Tag: Claire Foy

Women Talking (2022)

A worthy attempt but a misfire, that frustratingly fails to grapple with deeper feminist issues, settling for a safer, less challenging consensus

Director: Sarah Polley

Cast: Rooney Mara (Ona), Claire Foy (Salome), Jessie Buckley (Mariche), Judith Ivey (Agata), Ben Whishaw (August), Frances McDormand (Scarface Janz), Shelie McCarthy (Greta), Micelle McLeod Mejal), Kate Hallett (Autje), Liv McNeil (Nietje), Emily Mitchell (Miep), Kira Guloien (Anna)

In 2010, the women of an isolated Mennonite community discover they have been victims of a policy of systemic drugged rape by the men, every night for decades. All this remains unknown until a man is caught in the act and the attackers arrested. The other men go to the city to bail them out, informing the women they will be expected to forgive on their return. The women hold a vote about what to do: do nothing, stay and fight or leave. When the vote is tied between the latter two options, the women decide the final choice will be in the hands of a small group of their number, who will debate in the community’s hay loft.

All of this happens, in voiceover, in the film’s opening few minutes. It all sounds more engaging, challenging and dynamic than what actually happens in the film. I saw Women Talking with my wife, who is passionate about the issues this film wants to deal with. We were both united in our view of the film: Women Talking is full of talking, but no one really says anything. It’s a missed opportunity that fails to convert its undeniably powerful premise – or the committed and passionate performances of its cast – into something that really successfully grapples with, and comments on, the issues, with a cast of characters who feel more like devices than fully-rounded people discovering their voices and freedom.

It’s a film that should have the urgency of a time-bound debate and the passion of a group of women discovering that they have the power to make decisions themselves. But the film feels slow (much longer than its two hours), flat and theoretical where it should be filled with debate and different ideas. It has moments of power and speeches of tragedy, but it doesn’t manage to make this something truly revolutionary.

The film would have been more interesting if it had been about everything covered in that opening monologue. In this community the women are kept illiterate, have never been allowed to be part of any decision-making and are so oppressed they don’t even have language to understand what sexual assault is. There was a fascinating film waiting to be made about these women working out exactly what had happened to them – imagine the heart-rending conversations that must have involved – and discovering they were just as capable of reaching decisions in their own right as men. Of finding their voice and freedom.

Now that is a film about feminism I want to see! I wanted to see these women who have never even considered ideas about independence and self-determination discovering they could do that. Just having a vote in a community like this one is an astonishing revolutionary act – it shouldn’t be so blandly passed over as this film does. How did these women even realise that they could decide for themselves what they to do with their lives?

Instead, we get a film where actual debate is surprisingly neutered. Frances McDormand’s character is the voice of conservatism, but walks out of the debate after five minutes and never comes back. With her gone, no counter-arguments are raised, no voice given to help understand why people (and many of them have done so) would choose to stay in relationships even after they know the truth. McDormand’s character is almost certainly wrong – the women should get out of this awful place – but we should at least hear her say why she wants to stay and the film should trust us to understand that listening to her viewpoint isn’t the same as agreeing with it.

In fact, it would have been fascinating to hear why so many women in the community heard about the systemic rape and yet voted to stay. The hay-loft debates should hum with the exchange of ideas. We should hear different viewpoints. Many people voted to stay and do nothing: why? Let’s hear what makes these women accept what’s happened to them. Are they institutionalised, love their husbands despite their faults or can’t imagine leaving their homes no matter the cost? We don’t know. It’s like the film makers were worried that a debate which actually included all potential viewpoints would have been seen as reducing the horror. In reality, however, it’s essential.

There is also a fascinating discussion to engage with about justice and forgiveness – particularly given the film’s setting in a religious community that preaches forgiveness. The men have demanded the women forgive. Ona (Rooney Mara) declares early on that forced forgiveness cannot be real. But instead of engaging with this, that throwaway is all we get. It’s a deep question which we often grapple with in the wake of terrible crimes. Whole books have been devoted to people who can or cannot forgive those who’ve committed terrible crimes against them or their loved ones. There’s so much this film could have delved into with its cast of women who’ve been told all their lives they must forgive – but it had no interest.

Instead, the film wants to make things easy. It completely shirks any debate of religion. This is a community of women whose entire understanding of the world is founded on the Bible and religious instruction. But yet God, faith and Christian ideas barely come up. It’s briefly mentioned that leaving the community means exile from heaven – but that is benched and never raised again. It should be at the heart of their considerations. There isn’t even a debate about whether their community’s teachings are legitimate (since they are partly based on systemic rape, we can guess not).

In the end rather than really tackling themes, we get conversations which do little but make the same point over and over again. Some of these speeches are undeniably powerful, and the performances of Foy and Buckley in particular are strong, but they are weakened by the lack of depth to the characters.

Women Talking is full of words but never says as much as you are desperate for it to do. The actors do a fine job with the passionate speeches and bring a lot of power to this chamber piece. But it’s frustrating that we feel robbed of seeing these women realise they have the power to choose and instead circles a highly emotive but ultimately slightly unrevealing discussion intercut with on-the-nose shots of fields, playing children and empty kitchen tables. It manages to avoid focusing on anything potentially interesting or engaging and feels like a worthy missed opportunity.

First Man (2018)

Ryan Gosling as an unreadable Neil Armstrong in the engrossing but cold First Man

Director: Damien Chazelle

Cast: Ryan Gosling (Neil Armstrong), Claire Foy (Janet Armstrong), Jason Clarke (Ed White), Kyle Chandler (Deke Slayton), Corey Stoll (Buzz Aldrin), Pablo Schreiber (Jim Lovell), Christopher Abbott (David Scott), Patrick Fugit (Elliot See), Lukas Haas (Michael Collins), Shea Whigham (Gus Grissom), Brian d’Arcy James (Joseph Walker), Cory Michael Smith (Roger Chaffee), Ciaran Hinds (Robert R Gilruth)

About halfway through this film, it struck me: Neil Armstrong is a not particularly interesting man who experienced the most interesting thing ever. It’s a problem that First Man, an otherwise exemplary film, struggles with: Armstrong himself, put bluntly, is unknowable, undefinable and, in the end, an enigma I’m not sure there is much to unwrap. Which is not to detract one iota from Armstrong’s amazing achievements, or his legendary calmness under pressure or his courage and perseverance. It just doesn’t always make for good storytelling.

First Man charts the years 1961-1969. During these years of professional triumph, Armstrong has success as test pilot, an astronaut on the Gemini programme (including command of Gemini 8, carrying out the first docking in space then saving his own life and the life of his pilot with his quick thinking when the mission nearly encounters disaster) and then the Apollo programme and his own first steps upon the moon. But Armstrong’s life is dogged by loss and tragedy, first his five-year old daughter to cancer, then a string of friends in accidents during the hazardous early days of the NASA space programme, including the deaths of Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee in the Apollo 1 fire. Armstrong becomes a man burdened with these losses.

There is very little to fault in the making of First Man – in fact it’s further evidence that Chazelle is a gifted filmmaker with a glittering future of great movies ahead. There are two things this film absolutely nails: the supreme majesty and awe of space and the terrifyingly rickety nature of the spacecraft we send men up into it in.

Helped hugely by a superb score by Justin Hurwitz, which makes extensive and beautiful use of a theremin, the film captures the sense of mankind’s smallness, our vulnerability, in the face of the overwhelming vastness of space. Mixing goose-bump inducing wailing solos with orchestral sweep, and encapsulating the feeling of how small and lonely man in space is, the score goes a long way to match up with the visuals in creating a sense of space. The Oscar-winning visual effects – mixing computer graphics with some ingenious practical effects – never intrude but bring out the gritty reality of tin cans in space.

Chazelle also really understands the impact of being so far beyond anything we can imagine, and his moon landing sequence is a thing of beauty. He expertly uses a number of close ups in the confined, claustrophobic campaign and largely eschews exterior shots (most of which only use the perspective of the crew’s view from the tiny windows, or of the cameras mounted on the side of the spacecraft). The moon landing follows suit, as we are thrown in alongside Armstrong and Aldrin as the lunar landing module takes its place on the moon – until the hatch opens with a whoosh of air (and sound) escaping the picture. And with that whoosh, the camera flies out of the hatch and switches – in an astonishing visual trick – from wide screen to IMAX shot to give us our first view of the vastness of space filling the frame. Suddenly, space fills the entire screen and the shocking beauty of the moon is a beautiful touch. We get as close as we can visually to experiencing the switch for Armstrong from confined spaces and beeping switches to vast panoramas and all-consuming silence.

And we really feel the switch, because Chazelle has so completely immersed us into the dangers and insecurities of the space programme. The spacecraft are repeatedly shown as alarmingly shaky, screwed together (the camera frequently pans along lines of bolts inside the cabins), thin, tiny, vulnerable capsules that shake, groan, whine and seem barely able to survive the stresses and strains they are put under. Any doubts about the risks the astronauts are under are dispelled in the opening sequence when Armstrong’s X-15 rocket twice bounces off the atmosphere and the internal cockpit around him glows orange under the extreme heat. But it’s the same on every flight we see – these craft don’t look safe enough for a short hop to the Isle of Wight, let alone hundreds of thousands of miles to the moon and back.

And that’s clear as well from the danger that lurks around every corner of the space programme. Death is a constant companion for these pilots and can come at any time. Armstrong himself escapes only due to a combination of luck and skill. When luck disappears, death follows swiftly for many of his co-pilots. Off-screen crashes claim the lives of three of his friends. Chazelle sensitively handles the horrifying Apollo 1 fire (news reaches Armstrong of the death of several friends, including his closest Ed White, while wining and dining politicians at the White House), and the terrible cost of this tragedy hangs over every single second of the moon programme. Fate or chance at any moment could claim lives. This grim air of mortality hangs over the whole film, a melancholic reminder of the cost of going further and faster to expand mankind’s horizons.

This grief also runs through Armstrong’s life and shapes him into the man he becomes. The death of Armstrong’s daughter at the start of the film sets the tone – the shocking loss of a child at such a young age is tangible – and it seems (in the film) as if this was the moment that led to Armstrong hardening himself against the world. He weeps uncontrollably at the death of his daughter, but later deaths are met with stoic coolness. Armstrong in this film is a cool enigma, who by the end of the film treats concerned questions from his children about whether he will return alive from the moon mission with the same detachment he shows at the official NASA press conference. “We have every confidence in the mission” he tells these two pre-teens, “Any further questions?”

It’s the film’s main problem that in making Armstrong such an unreadable man, who buttons up and represses all emotion, that it also drains some of the drama and human interest from the story. While you can respect Armstrong’s professionalism and coolness under pressure, his icy unrelatability makes him hard to really root for over the course of two hours. The film also strangely only sketches in the vaguest of personalities for the other astronauts (Aldrin gets the most screentime, but is presented as an arrogant, insensitive blowhard) so we hardly feel the loss of the deaths. Its part of the attitude towards Armstrong as a man chiselled from marble, so lofty that the film doesn’t dare to really delve inside his own inner world or feelings but builds a careful front around him to avoid analysis.

It’s not helped by Ryan Gosling, whose skill for blankness makes him somewhat miscast here. Try as he might, he can’t suggest a deeper world of emotional torment below the calm surface, no matter how soulful his eyes. It’s a role you feel needed a British actor, who could really understand this culture of repressed stiff-upper-lipness. Indeed Claire Foy fares much better as his patient, loyal wife who holds her composure (more or less) for the whole film under the same pressures of grief as Armstrong. Gosling just can’t communicate this inner depth, and his blankness eventually begins to crush the film and our investment in its lead character.

First Man in almost every other respect is a great piece of film-making and another sign of Chazelle’s brilliance. But it’s never as dramatic as you feel it should be. Armstrong’s life doesn’t carry enough event outside his moon landing experience, and the film can’t make an emotional connection with the man, for all the loss and suffering it shows for him. For a film that is so close to so perfect on space and the Apollo programme it’s a shame – but makes this more a brilliant dramatized documentary than perhaps a drama.

The Lady in the Van (2015)

Maggie Smith and Alex Jennings tearing up the neighbourhood

Director: Nicholas Hytner

Cast: Maggie Smith (Miss Shepherd), Alex Jennings (Alan Bennett), Roger Allam (Rufus), Deborah Findley (Pauline), Jim Broadbent (Underwood), Claire Foy (Lois), Frances de la Tour (Ursula Vaughan Williams)

This screen adaptation of Alan Bennett’s play is entertaining and a feast of good acting, even if not a lot actually really happens in it. Nicholas Hytner directs, as he did with the original National Theatre production, with Maggie Smith also reprising her role as the titular bag lady. Interestingly the theatrical device of two versions of Alan Bennett (as the narrator) is also carried over from the film, with Alex Jennings playing both Bennett and his “Bennett the Author” persona.

Mary Shepherd (Maggie Smith) is an elderly bag lady who lives out of a broken down van which she insists painting a garish bright yellow. Befriended by ‘neighbour’ Alan Bennett (Alex Jennings) she moves the van onto his drive – and stays for 15 years. The film chronicles their unlikely friendship, as well as Bennett’s conflict with himself over his motives (in this and in everything else) and slowly reveals Mrs. Shepherd’s background.

It’s a witty and entertaining meandering film that oddly feels rather like the biggest budget home movie in the world, a sort of National Theatre party with the action taking place in Alan Bennett’s real home, Hytner himself popping up as an un-named character (as well as appearing on screen at the end with the real Bennett) and its dozens of cameos from British theatre, not least cameo appearances from all the cast of The History Boys (a rather distracting eye-spy game when you notice it). This doesn’t make it not fun – its a delight to see so many great actors at work – it just feels a little odd.

What probably keeps this from being impossibly smug is that it is actually a very acute (and self accusatory) examination of the author himself and the nature of writing. Bennett is not afraid at every point to question his motives and to accuse writers of exploiting those around them for material. Of course this is slightly distanced by the device of the “two” Alan Bennett’s, but this is pretty much essential to dramatise a conversation a man has with himself without using voiceover. Alex Jennings is, by the way, terrific in both roles – a wonderful mimic, but also really understands the psychology of the part and makes the contrasts between the two Bennett’s immediately clear.

Maggie Smith though is the star here and she is a shining one. She brings not only her usual wit and comic timing to the part,but she also is able to demonstrate with a few beats, or a small aside, years of pain and loneliness. She makes a woman who is basically quite unpleasant and difficult, into someone you care deeply about. A late sequence of her playing the piano – music being something she has avoided for years – is deeply moving because of the simplicity and genuine feeling she plays the moment with.

Hytner directs with a smooth unfussiness and a great deal of polish – I’ve always thought he is a natural at film directing, and he resists the temptation for visual flashiness. It goes without saying that he is a superb actors director. The final act of this film however doesn’t quite click into place – the comment on giving Miss Shepherd “the ending she would have wanted” doesn’t quite work and the final conversion with a decreased Miss Shepherd a scene too far. It’s an anecdote rather than a story – and a good anecdote well told – but not something I can imagine wanting or needing to see again.