(Going to do my breakdown of the field in a later post. This one deserved to stand on its own.)
My first observation from reading this year’s nominees for the Academy Awards is what an amazing year it is for women in film – and why can’t every year be at least this good?
Coming on the heels of Kathryn Bigelow’s glass-ceiling-exploding Oscar win last year with The Hurt Locker, we now have two of this year’s ten Best Picture nominees (The Kids Are All Right and Winter’s Bone) directed by women, and a third (Toy Story 3) solo-produced by a woman. Women are the driving central characters in four of the pictures up for the top prize – and none of them are simple leading beauties; but, ranging from adolescents to empty nesters, from the spectacular to the raw, they represent a range of roles that brought greatness out of performers both familiar and fresh.
Natalie Portman, the driven ballet dancer tumbling off a mental cliff in Black Swan, surpasses Vincent Cassel’s vulgar designs for her talents to a degree that is both miraculous and horrifying. Hailee Steinfeld’s vengeance-minded Mattie Ross may describe Rooster Cogburn as the one with True Grit, but without her grit, no movie happens. Jennifer Lawrence, the teenage girl at the center of Winter’s Bone, keeps her abandoned, poverty-stricken family together with a steely focus that shames the ego-driven meth-addled men of her valley. Annette Bening, playing a spouse and mother in the warmly-contemporary comedy The Kids Are All Right, stares down sperm donor Mark Ruffalo on her front porch and tells him (not in these words, but close enough), that he may be a very good sperm donor, but she’s a good parent, and that means that of the two of them (you’ll forgive the ironic expression) she has the bigger balls.
Even female roles that have traditionally gone underwritten were given rich attention this year. Enjoy Helena Bonham Carter as the Queen in The King’s Speech. See how active her love for her husband is – how she respects his fragile pride and the demands of his family line, yet still subtly, passionately, urges him to be as extraordinary as she knows him to be. The Fighter may front-sell the fraternal relationship between Mark Wahlberg’s struggling middleweight boxer Micky Ward and Christian Bale as his crack-addicted has-been older brother, but they all live in the wider context of their fearsomely narcissistic mother, played by Melissa Leo. Meanwhile the fiercest advocate for Micky is the barmaid played by Amy Adams – who in a dynamic performance is allowed to have both the heart and temper she needs to pry Micky loose from Mother and all those sisters.
And that’s the true celebration of female contributions to film in 2010 – not just that they directed or starred in great films, but that on-screen they could be so much more than a mother good or bad or a lover good or bad. They could be artists or heroes or monsters; they could be powerful, vain, tenacious, or simply ordinary, flawed, and genuine. And no matter what they were, they were always worth watching in some of the year’s best films. Iron Man and Batman still haven’t made room for Wonder Woman – but this year’s body of work is arguably much better for us as moviegoers, if Hollywood can keep it up.