Women Talking: A Review - Women Talking Has Nothing Interesting To Say

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!***

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A poorly written script and ham-handed direction are the lowlights in this movie more interested in promoting its agenda than cultivating its drama.

The past year, a most dismal one in terms of cinema (and most everything else), gifted us two films with the least tantalizing titles since Freddie Got Fingered and Breakin 2: Electric Boogaloo, with She Said and Women Talking.

Those titles conjure in the mind visions of nagging, navel-gazing shrews waxing rhapsodic about their sacred victimhood and pugilistically and pedantically pontificating about the inherent toxicity of masculinity. Not surprisingly, both films fervently live up to that expectation.

But that’s not all She Said and Women Talking have in common. Both were written, directed and star women. Both movies feature top-notch actresses. Both tell stories from a rigidly female perspective about abuse at the hands of men. Both movies are unabashed “agenda” films which emphasize ideology above artistry. And both films are Oscar-bait geared toward a very limited audience consisting of devout members of the #MeToo/neo-feminist cult who unquestioningly adore the film’s trite cultural/political ideology.

Unfortunately, what the two films also have in common is that regardless of their cultural/political messaging, they are truly abysmal cinematic works. To be fair, Women Talking is the better of the two movies, but that isn’t saying much as She Said is a cataclysmically awful movie.

Women Talking, which is written and directed by Sarah Polley and is based on the 2018 novel of the same name by Miriam Toews, tells the story of the women in an isolated Mennonite community secretly meeting to discuss the sexual abuse they’ve all endured over the years at the hands of the community’s men, and what to do about it.

The women believe their three options are to do nothing, stay and fight or leave the community en masse. They argue the pros and cons of each position and then vote. The vote ends up in a tie…so we are subjected to even more debate.

The film, which is nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards and is not yet available on a streaming service, stars Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jesse Buckley and Frances McDormand among many others, and each of them play characters that are supposed to embody various feminine archetypes in this struggle.

Rooney Mara’s Ona, is a wise waif, gentle and spiritual. Claire Foy’s Salome is a mama bear. Jessie Buckley’s Mariche is the battered realist fueled by frustration and ferocity. Frances McDormand’s Janz is the withered veteran too old and bitter to envision a better future.

All of these women are terrific actresses, and yet, none of them give even remotely decent performances or are in the least believable in this film due to the extremely sub-par script, the result of which is that you don’t care about any of these characters.

The dialogue is painfully contrived, and feels like it’s nothing but a collection of ‘look-at-me-acting’ audition speeches totally devoid of genuine intent or believable context.

Another issue is that these characters, all of whom are illiterate, are somehow able to talk with the philosophical fluency of second-year Women’s Studies majors at Bryn Mawr, which makes suspension of disbelief a monumental hurdle to overcome.

None of the characters are dramatically consistent either as they fluctuate between their beliefs like Kardashians shopping for shoes. There’s also no actual confrontation or conflagration during this important debate, just staged, rather showy but decidedly flaccid speeches followed by petulant walking away or a clamoring of voices silenced by one sole voice rising above the din. I guess this is supposed to show that women aren’t aggressive and therefore are superior to men, but all it really shows is that drama is dead with no genuine conflict.

It's also rather odd considering the film is about a group of women in a religious community, that the notions of God and religion are conspicuously absent most of the time and on the rare occasion they are mentioned are quickly brushed aside. The religious aspect of this debate among the women should be the most powerful and imposing element, but writer/director Sarah Polley, who is an atheist, imposes her notion of religion as entirely irrelevant onto the proceedings.  

Director Polley is a critical darling for a variety of reasons, but her work on Women Talking exposes her as quite the cinematic charlatan. Critics fawned over her films Away from Her (2006)and Take This Waltz (2011) despite both films being second and third-rate, self-indulgent exercises. Polley’s documentary Stories We Tell (2012) is a much more interesting piece of work but it too is also saddled with a relentless self-indulgence that reduces its power.

The main criticism voiced by the few critics who dare speak against Women Talking is that it’s visually not vibrant. It’s true that Luc Montpellier’s cinematography uses a desaturated and very muted visual style some find ugly, but I thought it was beautiful in its own stark way. And I actually found this visual approach to be the most interesting thing about the film because it was a coherent choice to reflect the setting and sub-text of the drama.

That said, this movie pushes the boundaries of reality with a plot point that includes one of the longest “golden hours” (which means the time after the sun sets but the sky is still bright enough to shoot a movie) in living memory.

As for Polley’s script and her direction, it is egregiously theatrical in style and is so lacking in subtlety and so heavy-handed that it ultimately feels like nothing more than a cheap agenda movie that only cares about its politics and not its drama.

A major example of this is that there is a trans character inserted into the film that is completely superfluous and does nothing but distract from the drama and narrative. This character, a female to male trans person, is so traumatized by the sexual abuse she suffers that she becomes not only a man named Melvin, but mute to boot. Although that sounds like a joke, I’m not kidding. What makes it even funnier than a trans man who is mute by choice is that Melvin is only mute with adults, but speaks freely with kids…and then with adults when necessary. Look, if you’re gonna have a mute trans man in a movie, for drama’s sake you got to commit to the muteness full-time, not have them be half-mute or mute by convenience. The preceding is a sentence I never in my wildest dreams imagined I’d ever write…welcome to post-modern America.  

Another example of the film’s skewed storytelling and perspective is that there is one single, solitary man in the whole movie, and his name is August and he is played by Ben Whishaw. August is such a weepy, whiny, weak-kneed eunuch as to be astounding if not embarrassing. August isn’t just anti-toxic-masculinity, he is allergic to all masculinity to the point of absurdist comedy. That August’s presence is just another piece of political theatre meant to satiate the man-hating in the audience by showing them that even anti-toxic men are repulsive, is obvious.

The irony of this man-hating is that Melvin, the trans-man, is not considered to be a “real-man” and is lumped in with the women by all the women, which no doubt will infuriate some of the more strident of the politically-correct, JK Rowling-hating, realism-averse viewers…such is the peril of incessant box-checking when making a movie.

What is so grating is that the endless, mindless, feminist pablum spewed in this movie isn’t insightful, it isn’t revelatory and it isn’t dramatically compelling. It is contrived, manufactured, phony cultural posing that might have been topical and/or interesting in 1992…maybe.

This type of sub-par, propagandistic liberal/feminist agenda movie is no different than those atrocious bullshit conservative agenda movies like the ridiculous Kirk Cameron “Jesus is Real!” pieces of garbage, or 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, or the shitty Chris Kyle hagiography American Sniper.

These are all bad movies and just because you like their politics doesn’t make them good. Of course, critics and the Academy Awards agree with the politics of Women Talking so they turn a blind eye to the poor writing, directing and acting and mute their criticism in order to signal their virtue and tribal affiliation. I am under no such obligation. I made my bones savaging shitty movies from across the political spectrum, and Women Talking is a shitty movie that thinks it’s brave and courageous for placing a well-worn flag on top of a secured hill in friendly territory in the forever culture war.

The bottom line is that Women Talking, or as I prefer to call it The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Mennonite Sisterhood or The Mennonite Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, is a dramatically dull, dreadfully amateurish movie that feels like every suburban high school stage play defiantly put on by the school’s drama-nerd girl group. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a shallow, adolescent, emotionalist, feminist rant from a fragile fool who thinks they’re a courageous hero because they wear an “I’m with Her” oversized t-shirt with Lululemon leggings.

The truth is that Women Talking should’ve taken trans Melvin’s approach and just stopped talking because it had absolutely nothing interesting or original to say.

Follow me on Twitter @MPMActingCo

©2023

A Very British Scandal: A Review

BBC’s ‘A Very British Scandal’ is a frigid, flaccid and frustrating affair

The mini-series about the scandalous divorce between the Duke and Duchess of Argyll doesn’t trust its audience to learn the proper lessons from its tale of aristocratic lust gone wrong.

The new BBC mini-series, A Very British Scandal, recounts the tumultuous marriage of the Duke of Argyll, Ian Campbell, and his third wife, Margaret Whigham, and their very public and seedy divorce in 1963.

The scandalous part of this very British story is that during the divorce proceedings, Ian accused Margaret of adultery and had the pictures to prove it. Most notable of these saucy photos showed Margaret performing oral sex on a mysterious ‘headless man’, so dubbed because his head was not visible in the picture.

Margaret ‘The Dirty Duchess’ giving a blow job to a “headless-man” sounds like either the strangest horror movie porn imaginable or the wet dream of a tabloid headline writer, but this very British scandal is all too true.

A Very British Scandal is an often frustrating, uneven, mixed bag of a drama. It stars Claire Foy, best known for her role as Queen Elizabeth II on The Crown, as Margaret, the rich and beautiful socialite who claims to “love sex” and be “very good at it”. Margaret is sort of like a 1950’s Kardashian as she is a socialite celebrity with a bevy of paparazzi trailing her every move.

After Margaret divorces her first husband, she meets the caddish Captain Ian Campbell (Paul Bettany), the newly anointed Duke of Argyll, who is married to his second wife and apparently actively looking for his third.

Foy is an appealing actress, but as beautiful as she is, she seems somewhat miscast as the “highly sexed woman” Margaret. Foy is a rather rigid and frigid on-screen presence, and therefore is not a comfortable fit as the libidinous Margaret.

Like Foy, Bettany too is a skilled actor, but doesn’t quite work as Ian. While Bettany certainly looks like an often crazy and lazy lord, he does not strike one as much of a lothario.

Despite its flaws, what is appealing about A Very British Scandal is that, at first anyway, it appears to be more interested in telling a semblance of the truth rather than pandering to its lesser cultural political instincts.

For example, neither Margaret nor Ian come across as the good guy in this tale of woe. In fact, the show most often seems like a case of two horrible people doing horrible things to each other.

Margaret is a shameless, near-compulsive liar and her non-sexual sins are substantially more egregious than her alleged sexual ones. For instance, she forges love letters to Ian’s ex-wife and sends them to Ian, forcing him to doubt the paternity of his children. She also tries to run a scam where she would buy a baby (she’s incapable of carrying a child after an accident) and claim it’s her and Ian’s and thus an heir to the Duke of Argyll title. And then there’s the time she publicly accused her step-mother of having an affair with Ian…thus basically stressing her already ill father to death.

Ian is a real piece of work too. At best he’s a lazy aristocratic womanizer suffering from WWII prison camp related PTSD. At worst, he’s an erratic, volatile, violent, abusive, alcoholic, amphetamine-addicted sociopath. Ian is like a vampire who sinks his teeth into women and drains them of their life force and their bank accounts of any money.  

Like I said, these are two horrible people doing horrible things to each other.

There is no hero here and no noble victim, just two entitled upper-class twits trying to entertain themselves while their worthless lives slowly pass.

Unfortunately, after spending its three-hour run time allowing its audience to see the ugly and unvarnished truth about its subjects, A Very British Scandal makes the most curious of decisions when concluding.

After the action ended a post-script popped up on-screen that set out to remove all agency from the audience by informing them what they were supposed to think about the preceding drama.

The ham-handed post-script tells viewers that what they just witnessed was the “first time a woman was publicly shamed by the UK mass media”. Oh, is that what it was?

It also informs the viewer that the dastardly Duke of Argyll married an American heiress five months after the divorce, and just to prove in contrast how noble Margaret truly was, it also tells the audience that she never revealed the name of the “headless” man she sexually serviced.

It’s utterly pathetic that the producers of this show felt they needed to hammer the audience over the head with the “proper” conclusions they were supposed to reach. God forbid anyone walk away from this series without understanding that what it’s really all about is feminist victimhood and the suffocating power of the patriarchy.

If you thought this was maybe a story about two hurt and wounded people hurting and wounding each other because they were raised in a vapid and corrupted aristocracy devoid of any substance, purpose, meaning, or moral and ethical grounding, then the producers want you to know that you’re not only wrong but bad.

By so shamelessly not trusting their audience and their own storytelling ability, the producers of A Very British Scandal not only undermined the power of their drama but also neutered their own credibility.

A Very British Scandal is at best a forgettable mediocrity, and the people who made it would be wise to worry more about putting out a quality product than about insulting their viewers by trying to control the conclusions they reach.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

First Man: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. An unorthodox take on a “space movie” that I found to be ultimately satisfying and moving…but your mileage may vary.

First Man, written by Josh Singer and directed by Damien Chazelle, is the story of Neil Armstrong and his long march to the moon. The film stars Ryan Gosling as Armstrong, with supporting turns from Claire Foy, Jason Clarke and Kyle Chandler.

First Man is a film that, for good or for ill, defies expectations. One would expect a film about Neil Armstrong and NASA to be a “space” movie in the vein of the expansive The Right Stuff or Apollo 13, but First Man is not a conventional space movie but rather a painstakingly intimate movie that uses space as metaphor.

What makes Neil Armstrong such a compelling character not only in this film but in our culture, is that he was an exceedingly “normal” person. Armstrong was the everyman of the space program which turned him into a sort of empty vessel which the public could project upon whatever traits they wished. Armstrong was portrayed in the media as smart, strong, honorable, noble and patriotic, but what Chazelle does in First Man is make Armstrong less heroic and more human by showing him to be wounded.

Armstrong’s wound is so palpable and catastrophic that he must risk life and limb and travel 238,900 miles in an attempt to soothe it. Ultimately, Armstrong’s journey to the undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveler returns, isn’t a running away from his wound, but a solemn yet desperate pilgrimage to it.

The moon in First Man is not a destination or ambition but a ghost, haunting Armstrong at every turn as he tries to take one small step for man through the fog of mourning in an attempt to regain his balance and find some semblance of normalcy once again.

By flouting “space movie” expectations, First Man can be a bit frustrating, but once you accept the premise and go along the dramatic journey, it becomes a remarkably satisfying and deeply moving experience. I readily admit that my own personal life experience made the film resonate with me and that others with a different life experience may not find it so worthwhile.

Emotional pull aside, director Damien Chazelle (Whiplash, La La Land) shows a deft and skilled hand at the helm of First Man. Chazelle’s film wonderfully mirrors Armstrong the man and the character in that it is strictly compartmentalized. Armstrong walls off his emotions and contains his pain and Chazelle uses magnificent framing to express this dramatic reality.

Chazelle also pulls off shooting in very tight spaces, like in the cockpit of a space capsule, by embracing rather than shunning the claustrophobia of those places. Chazelle recreates the physically and emotionally suffocating experience of being compartmentalized to such a degree that you can’t even turn your head to look at the exit, never mind walk through it. Chazelle’s embrace of dramatic claustrophobia also pays off when the cinematic expanse of the moon is finally reached.

Ryan Gosling’s work as Neil Armstrong is spot on, as he keeps with the theme of the film by keeping Armstrong entirely contained. The pain pulsating through Gosling’s Armstrong is tangible, but he keeps it tightly controlled, never letting the wound gush, only fester. The final scene of the film beautifully illustrates Armstrong’s dilemma, he is walled off and isolated, if not quarantined, from the world, and even from his wife, and he is at a loss for words, but still has the desperate human need to connect, even if he is unable to.

The long journey of Armstrong to Lunar catharsis is so potent because it is so deftly and subtly portrayed by Gosling, who with First Man proves once again that he is more an actor than a movie star.

Claire Foy’s work as Janet, Armstrong’s wife, is equally compelling. Foy’s Janet is much more combustible than Neil, but that just means it takes more effort for her to keep herself together. Foy and Chazelle imbue Janet with a percolating dynamism through a focused intensity and a mildly floating hand-held camera that gives Janet the feel of being ever so slightly unbalanced and teetering out of control, like a satellite knocked off its orbit. Janet has a volcanic magnetism that is a testament to Foy’s making the most out of what, in lesser hands, would have been just another astronaut wife character, at best an adoring moon, but Foy’s Janet is a planet unto herself, spinning in a wilder orbit around a dying Sun.

The rest of the supporting cast, which includes Jason Clarke, Kyle Chandler, Corey Stoll and Ciaran Hinds among many others, all do solid work in mostly underwritten roles. The supporting cast are most definitely very small pieces around the sun that is Ryan Gosling, who, along with Claire Foy, carry the emotional and dramatic weight of the picture.

First Man is really a story about alchemy through fire and ice (recurring themes throughout the film) and the psychological transformation and evolution that comes about through the alchemical Grail quest. Neil Armstrong’s connection to the cause of his existential anguish gets further and further away with every passing second, and he single-mindedly chases it through the fire of earth and its atmosphere all the way to the cold silence of the moon to catch up to it one last time.

In conclusion, First Man is not what you’d expect it to be, but it is all the better for it. I definitely recommend you spend your hard earned dollars to see it in the theatre (IMAX if possible). Director Damien Chazelle and star Ryan Gosling create a worthwhile and serious film of dramatic heft that turns the gigantic evolutionary moment of a human expedition to the moon into an intense and intimate evolutionary moment for a single man. When Neil Armstrong said it was “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”, he would’ve been more accurate to say that it was “one small step for mankind, and one giant leap for his humanity”.

©2018