeling of guilt and unease that made her drop out of medical school. She gave up on friends and relationships, on professional achievement. Now, she just confronts boorish men.
“The majority of the stuff that’s in our film is stuff that we’ve seen in comedies in the last 10 or 15 years,” Mulligan told The News. “And we’ve laughed at that, Emerald and I included. Part of that is the way we’ve all contributed to these things being normal when, on closer examination, they’re quite clearly not.”
Fennell, making her feature writing and directorial debut, began working on “Promising Young Woman” in 2017, before the #MeToo movement fully formed, before Harvey Weinstein was arrested or Brett Kavanaugh was nominated to the Supreme Court.
The men were cast with a vision, familiar faces we recognize as good guys: Adam Brody, Max Greenfield, Christopher MintzPlasse, Chris Lowell. Bo Burnham plays Ryan, a former college acquaintance who eventually cracks Cassie’s exterior and finds a woman capable of love and joy.
“Ryan was an exciting thing of getting to dig past the surface of a nice guy and interrogate a certain type of niceness and charm that
I always wish, when I see movies, was interrogated,” Burnham told The News. “Yeah, this guy is nice and cute, but what if you stayed with him past that point, if you showed what else is going on? Usually the worst thing a guy does in a rom-com is forget a birthday. Life is a little messier than that, I think.”
“Promising Young Woman” isn’t about men pretending to be good guys. It’s about men who genuinely believe they’re good guys when they’re not.
“It’s not like behind closed doors, they get Cassie home and suddenly they’re evil. No, they get Cassie home and they still think they’re good guys,” Burnham told The News. “In a confession booth, they’d still say they’re good.”
The dichotomy between being good and doing good “complicates the audience’s bloodthirst,” said Lowell, who plays a former college classmate who took Cassie’s friend back to his dorm room and raped her.
Cassie is not a hero to root for. Her methods are dark and crass. But her motivations make sense and her actions are driven out of desperation. “I think what came out of the #MeToo movement was so much anger,” Lowell told The News. “There’s an argument to be made that, OK, let’s ... move past the anger and focus on rebuilding and being agencies of change. But women get to be really ... furious for a long time. This ... is awful. I don’t think we need to rush anybody.”