The Women

The Women (2008)

--Diane English

So this was a pretty bad film. I don't know why other people gave it bad reviews since my criticisms all have to do with the portrayal of women, which most people (especially most male film critics [and most are male]) probably don't really care about or think about or who actually believe.


So let's start with the plot. There's a group of really rich upper class women (which sort of goes unsaid but also is blatantly obvious) and one of them has a husband who is cheating on her. The others find out and then she finds out and they all run around trying to deal with it. I think that's the plot, nothing really happens, it's more about friendship and bonding and "coming into your own" and all that crap.

Okay, now with the various and multiple reasons why I didn't like this film.

• The brief treatment of one of the character's apparent homosexuality. Jada Pinkett Smith's character has a girlfriend at the beginning of the film. I actually really liked her in the film and even her character, but she was really really muted. Also one of her so-called friends made somewhat disparaging remarks about her sexuality, which Pinkett Smith somewhat replied to, but not in a way to really deny them. It was an odd moment where I was hoping she was going to say "I'm a lesbian. I love women. I was born that way. Deal with it," but she didn't really say that? It was awkward and her sexuality really wasn't referenced after that. And her character just kinda hangs around and shows up in various scenes but isn't really allowed to add too much.
• The same things happens with Debra Messing's character a little bit. You get one scene with the chaos of her having kids and a short scene where she gives birth, but other than those really small parts, she also just kinda hangs around. Her character I didn't really mind either and I think she should have had a bigger role.
• Hair and Clothes. Once again, women are defined by their hairstyles and their clothes and their personalities also have to be reflected in hair/clothes. This is most evident in Meg Ryan's character (who the movie is mostly about) who starts off with "messy" hair (that to me really looks like someone spent 2 hours on it) and sort of loose, baggy, comfortable clothes. After she goes through her transition to caring/thinking more about herself, she has sleek, long straightened hair (which also looks like it takes hours to do) and more stylish business-women clothes. It just so tired. Women HAVE TO WEAR their hair and their clothes to reflect their unique (yet incredibly similar) personality. This can be seen in all of the other characters too, but mostly with Meg Ryan's. Now, I'm not really trying to say that this is all that unrealistic. We (men/women) are taught to dress our personalities and such, but it's rarely this complete and rarely this stereotypical and that sort of leads me into my next point...
• I have never met anyone like any of these women. It's called "the women" therefore suggesting that it is reflecting some sort of general overall encompassing realities of female experience. Yeah, there is one, twoish people of color in this film. And all the rest are white women. The main characters are all rich. They all shop at Saks (what is this place? it just looks like some hellish department store to me?). The fact that one of the main characters has two white servants who do everything (well one of them does, the other kind of just is there) is really weird. Ummm, white servants, really? Is that how it goes? Let's do an informal poll of all the uber-rich people with servants and see how many of them have an American white woman and a Danish white woman serving them. There is maybe one character who has a nanny who is a person of color, but she shows up for one second and I couldn't really tell and I really don't think they wanted to enter that into the narrative, so... Anyway, I don't know any of these women. They don't reflect any of my life experience. I don't go to salon's to get a manicure or get my hair straightened or whatever. And I'm not really even sure what Saks is. So thanks for making "the women" once again into the upper-class white women and the heavily muted almost homosexual rich woman of color.
• Yeah, this is already a really long post so I'm not even going to go further into how every single character was just a dumb stereotype.
• Bette Midler's character was random and dumb. They would have cut the scene out (because it was stupid) if it had been someone they weren't using to lure more of an audience.
  

What I liked about the film:

• Jada Pinkett Smith! And to a less degree Debra Messing
• Men are not in this film. I really enjoy that (especially given that there have been films where there are no women). I think that there should be more sans-men films, but I'm sad that this one wasn't any good because the films that didn't have any women are classics (12 Angry Men is what I'm thinking about, but most of the "classic films" generally have strong male leads and stereotyped/weak female leads--you may disagree, I have my own system of thought about this).
• The talk with the ten year old about women in magazines being unrealistic and stuff like that. It was sort of a good talk for awhile and I'm glad they brought it up, since Pinkett Smith's character is dating a model, Meg Ryan's character designs clothes (which get shown on runways) and that other chick (hahah, I'm not sure who she is) works for a fashion (?) magazine.

There's another part I really didn't like that I didn't put with the above because I wanted to mention something I liked first. I really didn't like the gendering of Meg Ryan's character's daughter. It was disgusting. The "girl" was sucked into the middle of some sexist "cat fight" between Meg Ryan and her husband's "mistress" and how is she going to think about relationships later in life? They force her to be part of their relationship "games" where both of them are trying to hurt one another over some stupid asshole. They just fucked up that "girl's" whole thinking about relationships. Not only are they heavily heavily gendering her, but they are also normatizing her to repeat their weird upper-class power-play bullshit. It's really gross.

Okay, this review is really long, right? Sorry, but it's a movie that can inspire a lot of criticism from me. And I have more! But I won't burden ya'll with them. Hehe. This film did make me want to kind of see the 30's film, just because I have no idea how it would have translated back then. I just can't imagine that 30's film from seeing this version. So I might have to get on that. I can probably safely assert that there were no people of color as the main characters (but really, are there any in this one? It's mostly about the relationships between two white women) and probably no one was homosexual, and if they were than it would be negative. But I really doubt that that is in there.