The missing ingredient

But the recent glut of political biopics- Che, Frost/Nixon, Milk-have come down on the right side of enlightening and entertaining and have left me feeling unusually optimistic about the future of film. And yet, and yet, great as these films were, I have begun to have a nagging feeling that somewhere something is missing...

Look closer at these films and what do they have in common? Yup- that old chestnut, the lives of great men, all conspicuously lacking any women characters of note. Both Che and Frost/Nixon have the fabulous Catalina Sandino Moreno and Rebecca Hall playing parts that amount to little more than providing an attractive backdrop; Milk has Alison Pill as a gay activist, admittedly a great female character but, really, just the one girl??

I know this argument has it's weaknesses- these are representations of real lives which just didn't happen to include many women, Milk is about gay men (etc,etc)- but my point is that these are symptoms of a wider problem. Too often there is only one option for women in films and so, while multiple characters can represent the many facets of being a bloke, that single option becomes a representation of women in general rather than a particular woman. And when this single option is merely to act as an alluring prop.... you get where I'm going with this.

So what of the recent films about women? Hmm- we have Bride Wars, He's Just Not That Into You and, coming soon, Confessions of a Shopaholic. These are admittedly all films with lots of women in them; however, curiously they all appear to be playing exactly the same part- young, beautiful, skinny, enjoys shopping, weddings and dreaming of a bloke and a babie. Or we have The Reader, Revolutionary Road, The Changeling, in which the central female character is there to suffer and emote (and still only one!).

What happened to Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday, to Katherine Hepburn, to Lauren Bacall, to women with dimensions (physical and emotional) and agendas and interests? Is it that there are so few women in positions of control (only 6% of all directors, fact fans) or is it more probably and more worryingly that our ideas of what women are, want and can be has narrowed to such a degree that this is now all people want to see?
I've had enough. We should all get angry.

(See what happens when I watch political films...)