Why is Hollywood going for bloke?
Casting your eyes over this year’s roster of film
award contenders, you would be forgiven for wondering why
women, more than ever, have been relegated to the margins. The
stories Hollywood wanted to tell last year were about fathers and
sons, the American west and machismo run amok.
This is generalising, but look at the roles played by women in
these pictures - sweet but disposable Kelly Macdonald in No
Country For Old Men, barely there Mary-Louise Parker in
The
Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, and
a handful of silent female extras in There
Will Be Blood - and a pattern begins to emerge.
Where are this year’s The Queen, Erin Brockovich,
Far From Heaven, The Hours? Oscar-watchers can only
point to the best-picture nominees Atonement
and Juno
as examples of female-led cinema, and neither of these will quite
do.
Admittedly, in the best actress category, some genuine “women’s
films” are in the running: Julie Christie (Away
From Her) and Laura Linney (The Savages) are
nominated for films by female directors, and Marion Cotillard
(La
Vie En Rose) owns her starring vehicle like no one else
this year except Daniel Day-Lewis. But the less said about Cate
Blanchett and the atrocious Elizabeth:
The Golden Age the better. Suffice it to say that none of
these films, save Juno
starring Ellen Page, are heavy-hitters in the awards race.
The marginalisation pattern rears its head again in best
supporting actress. Ruby Dee gets nominated for a scene slapping
Denzel Washington in the phallocentric American
Gangster. Blanchett is in for playing a man. Tilda Swinton,
superb in Michael
Clayton, makes a virtue of being the only gal in her
male-dominated ensemble. Her performance as the morally decentred
lawyer Karen Crowder is a brilliant reproach to a wretched part:
the role is tinged with misogyny, but Swinton makes Karen seem like
the victim of a man’s world. Having Blanchett play Bob Dylan in
I’m
Not There is admittedly a feminist gesture - the kind you’d
expect from Far From Heaven director Todd Haynes - but it’s
one of dismayingly few.
It seems Hollywood has been working out maleness issues, rather
than feminine ones - whether it’s rampant capitalism (There Will
Be Blood, Michael Clayton) or essays on violence (No
Country For Old Men, Jesse James) or paeans to male
solitude (Into
The Wild).
The odds so often seem stacked against women’s pictures at the
multiplexes, not to mention the careers of any number of female
directors, who manage to have one break-out success (Boys Don’t
Cry, Girlfight, Monster) and then struggle for years to get
their next film funded.
There’s an imbalance, all right - and it’s particularly blatant
in this year of gunfights, oil derricks and blood.
Telegraph, London
