The Women

I saw The Women this Saturday. Though reviews are generally abysmal, I will offer my qualified recommendation to the contrary: The Women isn’t good. But it isn’t bad. And if you’d like to see more movies with female protagonists, and more movies aren’t solely about those women’s relationships with men, give The Women your money. Hollywood will not respond to petitions or politics or all the bloggers in the world. But it will respond to cash. If The Women makes a reasonable chunk of change, then they’ll try it again, and maybe next time it’ll be good.

The film revolves around four friends: Mary, the do-it-all suburbanite (Meg Ryan), Sylvia, the magazine editor (Annette Bening), Edie, the frazzled, fertile mom (Debra Messing), and Alex, the hot, edgy lesbian (Jada Pinkett-Smith). (I was unaware the last was a trope of chick flicks, but maybe this is The Women trying to break the gender barriers of movie genres.) The four live in the control environment of “upper class,” where the mundane concerns of day-to-day are neatly solved by money and the hired help, allowing the film to have pinpoint focus on other (but not frivolous!) problems. One you probably guessed from the previews: Mary finds out her husband is cheating on her. The other is Sylvia’s futile quest to bring intelligence and substance to the women’s magazine she’s recently come to helm. There are incremental perturbations of mother/daughter problems, the betrayal of friends, etc.

The main failing of The Women is that it could have landed so many solid blows – but it pulls its punches at best, or just never goes for it at all. The Sylvia’s struggle to bring quality content and writing is opposed time and again by the establishment – airbrushed actresses, diet tips, and appeals to our worst emotions. She fails (realistic), quits (understandable), but for all her passion has nothing to say about it in the aftermath. The closest she comes to criticism is when she’s talking to Mary’s daughter, who wants to be skinny like the models in her magazines – to which Sylvia only says, “No one looks like that. They’re all airbrushed.” Mary fails worse in reassuring her daughter, however. Her daughter is 12, a stick, and when she refuses a cookie on the grounds that it is “too many points,” Mary only laughs amusedly then goes back to prepping for her little garden party. Then, of course, Mary gets into a messy almost-divorce with her cheating husband, and sort of forgets about her daughter’s weight obsession, because of course her daughter won’t be even more driven to gain control over some aspect of her life while her parents’ relationship is disintegrating in a most ugly fashion around her.

Ultimately, none of these issues – seeing the impotence of one’s passion towards a laudable goal, tweens suffering poor body image because of pictures better qualified as drawings than photographs – are very important because the characters live in the magical world of wealth. Much like money allows them the luxury to dwell on such problems, money, apparently, can also sweep them all away. Sylvia will launch her own magazine and do whatever she likes regardless of profits, and Mary’s daughter will follow in the footsteps of her mother and grandmother, buying hair-straightenings and face lifts to bring her nearer to that fictional image she never stops admiring.

The one hit the movie never took, and I really wish it had, was men’s culpability in the messes that are personal relationships. They get credit for not playing the blame game on men, which I think is what a lot of people assume “girl power” and “feminism” are, but in ducking that they were equally unfair – since men weren’t the evil overbearing monsters ruining everything, they’re impotent, barely culpable for their own actions. In the whole cheating scandal, the mistress Crystal (Eva Mendes) is blamed much more than the unfaithful husband. Even when he’s forced to move out, trying to make amends all the while, Crystal comes by his place on a daily basis – but it’s hardly his fault, or so his daughter claims, saying “I don’t think he even likes her. He’s just lonely.” Of course, he’s lonely! He can’t help having a mistress, he’s just a sad little man. It is strangely Crystal that offers the only fair and balanced view of the situation, saying when Mary confronts her, that husbands don’t get stolen. They go willingly. But then Crystal is a self-obsessed, money-grubbing home wrecker, so is likely not meant to be the film’s vessel of wisdom.

But even if the movie isn’t as good to women as it could be, as hard on the problems it presents as it might have been, and contains its fair share of stereotypes, it’s not anywhere near as bad as the rest of Hollywood. These women are able to pursue the lives they want – and what they want isn’t shoes, or wealth, or men. And if they must live in a world of financial freedom to have that luxury, at least that freedom seems to come from their own efforts, and not from the benevolence of the men in their lives.

What’s a movie, $10 and two hours of your life? A small price to pay for the chance at women of real substance on the silver screen.

Nylon

I do not believe I will be renewing my subscription to Nylon. I just can’t get behind anything – even my precious Urban Decay – that exalts a person to the status of “style icon” who has done nothing more than be rich, responsibility-free, and be prone to mixing purchased clothing in an as-yet-unconceived (or conceived, and dismissed for its hideousness) manner. I cannot support any so-called celebrity whose rise to fame requires sleuthing on par with one’s thesis research to understand. Doubly so if, after all that digging, I still don’t get why s/he is famous.

Right now I’m looking at you, Cory Kennedy. Props for building success out of an apparent lack of any sort of skill. Maybe that’s a skill within itself. But not one I can respect, and not one that will ever make you any more than an accident and minor, inexplicable infatuation of pop culture.

Nylon, when you stop putting 90210 (the current one), Cory Kennedy, and all other artifices of the “LA club kid” scene up on a pedestal, I will come back. Yes, perhaps there is some style and innovation there. Maybe it warrants some nifty on-the-street pictures. But to push people into celebrity, and to suggest there’s any more culture there than one of white-out and unabashed privilege, is a joke. LA is LA because it is all money and no substance, and on the outside it’s pretty, but on the inside it’s not, and call me picky but I like my famous people to have more interior than a cardboard cutout.

You were doing so well, too. There were even some black models in that last issue. Though I seem to recall the one before had none. And your covers remain uniformly whitewashed. I’m not so hot at math but it doesn’t really average out in your favor.