IT CAN’T be easy to get those Oscar lists together, whichever
way you’re coming at them; so many blokes to sift, so few gals to
choose from. So much dross, although that’s another story. Because
even though the enduring image of Hollywood film is of a screen
siren framed and thus possessed by some unseen male director, very
few women these days are centre stage.
It has long been a truism that there are no good parts for older
women out there; over 40, they say, you can whistle for a role that
doesn’t involve keeping house. Sometime ingenue Rosanna Arquette
made a film on the subject, Searching for Debra Winger, in
which actresses including Jane Fonda and Whoopi Goldberg reflected
on life on the supposed scrap heap. The title was taken from Debra
Winger’s declaration that she was leaving Hollywood in the ’80s
while her career was still flush.
After the film had screened in Cannes, the redoubtable Frances
McDormand %26#151; star of Fargo and a brilliant support in
films such as Something’s Gotta Give and North
Country %26#151; was asking anxiously what it was like. She had
appeared in it, caught on camera in a weak moment at the end of a
night on champagne, and was worried about the message. And rightly
so, in many viewers’ opinions, since in its worst moments the stars
came across as a bunch of privileged women, who had done very well
out of their own golden days of youth and beauty, whining about not
much.
Of course, there was a problem, said McDormand, but it wasn’t
that there were no good parts for older women. It was that there
were so few substantial parts for women of any age. To bleat about
being too old was to miss the point: a young and generically
attractive woman might well be in line for more roles as the
romantic interest, but if you only get five lines and a couple of
frocks to wear, who cares?
The list of candidates for Academy Awards illustrates the point
perfectly. Quite a few of the films aimed at that top-end market
%26#151; the sorts of films with enough gravitas to win an award
%26#151; either have virtually no female presence at all or, in a
platoon of men, a single female role to stir that frisson of
difference.
Take There Will Be Blood, leading the field with eight
nominations: the only women in it are extras, unless you count a
girl of 12.
Michael Clayton? There are actually a few women in this
one. On the one hand, there’s a family of female victims of
chemical contamination who are the subject of Oscar nominee Tom
Wilkinson’s neurotic love, guilt and anxiety. On the other, there’s
Tilda Swinton as the wicked witch, which is traditionally the best
female role in anything. Actually, Swinton plays a conniving
lawyer; she has been deservedly nominated for a supporting actress‘
Oscar. What is striking, however, is that she is the only woman in
yet another man’s world; small wonder that, having cracked it, she
will do anything at all to keep her spot.
Similarly, in Charlie Wilson’s War, Julia Roberts’
strangely manipulative right-wing socialite is intriguing because
she is the one woman mixing it with the guys doing guys’ work in
the murky back rooms of government. They’re a fairly
straightforward bunch; Roberts, on the other hand, is unfathomable
in her femininity. What is she doing there? Nobody quite knows. She
is defined by her difference.
No Country For Old Men also has a single significant
female character, but we barely see her. She’s the wife left well
behind as Josh Brolin goes on the road, pursued by crazy Javier
Bardem and a bunch of good ol’ boys in the law-keeping business.
Given that part of the point of his flight is to keep that lot away
from her, we are effectively kept from her too. And what of those
other grand epics, Into the Wild and The Assassination of
Jesse James? Come on! Everyone knows women don’t go
outside!
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street? Helena
Bonham Carter does her share of slaughtering and singing,
certainly, but it is Johnny Depp’s psychopathic barber, a good man
turned unspeakably bad, who is both the dramatic and emotional core
of the story. In almost any story of moral quandary, indeed, the
proper subject is a man; women, being either angels or vixens, are
fixed points, immune to quandary of any kind. Dramatically, the
lovelorn Mrs Lovett serves only to demonstrate Todd’s state of
mind: she loves him to death, quite literally, but he doesn’t
notice.
Of course, many of these stories are constrained by source
material, including the truth: to wedge a woman into the story of
Jesse James for the sake of it would be the worst kind of
patronage, quite apart from ruining the story. Sweeney Todd
is, unavoidably, the story of Sweeney Todd. But there is a point to
be made about the fact these are the stories chosen. These are both
great films, but they are the kinds of stories we see again and
again.
In an interview last week, actresses Scarlett Johansson and
Natalie Portman agreed that while they were not aware of any overt
sexism in Hollywood, the available scripts themselves effectively
discriminated against women. “The majority of writers and directors
are male and they write about what they know,” says Portman. “Often
female characters are correlates to male stories. It’s not
purposely discriminatory.”
Perhaps, but the result is systemic: out there, on the other
side of the silver screen, lies one of the last bastions of
boarding-school-to-barracks monasticism. Put it down to feminism
making women seem too risky to write about, or put it down to a
confluence of trends %26#151; high-tech blockbusters, gross-out
comedies, epic westerns %26#151; that have little room for women’s
roles. It is still worth asking why those trends emerged in the
first place.
It is also worth pondering why, apart from the obvious
explanations associated with real-life stories, women are so
automatically excluded from them. Why aren’t women allowed to make
gross-out jokes? Even in a comedy like Knocked Up,
ostensibly about a mismatched couple %26#151; that is to say, about
both a man and a woman %26#151; it is Seth Rogen who gets to be
funny, endearing and an odd beacon of slacker sanity in a crazy,
acquisitive suburban world. With all due respect to Katherine
Heigl, the stroppy blonde could be played by pretty much anybody.
Anybody thin, anyway.
And that’s romantic comedy, a genre that demands at least the
intermittent appearance of a female star. Indeed, the only genre
that reliably top-loads its casts with middle-rank women, as
opposed to the romantic lead or that one stand-out Julia Roberts
role, is the slasher horror. Girls may not exactly rule in this
genre, but there are always plenty of them. Thank goodness, for the
sake of young actresses needing to pay the rent, that there is
apparently such satisfaction in seeing girls sliced up by a lunatic
in a mask.
These are not the kinds of roles that win you an Oscar, however.
It is very striking that, of the five nominees for best actress in
a leading role, three of them appear in films written or directed
by women. Given how few women writers and, more particularly,
directors there are in Hollywood, it is telling that those few are
writing the majority of roles for women chewy enough to win Academy
recognition.
The Canadian actress Sarah Polley wrote and directed Away
From Her, the story of a woman with early dementia brought so
poignantly to life by Julie Christie. Tamara Jenkins directed that
subtle, robust actress Laura Linney in The Savages, also
about a demented parent; she also wrote it. And the colourful
Diablo Cody, former stripper turned independent screenwriter, wrote
the comedy about teen pregnancy Juno. Ellen Page is
nominated in the title role; incidentally, the much smaller role of
Ellen’s stepmother, played by Alison Janney, also has more
real-life meat on it than any number of flighty rom-com
heroines.
The other two nominees in this category are Marion Cotillard for
La Vie en Rose and Cate Blanchett for her reprise of her
role as Elizabeth I. La Vie En Rose, being in French,
follows rather different rules; it is also true that a film about
Edith Piaf is going to have at least one solid role for a woman in
it.
Cate Blanchett, who is also nominated in the supporting actress
category for her turn as Bob Dylan in I’m Not There, is a
classic example of a revered actress winning a mediocre film
recognition beyond its station. The best one can say about that is
that at least it meant Keira Knightly wasn’t nominated for her
services to the colour green.
What these women behind the scenes have done is carve out a
space where women in front of the camera can take centre stage in
roles that have something to do with real lives. We have all had
enough, surely, of seeing interchangeable heroines decorate the
screen, heads tilting prettily at the sound of His Master’s Voice.
But, great as it is to see women wrestling with their demons or
with impossible domestic dramas, it would also be good to see it
taken for granted that women, like men, act in the world.
Imagine a big Hollywood film giving a middle-aged woman the
chance to chew every bit of scenery in every scene as Daniel Day
Lewis does in There Will Be Blood. Or a female
characterisation as highly coloured as Philip Seymour Hoffman’s CIA
renegade in Charlie Wilson’s War. Or the girls goofing round
with the boys, being funny in a foul comedy about getting drunk at
the prom. That really would be a revolution.
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