Filminism: ‘Mud,’ and Why It’s Sometimes Okay to Write One-Dimensional Women

Filminism is a bi-weekly column dedicated to representations of women in cinema. It runs every other Friday.

As other writers have noted, being a feminist and a pop culture critic sometimes requires a bit of mental gymnastics. How can I reconcile enjoying something like “Pain & Gain” unless I write it off as Michael Bay lampooning the American Dream and its ugly baggage (homophobia, sexism, and sizism, just to start with)? As I walked out of the screening, a publicist asked me what I thought. She called me out by name! I was caught! I couldn’t escape! So I blurted out what I thought. “I liked it, but I feel guilty for liking it,” is what I told her, more or less. There was nothing in it that lit a fire under my ass to really engage with it more than that, and it was a relief. Because frankly, if I was actively angry about all the things that make me mad and sad and disgusted in the world, I’d go crazy. I still don’t know how to feel about “Spring Breakers,” except that seeing James Franco fellate a gun makes me blush. (Two guns at once, actually – it’s a rather impressive show of gag reflex control.)

Just as I enjoy video games and consume other so-called “problematic” types of media, I don’t always demand that a movie I love must be a paradigm of, well, whatever utopian vision we’re all striving for. There are plenty of worthy works of art that don’t pass the Bechdel Test, or whose creators were particularly monstrous in their private lives. The artist leaks into his or her work, no doubt, but I’m not giving them a free pass on being a piece of crap just because I take pleasure in their art. Poorly written female characters are the work of lazy writers. Actually, that’s giving some of these writers more credit than they’re due; maybe they’re just emotionally stunted or something, but I don’t know because I’m not Todd Phillips’ therapist.

There are exceptions, though. Occasionally, a film’s point of view requires the sort of female characters that normally irk me as underdeveloped and wispy, but they succeed despite (or in some cases, because of) this. That’s the case with writer/director Jeff Nichols’ newest, and quite excellent movie, “Mud.”

Our young protagonist Ellis (Tye Sheridan) is our eyes and ears in this world where it’s completely normal for a man to live in a boat stuck in a tree. He’s learning about love and women from broken men doing their best to find their own way in a changing world: his reticent fisherman father Senior (Ray McKinnon), his best friend Neckbone’s womanizing uncle Galen (Michael Shannon), and the aforementioned tree-inhabiting Mud (Matthew McConaughey), who is desperately in love with his childhood sweetheart Juniper (Reese Witherspoon).

Senior breaks his silence occasionally, and it’s rarely for anything good. After Ellis witnesses plenty of fighting, Senior relays the information that Ellis’ mom Mary Lee (Sarah Paulson) is going to sell their houseboat and uproot Ellis to a sterile suburb. The girl Ellis has a crush on, May Pearl, holds his hand in the back of a truck and kisses him quickly but shames him in public – as if she’d really be seen with a pipsqueak like him. Juniper is your basic broken woman, beautiful in a bedraggled sort of way and self-defeating to the very end. She and Mud have spent their lives bouncing off of each other, but Ellis is determined to help Mud escape the gangsters and policemen on his trail so he and Juniper can live happily ever after.

Mud is Ellis’ hero, someone so bound and determined to protect the woman that he kills for her. This is the sort of all-consuming love that Ellis yearns for, and what his world sorely lacks; he has no idea just how deeply dysfunctional the love between Juniper and Mud is, and the more he learns, the more disappointed and angered he is by the adults around him.

If you wanted to get all Joseph Campbell about it, you could argue that at one point or another, every adult character takes a turn at being some sort of archetypal figure from myths. For example, the mysterious neighbor played by Sam Shepard, Tom Blankenship, appears as the Hermit, the wise but mysterious person that the Hero with a Thousand Faces becomes after experiencing the outside world. The Hermit returns to his hidey-hole — in this case, a houseboat — only to come out and impart his lessons to those who need it. Mud can be seen as the trickster, an archetype that shows up in belief systems around the world. Nichols plays with variations on the virgin/mother/crone and virgin/whore symbols with the women, flipping them around at different points. Even the names May Pearl, Juniper, and Mary Lee are ripe for interpretation; I mean, May Pearl? How much more maidenly can you get? These other people are mysteries to Ellis, except for Neckbone, and so they’re mysteries to us too.

Nichols is not unfamiliar with excellent female characters, though. Nichols’ 2011 movie “Take Shelter” was one of my top picks for the year, and the character Samantha is a big reason why. Samantha, played by Jessica Chastain, stays strong in the face of her husband’s crumbling mental health; she’s sturdy and interesting, and her crazy husband and hearing-impaired daughter aren’t the most interesting things about her. She has one of the bravest moments in a movie full of aching vulnerability. Nichols knows just what he’s doing.

What are some other movies that have similar problematic elements that work in the movie’s favor, or are otherwise so good that you’re willing to overlook them?

Categories: Columns

Tags: Filminism, Jeff Nichols, Matthew mcconaughey, Mud, Reese witherspoon

Filminism: Jane Campion’s ‘Top of the Lake’ Is the Best Movie on TV

Jane Campion’s “Top of the Lake” is an overwhelming experience. Maybe not if it’s taken in one-hour chunks, which is how it aired on the Sundance Channel, but if you watch it on Netflix Instant in one fell swoop, you’re liable to emerge on the other side with your head still in the foggy clouds of New Zealand. I can only imagine how anyone seeing it at Sundance earlier this year felt after sitting through all 353 minutes with nothing to interrupt the immersion save for the occasional bathroom break.

The simplest way to describe the plot sounds like the makings of a really long “Law and Order: SVU” episode: A 12-year-old named Tui tries to drown herself in a lake, and it’s only after she’s rescued that the adults around her notice she’s five months pregnant. The nearly silent pre-teen rides off into the wilderness on a horse with nothing but some supplies, a shotgun, and her snappy Chihuahua at her side. And that’s when Campion and Gerard Lee’s story goes sprawling in every direction, much like the mountains and bush surrounding Tui’s small hometown of Lake Top.

Detective Robin Griffin, played by “Mad Men” star Elisabeth Moss, is visiting her dying mother when the head of the Queenstown Police Station, Al Parker, calls on her to help with the investigation. Right away, Robin’s thrust back into the uber-masculine environment she grew up in, a murky stew of hard drugs and shotguns presided over by Tui’s grizzled dad Matt. In a poor town bristling with barely sublimated sexual rage, Matt is the scariest of them all — an impressive feat, but given that Peter Mullen has convincingly played psychos in approximately all of his prior roles, it’s not hard to believe.

At the edge of the town lies Paradise, a little plot of land that Matt was meaning to buy. His mother is buried there, and he likes to flagellate himself with the belt he leaves draped on top of her grave (as you do). One morning, like magic, a compound full of New Age-y women settle on the property in packing containers. Holly Hunter, who won an Oscar for her performance in Campion’s “The Piano,” plays their reluctant leader GJ. She has no time for these women who sit around her meditating or prattling on about their ex-husbands (or, in one woman’s case, her pet chimp that attacked her best friend and had to be put down).

“Searchers search. All the bitches here are searching for love. And when they don’t find that, for enlightenment. They don’t find anything. Not one of them,” she declares in just one of many bizarre monologues. With her white hair and genderless clothes, GJ is not a welcome sight to the men of Lake Top, especially Matt. When Tui stops by, she tells the girl she has a time bomb inside of her. GJ is not one for small talk or coddling; she is, if anything, anti-mystical, instead directing the women to listen to their bodies, whether it’s to learn how to give birth or how to die. We are not our bodies and death is “just a reshuffling of atoms,” she says.

And then there’s Matt’s third son Johnno, Robin’s teen sweetheart played by Thomas M. Wright. She finds him living in the woods in a tent or carrying on with a variety of women in town. He’s tall and lanky, tattooed and tortured by his years in jail and as an addict. It’s hard to not to root for these old flames to hook up again, even though Robin’s mom (who is dying of cancer, for God’s sake), begs her not to.

“Top of the Lake” could be a two-hour crime procedural, or a feature on the search for a modern female identity, or even how the sins of the parents are visited upon the children. Luckily, it’s got plenty of time to stretch out and stay awhile so we can fully explore these fascinating, imperfect characters. It’s romantic and incredibly sexy, it’s terrifying and violent, and it’s so raw it chafes. Cable TV has been well-established as a safe haven for actresses that are no longer interested in or perhaps have aged out of Hollywood’s flimsy offerings, but “Top of the Lake” is probably the only top-tier TV series in recent memory that has such strong roots in female filmmaking.

“Top of the Lake” couldn’t be more different stylistically than much of Campion’s past work, from the weird and colorful “Sweetie” to period pieces like “The Portrait of a Lady” and the exquisite “Bright Star.” You can see echoes of these characters across the ages, though. “Sweetie” star Geneviève Lemon appears here as Bunny, a rich woman whose husband left her for a much younger woman. In one striking scene, she goes to the town bar, drops cash on the counter, and tells the slack-jawed men drinking beer it’s for “a f*ck” that will only last seven minutes and to meet her upstairs.

The time constraint is so she won’t get romantically attached — orders from GJ. The female characters are wildly complicated and uninhibitedly sensual in all manners of the word; even innocent Tui becomes a hissing animal when cornered. While most of the men at Lake Top are dangerous — even Robin’s mom’s boyfriend gets a little punchy when he’s drunk — Johnno is the outsider, and the most tender. Mullan might physically resemble Harvey Keitel in “The Piano,” but it’s Wright that channels Keitel’s bare, blunt desire.

“Top of the Lake” is the flip side of recent Australian films like “Snowtown” and “Animal Kingdom.” (All three share the same cinematographer, Adam Arkapaw.) “Snowtown” and “Animal Kingdom” are tightly wound thrillers that take place in towns like Lake Top, populated by men like Matt and his cronies. The crime family in “Animal Kingdom” is run by a woman (the marvelous Jacki Weaver), but we don’t get to see too much of her inner life. Jane Campion has rescued them, given them their own lives, and then armed them to the teeth.

“Boom,” as GJ told Tui. “Boom.”

Categories: Columns

Tags: Elisabeth moss, Filminism, Jane campion, Netflix, Top of the Lake, Tv

Filminism: Pro-Life Thriller ‘The Life Zone’ Began to be Terrible at Conception

Filminism is a smart-ass (but occasionally silly) bi-weekly column about the intersection between film and feminism. 

I’d love to kick off this column with something a bit more pleasant, but Filminism is ultimately a forum to discuss and reflect upon what’s happening in our culture, and “The Life Zone” unfortunately fits the bill. Of course, it’s easier to engage with problematic material when that material is genuinely provocative, but when something as legitimately terrible as “The Life Zone” comes around, it raises questions as to whether a poorly conceived issue film can actually do its proponents more harm than good.

When I pitched this article, the angle was simple.

What happens when a vehemently pro-choice feminist (hi!) watches a “pro-life” horror movie? I pictured my head exploding, my eyes bleeding, my fingers nimbly racing across the keyboard after sitting through “The Life Zone,” a movie I’d seen the trailer for way back in 2011. I was expecting a fetal freak-out along the lines of David Cronenberg’s “The Brood,” where pretty young Samantha Eggar gives birth to horrible eggs that hatched murderous child-things, or “Inside,” a French film with such unabated gore and terror that it actually prompted a full-on panic attack. I’ve never seen the rest.

I was ready to be grossed out by “The Life Zone.” I was ready to be upset. I wasn’t ready to be bored (it turns out that the trailer was a bit misleading; it’s more of a thriller than a horror movie, but … It wasn’t too thrilling, either.) After all, abortion is one of the most hotly contested topics in society today, and although horror movies often use the female body as a stomping ground to play out our fears and desires, few dare touch something as dicey as abortion in any outright way. Sure, there are symbols and allusions, but even Juno turns away from Planned Parenthood after a picketer — another high school girl she knows — tells her that her baby has fingernails. Movies like “Vera Drake” and “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” are few and far between.

If a small company like Justice for All Productions cares enough to make a movie with a message about abortion, you think they’d bring their big guns, right? Screenwriter/producer Ken Del Vecchio even gave up his career as a judge in New Jersey to pursue his life as a filmmaker (well, only because a NJ judicial panel ruled that it “created an ethical conflict,” but still.)

Nope, even going to a real “Hell House” sounds scarier (and perhaps more persuasive) than “The Life Zone.” I mean, just look at the amazing poster.

Three young women wake up in a grimy-looking room and discover they’re prisoners of the icy Dr. Wise, played by Blanche Baker (she was the blonde older sister whose nuptials overshadowed Sam’s birthday in “Sixteen Candles”). They were kidnapped from “the operating table” at the abortion clinic of their choice and carted away to this nameless place where they will be forced to carry their pregnancies to term (the only legitimately scary aspect of the film might be its sneaky rhetoric). To add insult to injury, each woman has been chipped with something like an RFID tag with the ability to shock and drug her should she wander too far from the flock; it was placed in the back of each woman’s neck with “minor laser surgery,” because that’s how medicine works. With lasers!

Each woman has her own story of how she ended up at a clinic. Lara Posey, a tough criminal lawyer and former homecoming queen played by Angela Little, wanted to put her career first. Natalie (Nina Transfeld) is a sweet-faced twenty-year-old whose boyfriend pressured her to have an abortion. We don’t know why Staci Horowitz (Lindsey Haun) chose to have an abortion, or wanted to anyway, and we don’t know if she’s related to Cher Horowitz, but what’s important is she’s the one that Dr. Wise and Mr. Lation can’t break. Oh, Mr. Lation? That’s just Oscar nominee Robert Loggia playing a creepy old man who occasionally Skypes in to growl at our heroines. His best line is probably “Pregnant women! Always eating, never thinking!” It’s crazy how women have to eat more so their bodies have enough nutrients to grow extra humans inside of them.

Lara, Natalie and Staci are forced to watch brain-numbingly boring videos that are supposed to encourage discourse and even create what Dr. Wise refers to as an “abortion think tank,” because think tanks are comprised of hostages and a bitter OB-GYN who declares that the worst drug of all is true love. True love! It’s the worst. Almost as bad as pregnant woman, right, Mr. Lation? (Free TV show pitch: “Breaking Love.” Love instead of meth. Just as addictive, but you lose less teeth in the long run. Free for the taking!)

It’s revealed in a very emotionally moving flashback that Dr. Wise is jealous of these brooding broads because she is unable to have children herself. After her husband left her for some hot young thing whose loins were juicier and ready to party, she tried to kill herself, but the worst was yet to come. Her parents, who are with her in an examination room for some reason, lecture her on all of her failings: She waited too long, she didn’t exercise or eat the right foods, and worst of all, she enjoyed the booze! “You could have stayed away from those cocktails and that red wine,” her mother reminds her. With parents like that, I’d probably sterilize myself.

The ending has a twist that other viewers could have probably seen coming, although to be honest I didn’t. I was busy wondering how Dr. Wise could help pry a baby out of Staci’s vagina, and also if Staci is Cher’s daughter, maybe (no one comes right out and says she’s the most left-wing feminist of them all because she’s Jewish, but come on, if you’ve ever met a gentile named Horowitz, I’ve got some gefilte fish I’d like you to taste). So far as plot twists go it’s not on par with, say, “Safe Haven,” but it’s still pretty wackadoodles. Still, I won’t spoil it in case you decide to enter “The Life Zone” yourself.

The idea of being trapped and held against your will by religious extremists is pretty damn scary, and the idea of losing total bodily autonomy is certainly the thing of nightmares. You might say it is a rather fertile topic! The only nightmares that these women have are of the evils that await them if they abort. Images of ground chuck, swastikas, bugs and people shooting heroin are dancing like sugarplums in their heads. One particularly inspired nightmare shows all of the people in the “documentaries” that were pro-choice chanting “Abort the fetus!” and “Abort the baby!” in different languages, which is I guess what it was like when all those kids were playing Judas Priest records backwards except not as cool.

If you engage in the sort of semantic acrobatics that characters like Natalie do to argue against abortion — a serious theory she proposes is that just because something is legal doesn’t make it moral, like slavery! — you might even say that being held against your will and forced to carry a fetus to term under bodily threat is a violation on par with physical or sexual assault. You might. If you wanted to. Since we’re making giant leaps of logic and all.

The general lighting and tone of the film is a callback to horror franchise films like “Saw” and “Hostel,” and although Mr. Lation isn’t a creepy puppet or a cadre of shadowy businessmen who peddle voyeuristic violence for fun, “The Life Zone” certainly has enough earmarks of the so-called torture porn genre that a lingering threat lurks just below the surface. The movie really gives us that pay-off, though, because the people you’d assume are the bad guys are just doing the work of the Lord. And it’s not like the way crazy people think they’re doing it in movies like “Se7en,” because even though a rational person would realize that kidnapping a pregnant woman and forcing her to remain pregnant against her will is seven shades of effed up, it’s somehow admirable in the eyes of the filmmakers. Like, obviously, this is what you get, little women! You get to hang out with sad old Dr. Wise and Mr. Lation and watch crappy movies forever!

You might wonder why it’s important to engage with a movie like “The Life Zone” at all. There are so many movies that are deemed critic-proof, which doesn’t mean a damn thing except those movies will make a lot of money and probably spawn sequels like bacteria. Very few people will see “The Life Zone,” and it’s unlikely that we’ll ever see a sequel. Its production values are poor and its arguments are so devoid of nuance that the film might ultimately have a deleterious effect on its cause — “If my beliefs were worth defending,” an anti-choice viewer might think, “Perhaps they wouldn’t make for such repugnant drama?”

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Tags: 3 Weeks, 4 Months, And 2 Days, Filminism, Issue films, The Life Zone