San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Lily Janiak: Why 'Promising Young Woman’ is revolutionary.
When I first saw the trailer for “Promising Young Woman,” which has been nominated for five Academy Awards, I knew I was among its target audience.
And not just because I worship Carey Mulligan, who, whatever role she plays, always seems to have another movie flickering behind her character’s eyes, so many leagues of depth does she give each moment. I could also tell this movie would be for me because it looked uncompromisingly feminist, in a way that I almost couldn’t believe Hollywood would allow.
In the trailer, Cassie (Mulligan), apparently drunk beyond comprehension by herself at a bar, gets scooped up by Jerry (Adam Brody). As they’re in bed, she moans, “What are you doing?” Then, abruptly, her tone sobers up and she sits up. She’s all business, crisply enunciating each word: “Hey, I said, what are you doing?”
The sequence exposes and avenges male predation, trading women’s sexual vulnerability for male moral humiliation. It does so without casting Cassie as obsessive or villainous or too angry. It proceeds methodically, almost clinically, and, perhaps most remarkably, without apology to its male audiences.
It reminded me of how once, after a show at a bar and as the crowd began to break up to go home, a man chose that moment to approach me. I was alone, a couple of drinks in, and, with spurious chivalry, he told me it wouldn’t be safe for me to go home by myself.
I believe many women have stories like that one (or much, much worse), and I kept its memory fresh for when I finally got to watch the whole movie.
At first, the film, which was written, directed and produced by Emerald Fennell, proceeds much as the trailer does. Mulligan’s Cassie is fearless and righteous in her guerrilla campaign, but she also seems to be a bit mystified by herself. The reason she upends her life and goes to so much trouble to expose these men is at once straightforward — a horrible thing happened to her friend — and beyond her reach. At times she’s mischievous; at others, frustrated; at still others, resigned. In short, she’s still very deeply human, despite the facades she presents to her male marks.
That core of vulnerability allows the film to veer in another direction, one not presaged in the trailer. (Editor’s note: Spoilers follow.)
Ryan (Bo Burnham) remembers Cassie from before she dropped out of med school and starts to pursue her at the coffee shop where she works. There’s nothing menacing about him, unlike the film’s other men. He’s downright adorable, abasing himself before her (at one point he still drinks his coffee after she spits in it), gamely absorbing her rejections, making fun of himself.
Gradually, “Promising Young Woman” transforms from one movie into another, without announcing the change: from spiky, highly stylized revenge thriller to good oldfashioned romcom — from work of radical feminism to a genre known for reactionary notions of gender. But this, too, made “Promising Young Woman” all the more up my alley
Yet even as you watch Burnham’s Ryan charm Cassie — at one point he bops around a pharmacy, embarrassed but not embarrassed to know all the words to a girly pop song — it’s impossible to sink fully into romcom pleasures. You know the other shoe has to drop.
And critically, Burnham’s Ryan seizes focus in this part of the movie. Mulligan’s Cassie grows demure, reacting to him instead of taking the lead. But she doesn’t become classically lovable in the same way.
It probably shouldn’t have surprised me when, soon, the film reveals that Ryan isn’t immune to the sins of the other male characters as I believed at first. And yet it wasn’t just surprise I felt but denial. I didn’t want Ryan to be that guy, because “Promising Young Woman” made me like him so much.
It was a lot simpler and more validating to condemn Brody’s Jerry, back at the top of the movie. (And granted, Ryan doesn’t do anything as bad as Jerry does.) But we didn’t learn much about Jerry’s backstory. Maybe he, too, can win over parents. Maybe he, too, persists through obstacles and does sweet things when he’s in love.
The film simulates how the world spends our lives warping our lenses. It endeared me to the quirky but persistent male pursuit. It made me invest so much feeling in Ryan that I resisted believing anything bad about him — even though I’m a loudandproud feminist. There’s something in that humility amid perseverance, that adoring expression leavened with awshucks deprecation, that telegraphs, “This man can do no wrong.” But what if he can be those things and do wrong?
On one level, “Promising Young Woman” asks heterosexual men if they’re really the good guys they think they are. But on another level, it asks the rest of us why we, too, are so compelled and blinded by the goodguy narrative.
What is its mysterious pull on us, and how can we break free?