MOVIES
B Y M O L LY T E M P L E T O N
ELLE FANNING
IN TWENTIETH
CENTURY WOMEN
BEING AND
BECOMING
Two new films, Elle and
Twentieth Century Women,
offer vastly different takes
on what makes us who we are
O
ddly enough, it was a misguided defense of Elle
that made me come around — to some degree
— to Paul Verhoeven’s latest Rorschach test of a
film. A tireless provocateur, Verhoeven (Starship
Troopers, Showgirls) can also be tiresome, and
Elle is a bit of both sides.
The litany of horrors that befall Michèle (a brilliant,
fearsome Isabelle Huppert) in this film include: violent
rape; the alien rape of a video game character wearing her
face; being blamed for murders committed by her father;
her ex-husband hitting her (offscreen, in the past); and a
car crash. (I may have left something out.)
Efficient and apparently tireless, Michèle can be cruel,
callous, vindictive and selfish. We could point to her
murderous father and self-obsessed mother (understandable,
arguably, given her husband) as justification for her eerily
calm response to everything. How could she be “normal,”
growing up like that?
But the piece that changed my mind about Elle took
such characterization a step farther, opting to argue that
Michèle is not just damaged but a sociopath.
Isn’t all of this too easy? Using trauma to define a character
is lazy and clichéd shorthand; using atypical actions to label
her a sociopath is just a bigger leap. And all of this is exactly
what Verhoeven’s poking at: the temptation to explain who
a person is, and why, to pretend we can possibly understand
that person based on the things that happen to her. Are you
just the sum of what’s happened to you?
I wouldn’t want to hang out with Michèle, and to say
I’m uncertain about her response to her assailant would be
a considerable understatement. But at the application of
the sociopath label, I wanted to rise in her defense — or
in the defense of all women, especially those of a certain
age, who do not behave as expected, who don’t run about
coddling the feelings of the men in their lives.
Calculating, precise, tactless, brutally honest, Michèle is
categorically unwilling to be a victim, and so Elle goes in
unexpected, uncomfortable directions. There’s not a man in
Elle who doesn’t act directly against the interests of a woman
— yet she’s the one at whom we look askance. Somewhere
in the heaping pile of trauma, in Huppert’s raised eyebrow,
is a dig at narrative norms and character expectations, a
vicious twist on who we expect people to be.
Would a revenge fantasy have been more satisfying?
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Absolutely. But that’s not what Verhoeven is here for. Elle
is flawed and brutal, occasionally glorying in shock more
than smarts — but Huppert’s Michèle deserves a place in
film’s pantheon of anti-heroines. And if there isn’t such a
pantheon, it’s about time to create it.
On the flip side of men-making-movies-about-women
is Mike Mills’ loving, beautiful Twentieth Century Women.
In gray curls and very little makeup, Annette Bening stars
as Dorothea Fields, an older mother raising her son, Jamie
(Lucas Jade Zumann), in a rambling renovation-project of
a house in Santa Barbara.
At 15, Jamie is starting to stretch away from his single
mother, whose attempts to put a man in his life work out
better for her than for her son. (Billy Crudup, in a bushy
mustache, is perfection as the slightly dopey sculptor/
mechanic/man-about-the-house.)
But does it take a man to raise a man? The answer,
in Mills’ primary-color saturated 1970s dream, is a solid
no: Dorothea enlists her other boarder, twentysomething
Abby (a radiant Greta Gerwig), and Jamie’s 17-year-old
friend Julie (Elle Fanning) to help Jamie — and his mother
— navigate the fraught early teen years.
But Twentieth Century Women isn’t just about Jamie
(the title probably gives that away). Each woman gets her
portrait painted in the course of the film, from youth to
adulthood, and Mills is generous and unjudging in these
scenes. He tells as well as shows, and the effect is that
of a mini biography — a character sketch of the work in
progress that people usually are.
Fanning, with her sullen face, sparks into earnestness
at an awkward dinner party; Gerwig flails in a dark club,
dragging Jamie out into a world his mother doesn’t
understand yet gamely explores. Dorothea is confused but
sincere when she asks what Black Flag is singing about.
Twentieth Century Women contains what is possibly
my favorite exchange in recent film (a question that’s
answered with the words “clitoral stimulation”). But clever
teen replies aside, Mills’ film is deeply honest about people
and the places where they hide. After Jamie gets deep into
some feminist texts he tries to understand his mother —
who pulls back, not sure she wants this knowing to go both
ways.
Characters swirl, overlap, grow together and slip apart,
and nothing built in this narrative lasts forever. Though
every character comes into a certain degree of focus, Mills
isn’t here to sum people up, but to show them in motion.
Twentieth Century Women is a film about how we know
people and how we grow alongside them, in their shadows,
at least for a while. (Elle is at Broadway Metro, Twentieth
Century Women is at Bijou Art Cinemas)
20th CENTURY WOMEN (R)
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COMING SOON
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THE LURE
OSCAR SHORTS
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TONI ERDMANN I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO
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eugeneweekly.com • January 19, 2017
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