First off, anyone who has learned more than two licks about Jessica Chastain knows that she clearly wasn't advocating for Meryl to take less parts (Jessica Chastain is in roughly eight million movies a year, so obviously she isn't advocating for that...kidding, I've met her and she's a sweetheart-this isn't how ardent film fan Jessica Chastain operates). What she was advocating for is that "women of a certain age," including the talented women that she name-checked (Jessica Lange, Susan Sarandon, and Viola Davis) seem to fall by the wayside, and the extremely limited number of parts that go to Streep shouldn't be so limited-there should be more and more interesting parts for actresses in their 50's and 60's.
Chastain of course has a point (though I always wonder if Viola Davis, who is considerably younger than Streep, Lange, and Sarandon, doesn't feel a bit of a twinge when she gets lumped in with these women as they are not in the same age group). While Lange and Davis have both enjoyed recent success on television (more on How to Get Away with Murder later next week when I manage to get through more of my DVR), cinematically the only American woman over 55 who consistently gets giant lead roles is Meryl Streep. Most of the women of Meryl's generation like Sarandon and Lange, as well as Glenn Close, Holly Hunter, Kathy Bates, Geena Davis, Sigourney Weaver, Sissy Spacek, and Kathleen Turner (amongst others) all struggle mightily to get major film roles. In the past decade, some of these women haven't even had a lead role, much less a role that would be critically-praised and widely seen (only Close has managed an Oscar nomination amongst this crew).
The question here, though, is two-fold. Will people actually see
critically-acclaimed films from these women if Hollywood were to producer
them? Hollywood does have a finite
number of films that it can release each year, even if it seems like there’s an
infinite number of screens to play films upon. However, I think that it has been proven that with a
combination of strong female-driven films over the past few years that there is
a large appetite for women at the Box Office. Bridesmaids, The Help,
The Heat, Sex and the City, and It’s
Complicated all cleared $100 million domestically. The specific lead women in these films
(save for Viola Davis) seem to have seen a bit of an increase in their overall
cache since then, but it still feels like (save for Meryl) none of the women
have been showered with the sort of adulation and roles that greet a new male
member of the A-list (see how Ryan Gosling basically got any part he wanted
after Blue Valentine but Michelle
Williams didn’t get remotely as many).
It’s worth noting, looking at Bridesmaids and The Help in particular, how Hollywood doesn’t seem to have a farm team system
when it comes to female actors in the same way that it does for male
actors. You get a hit like Wedding Crashers, and you see how
Hollywood sees the potential in someone like Bradley Cooper in a supporting role, but then groomed for stardom. This happens with someone like Zach
Galifinakis in The Hangover films or
any number of supporting players in the movies of Judd Apatow. The same cannot be said for smash hits
like Bridesmaids and The Help. Yes, Jessica Chastain and Melissa McCarthy were plucked out
of obscurity and given stronger parts, but McCarthy was the only supporting
player who got major Box Office opportunities as a result. Ellie Kemper, Octavia Spencer, Wendi
McLendon-Covey, and even Rebel Wilson continue to get supporting parts despite
having been major crowd-pleasers in these films. They are either given continued supporting parts in comedic movies or
are relegated to television even though they’ve proven they have potential in
cinema. This is clearly a
gender-biased problem for Hollywood, as breakout male stars continually get
limitless roles even when their potential is clearly tapped out (you think that
a woman could have as many flops as Taylor Kitsch or Ryan Reynolds have had and
still be working?).
If you expand beyond just looking at women of a certain age,
and really expand to all women (as I have clearly done, though we’ll get back
to Chastain’s point in a bit), you see an even more startling set of
statistic. The Geena Davis
Institute (founded by the Oscar-winning actress) took a recent study of films
from 2010-2013 (rated lower than R, as their focus is frequently on how women
are perceived by younger women), and found some damning results. Amidst some 5800 speaking or named
characters, only 31% of them were women-nearly seventy percent of all speaking
roles in films from that period were men.
This gets even worse if you look specifically at American productions,
where 29.3% of characters are female, and only 30% of films had female leads or
co-leads.
The statistics get even more dire when you look at specific
attributes of female roles. Only
23.2% of employees in work-place scenes in American films are female, compared
to the actual workforce, which is 46.3% and continually growing (a disparity
nearly as high as large as the 23.2% of women in films, meaning that the number
of women in these scenes would have to double to be accurate to real
life). If you look specifically at
STEM (Science Technology Engineering Mathematics), you get perhaps the most
disgusting imbalance: of the STEM jobs onscreen from the United States, only
12.5% were represented by women (half of what is true in the real
workforce). These statistics may
seem nitpicky, but the reality is that they add up to a startling
under-representation of women in cinema.
And they add to Chastain’s point in general, which is that
women are under-represented. That
being said, the better question is why can’t we see more major films with our
favorite actresses in their 50’s and 60’s. This is a true conundrum, because Meryl Streep should serve
as an indication that there is a hunger for these sorts of movies. Streep’s films frequently gross over
$100 million (even lower-tier hits like Hope
Springs managed to do that), but she’s not the only one who is able to wow
on the Art House circuit. Look at
the recent movies of Judi Dench (Best
Exotic Marigold Hotel made $130 million on a $10 million budget), Maggie
Smith (Quartet made nearly $60
million on an $11 million budget) or Helen Mirren (The Hundred-Foot Journey made nearly $80 million on a $25 million
budget). And this is just having
these films play limited art houses across the country. Imagine what would happen if they were
to follow Streep’s lead and give them wide openings so that people across the
country are able to see these films. When a comic book movie or fairy tale movie plays well and makes a lot of money, Hollywood assumes that others will work-why don't they think the same when a comedy about a woman over fifty is successful? You'd think this would be a no-brainer.
But for some reason Hollywood refuses to listen, and
Hollywood directors refuse to be inspired, so we as an audience need to take
matters into our own hands by supporting the works of women until Hollywood is
beaten over the head enough to take it seriously.
That starts, for the record, today, and you can do it in a number of
ways. For starters you can:
1. Go out and add ten female-led pictures to your Netflix
queue.
2. Make a point to catch a female-led picture from an
actress over forty this fall (in fact, try to do it multiple times). Some obvious contenders include
Julianne Moore in Still Alice or Maps to the Stars, Meryl Streep in Into the Woods, or Maggie Smith in My Old Lady (this is a pretty sad
indictment that there are so few, but if you see others on your screens, make a
point of seeking them out).
Eventually Hollywood won’t just think it’s a fluke or “this one actress”
but instead that it’s both this one actress and a number of her extremely talented
peers.
3. Follow a favorite actress that you aren’t currently
following on Twitter that you aren’t currently. May I suggest Jane Fonda, Octavia Spencer, Ellen Barkin,
Marisa Tomei, Goldie Hawn, Kyra Sedgwick, Cher, and Marlee Matlin, though there
are countless others.
4. Write to your local theater when they aren’t playing a Still Alice or Philomena or Quartet and
demand to know why these films aren’t playing-the more they know that people
want to see these films, the more likely they are to play them and give more
women stronger opportunities to prove they can demand a strong box office.
5. And because it’s so easy-look for a female-driven
television show that you’ve been meaning to Netflix but haven’t because you’re
too into Breaking Bad or The Wire or Dexter or…well you get my point when it comes to shows that aren’t Orange is the New Black in the
zeitgeist. See what Scandal or Nurse Jackie or How to Get
Away with Murder is like and you might just enjoy it.
These are just some ways that you can help Jessica
Chastain’s mission. The reality is
that this is a larger issue that affects everywhere from Congress to the board
room to the theater, and only through demanding it with your time and money
will we see more of these incredibly talented actresses in roles that are
worthy of them.
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