Inessentials

Spoilers for the first 30 minutes of Wendy and Lucy

Wendy and Lucy, a very small and moving film about a woman working her way across country to a job in Alaska but is delayed in a small town in Oregon, is so careful in its study of a person at the edge of society that in its brief 82 minutes it reveals a great deal about individuals and the way they understand and interact with society.

Although there is a lot to consider in this film, one scene struck me particularly. In this scene, Wendy has been caught shoplifting dog food for her dog Lucy. An eager teenage stock boy grabs her arm roughly and leads her into a back office where a manager sits. At first, Wendy denies that she took anything. When the young stock clerk pulls her purse from her and pulls out the cans of dog food, she begins to scramble reasons for why she did it and why she’ll never do it again. The teenage stock boy goads the manager into calling the cops. “It’s store policy.” “You have to treat everyone the same.” “If she can’t afford a dog, she shouldn’t have one.” Having grown attached to Wendy over the early scenes, these words sound snide, almost hateful.

What director Kelly Reichardt and writer Jonathan Raymond have done is to provide a nicely encapsulated feminist critique of rule-bound ethical systems. While not clearly endorsing any particular ethic of care or explicitly acknowledging any link to the pioneering work of Carol Gilligan, the film presents instead a simple moment in which the viewer hears words that he or she has probably spoken at some point, words that sound very right when spoken in generalized form, but that seem very, very wrong when we see the consequences they have for Wendy (and for Lucy). By placing these generalized ethical rules in the mouth of a teenage boy, it further emphasizes that these sorts of rules are adolescent, limited, and we need to move on from them toward a system that allows us to treat Wendy with the care that the film recognizes she deserves.

That’s a very thoughtful moment in a film that addresses homelessness, social blindness, charity, friendship, and more in a very sophisticated yet never preachy way.

Discussion of Jennifer’s Body (no spoilers beyond the trailer), Whip It (extremely mild spoiler), and The Hurt Locker (no spoilers)

The early numbers show that Whip It, the roller derby film directed by Drew Barrymore, bombed with $4.9 million in its opening weekend. Jennifer’s Body opened three weeks ago to a disappointing $6.9 million, and has earned less than $15 million in three weeks. That’s a very low number for a horror film that had received a lot of attention. (Compare to Zombieland, which grossed $25 million in its opening this weekend.) I’m a little surprised by how low both of those receipts were, but I think the Whip It numbers were especially surprising. (The people who have seen it have given it very high marks, so at least one person is hopeful that it will have staying power.)

One thing that stands out about these two films is that they are both written by, directed by, and starring women. Jennifer’s Body was penned by Oscar-winner Diablo Cody (Juno); Whip It is Drew Barrymore’s first film as a director; both feature some of the most-talked about young actresses in Hollywood (Ellen Page, Megan Fox, Amanda Seyfried). So what happened? Why did so few people go to see this films?

I’m not completely sure why these two films didn’t fare so well, but they both clearly have one thing in common. Not only are women prominently featured on camera and behind the camera, both of these films represent gender reversals of traditionally male genres. Whip It is in large part a traditional sports film in which the hero(ine) must overcome familial obstacles to do what (s)he really loves and take the team to a championship. But this isn’t an all-male basketball or football film in which the female parts are the always-saying-no mother and the always-has-your-back girlfriend, it’s about the bruises-as-power feminism of Drew Barrymore, who has also produced the girl-power Charlie’s Angels films and Never Been Kissed. Jennifer’s Body (which I haven’t seen yet) is supposed to invert the horror genre by positioning the pretty, seemingly defenseless high school girl as the killer, which has a couple predecessors but is still atypical.

It is tempting to say that women will go see “guy films” (sports and horror films), but that guys won’t go see films about women. And perhaps that is the case here. But these two cases don’t seem enough to judge that. (It would be interesting to see the gender breakdown of the audiences for these two films, which might help show who was coming.) What’s sad is that at a time when over 90% of Hollywood films are directed by men, the failure to bring out crowds to these films directed by women can only make it more difficult to see that imbalance corrected. Two of this year’s best reviewed films are directed by women (Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker and Jane Campion’s Bright Star), but neither of them will shatter any box office records.

But more than just being about larger trends, it’s a shame that people aren’t going to see these films. The Hurt Locker is easily one of the best films of 2009, and it is absolutely thrilling. It’s wonderfully acted, and has more tension and excitement than any film I can remember seeing recently. Whip It isn’t a great film, but it is a good one. It is incredibly likable (an underrated quality) and very well acted. Ellen Page’s performance simply blew me away. I enjoyed her in Juno and Smart People, but I had never before appreciated the subtlety, range, and power she brings to a role that most young screen actors would play for charm and melodrama. You expect the great performances that Marcia Gay Harden and Daniel Stern give, but Barrymore brought something wonderful out of Page, Alia Shawkat, and Kristen Wiig. The film respects its actors, and subsumes all other aspects of filmmaking to draw us into these performances, which are worth it. It’s an incredibly good film, and one worth seeing.