“So do we get to watch Steel Magnolias?” That was my long-suffering girlfriend’s response when I told her about this particular writing gig. This is an ongoing joke between us. Every so often, she’ll ask if I suddenly like Steel Magnolias and I’ll tell her that I still don’t like it and she’ll mutter something like “the estrogen isn’t working.” My take on that film is similar to Manhola Dargis’s take on Nora Ephron in an interview she gave to Jezebel earlier this year:
“Sometimes I think women should do what various black and gay audiences have done, which is support women making movies for women. So does that mean I have to go support Nora Ephron? Fuck no. That’s just like, blech.“
One of the things that most annoyed me about Steel Magnolias was the Julia Roberts character, who contracts one of those diseases whose main symptom seems to be a tendency for the character to get more beautiful. In film circles, it’s known as Ali McGraw’s Syndrome and dying beautifully is a hallmark of weepies. Women are never asked to go all Robert De Niro when it comes to looking bad on screen, and it’s particularly egregious here. The only time I can remember actually seeing a major actress get anywhere near what dying from an incurable disease might really be like was in Mike Nichols’s Wit, in which Emma Thompson’s prickly English professor is confronted by the unpleasant facts of the end of her life. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a legitimately great movie and you SHOULD see it, but I’ll never, ever watch it again myself. It looks too much like my mom’s slow death from breast cancer, and I imagine it looks like what my own death might be like at some nebulous time in the future.
Which brings me in a roundabout circle to what’s on my mind today. I had been considering throwing myself on Sex and the City 2 for my inaugural movie tirade, but circumstances gave me a reprieve. It closed in my fair city the night before I started thinking about it. And, really, I can’t improve upon Helen Razer’s scorched-earth take on it. I mean, I don’t know that I’m even capable of improving on an opening that reads in part:
“One more time: Your movie has lain itself on the rock of female self-loathing, asked late-capitalism to gang-bang it, please, and then drown it in a bukkake-tsunami of product placement.”
I can only read that and envy. Anyway, I’ll leave a post-mortem on SatC2 for others. Fortunately, SatC2 isn’t the only oasis away from all the crap aimed at fanboys and happy meals this summer. My local art house is coming to the rescue in a big way over the next few weeks, with Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone opening soon and Tilda Swinton’s I Am Love on deck (plus a Kurosawa retrospective, but that’s off the subject). This past weekend, they opened Nicole Holofcener’s droll comedy of manners, Please Give, a film that stands as a caustic rebuke to the kinds of movies normally marketed as chick flicks. I mean, the elements of the chick flick are all there: it’s an intergenerational relationship comedy that encompasses the lives of women from the very young to the very old, but structural similarities are where the resemblance ends. Its opening scene, in which a succession of breasts are plopped on a mammogram machine while The Roches “No Hands” plays over the soundtrack is pretty in-your-face about the film’s intentions: It announces itself as both female-centric and haunted by death and like Wit, it reminds me of my mother’s death from breast cancer and my own (near) future of occasional mammograms. Thanks mom.
Please Give then proceeds to show us the lives of a quartet of New York women who are, in their own ways, almost as obnoxious as the heroines of Sex and the City, but they’re obnoxious in totally credible ways. There’s no absurd wealth without visible source, no absurd field trips to Abu Dabhi at $22,000 a night, no designer product placement. The central characters are Kate and Alex, owners of an antique furniture store who stock their inventory by low-balling the children of dead people. Kate and Alex also own their next-door neighbor’s apartment, where nonagenarian Andra lives. Kate and Alex are waiting for her to die so they can expand their own place. Andra has two grown granddaughters, Rebecca and Mary, whose relationship with their grandmother is frosty at best. The audience can’t really blame them, actually, because Andra is pretty much as unpleasant a woman as you can imagine. Rebecca doesn’t like her grandmother’s neighbors. She sees them as vultures, waiting to pick over Andra’s corpse. For what it’s worth, that eats at Kate, too, who manifests her own ambivalence over how she finances her lifestyle in an escalating show of liberal guilt. Kate and Rebecca are the center of the movie. In their orbit are Kate’s teenage daughter, who is plagued by zits, Alex’s wandering eye for Mary, who is herself self-absorbed to the point of amorality, and Rebecca’s mammography patient, Mrs. Portman, who is trying to set her up with her grandson. Mix well.
Nicole Holofcener handles all of this with a deft and practiced hand, aided immeasurably by her cast. Catherine Keener remains the director’s alter ego (they’ve made four movies together). Keener seems completely incapable of a bad performance, and this is probably her most challenging role for Holofcener, given the potential for it to be a gimmick. Rebecca Hall’s character seems like the film’s moral center. She’s intended as the warmest character in the mix, I think (and how is it that English actresses do American accents better than American actresses do British accents; weird). The supporting actors do a terrific job of bringing otherwise pretty unhealthy characters to some kind of life (Amanda Peet as the booth-tanned Mary almost steals the movie). Enough that we don’t mind being in their company until the end of the movie, but perhaps no longer. If you squint, you can almost see this as a distaff Woody Allen movie, but Allen hasn’t been this funny in decades. Plus, Holofcener has a capacity for forgiving her characters for their unpleasantness that I don’t think Allen has ever possessed. This is a facility that makes me overlook the fact that Holofcener isn’t the most visually adventurous of directors, though that might be an asset. In the case of this particular movie, her style acts as a kind of deadpan. More style and the whole thing might overheat.
So take all of this as a recommendation (go out and rent Lovely and Amazing or Friends with Money while you’re at it, both of which could act as companion pieces). Take it, too, as confirmation that there are actually movies out there that are still interested in portraying people who bear some resemblance to you, made for an audience that isn’t comprised of adolescent and arrested adolescent boys. This, even if the big studios have no interest in providing easy access to them. I imagine that Please Give is playing multiplexes somewhere in the country, but out here in the boonies where I live, it takes some effort. It’s worth it, though.
and how is it that English actresses do American accents better than American actresses do British accents; weird
American culture is everywhere, and it brings with it all of our accentery. British culture isn’t as popular here as American culture is there.
I like SaTC, and watch it with the understanding that it’s a ridiculous parody of everything in portrays.
and how is it that English actresses do American accents better than American actresses do British accents; weird
Leah is partially correct in that American accents were everywhere as I was growing up – radio DJs affected them, and imported sitcoms brought them into most living rooms. However, I don’t think that’s the whole story. Personally I cringe whenever I hear any American attempt a British accent, not just because they’re not doing a good job, but because I have grown to dislike British accents in general since moving to the U.S. They’re far more regional, more pronounced, more exact than American accents on the whole, and I think far more difficult to get just right.
Or I could be talking a load of old cobblers.
I was never a fan of the show when it was running on HBO, but it wasn’t particularly offensive. I DID see the first movie, though, and everything that seemed to be knowing and sly in the show seemed to have transformed into something offensive and condescending. I don’t know what happened, truth to tell, and maybe the elements that were offensive were always there, but constrained by a TV budget. There’s some weird alchemy caused by a huge budget, I think. It’s also possible that that I have no connection with these characters due to the fact that I’ve never lived in NYC, or even been there to visit, nor shared their outlook on culture or relationships. In any event, I think the difference between the show and the first movie is the difference between a real person and a pod person. They’re essentially the same, but, well, they’re different.