The Other Woman: Empathy Isn't Easy

        Anyone else remember that one time Padme wrecked Phoebe's marriage to Max Medina?

Directed by Don Roos, The Other Woman first premiered in Toronto in 2009. At the time, the movie was sporting the title of the book from which it was adapted, Love, and Other Impossible Pursuits. But the film didn’t receive any kind of widespread theatrical release until 2011, when it also sported its new title. We can assume perhaps distributors were more eager to showcase the film after Portman’s Oscar win for Black Swan at the 2011 ceremony.

I myself caught the film on Netflix circa 2017, a time I remember as being especially fruitful for discovering underseen and independently financed films on the service (back before most of Netflix's budget went instead to funding such homegrown masterworks as Extraction or Damsel ...). In the tentpole-driven film world that we were already seeing emerge in 2009, an underground Netflix following is typically the highest that most indie-filmmakers hope for.

I actually did have one friend from my film program run across this movie on Netflix independent of my involvement or recommendation, and she reported also liking the film. But seeing how the larger critical body received the film, I have to imagine it was just the two of us against the world.

The movie’s critical reception was nothing to brag about, sitting at 38 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, putting it just behind Roland Emmerich’s 2012 and Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, both of which came out the same year. (But hey, at least it beat Paul Blart: Mall Cop …)

    You can tell by the nature of the criticism that no one who wrote about this film was actually thinking anyone would be thinking about the movie fifteen years on, hence a lot of the vague claims about the movie is “uneven” or “doesn’t know what it wants to be.” The movie left so little cultural impact that five years later, we got a whole different film with the exact same title (starring Cameron Diaz) and no one cared, or even remembered that movie either.

         So, why bring up this film at all?

The Florida Project (2017)

       Well, independent films, like The Other Woman, have never had what most would call a stable footing in the ecosystem (some would say that’s kind of the point), but the outlook has perhaps never been quite as grim as it does in the present time. Film pundits have been sounding the alarm over trying to tether every single movie into a cinematic universe for some time now, and Hollywood is absolutely facing the consequences of ignoring this counsel.

    You see this in the films that get made and the films that get promoted. Hollywood continues to restructure itself to do just one thing, and in doing so it leaves itself and its filmmakers very vulnerable. (Speaking as one of those weirdos who actually genuinely enjoyed the Jurassic World trilogy, even I am scratching my head wondering who this new reboot due next summer is supposed to be for.)

    You have outlets like A24, responsible for films such as The Farewell, Eighth Grade, Room, and most recently Civil War who seem intent on preserving more grassroots cinema. Though even these guys are keeping their heads up largely owing to the way they imitate major film studios--essentially branding itself as the independent film destination.

    And this is not something that Joe Moviegoer just doesn't know about. This is one of the hottest talking points in the world of YouTube film criticism, "I am so sick of remakes and reboots." But there is a general lack of interest in actually generating that conversation--in seeking out and promoting the movies we should be talking about instead. And so I am hoping to be a part of the wave that tries to these give movies better real estate in the dialogue, and that includes movies like The Other Woman.

         The movie's draw lies not in the colorful flashing of an established IP or high-budget effects, but in the thoughtful exploration of the contradictions within the human psyche. It is the picture of character-driven storytelling. And I am attempting to show that extra measure of proactivity in the films I discuss and celebrate. And despite the audience's indifference or even antipathy for the film, there’s a lot about The Other Woman that I think is genuinely worth celebrating.

 

Catching You Up

Emilia (Natalie Portman) and Jack (Scott Cohen) are newlyweds who started seeing each other romantically while he was still married to his first wife, Carolyn (Lisa Kudrow), an accomplished doctor with whom Jack has a young son, William (Charlie Tahan). It was the development of Emilia’s pregnancy that motivated Jack to initiate the divorce so he and Emilia could get married. When their baby, Isabelle, dies unexpectedly in the night. Emilia is stuck untangling the emotional fallout of her loss with the implications of her affair with Jack, especially as it pertains to William.

Emilia faces all sorts of roadblocks, including the stigma of being the second gold-digging wife to a much richer man as well as the passive-aggression of Carolyn. Eight-year-old William, meanwhile, resents his new stepmother and does not hesitate to weaponize his position in his father’s life to make Emilia feel uncomfortable. But Emilia is determined to prove that she does have a place in this new life. Her efforts to come to terms with the grief of losing her daughter grow hand-in-hand with her efforts to nurture a relationship with William, who starts to warm up to his new stepmother, and even repair her relationship to her own divorced parents.

    Relationships deepen as tensions mount, and Emilia eventually reveals to Jack the real source of her anger: even though she claimed to have found Isabelle dead in her bassinet, Emilia was in fact holding Isabelle when she fell asleep and awoke to find her dead, and she believes that she in fact smothered Isabelle in her sleep. The emotional tension becomes too much, and Emilia and Jack decide to separate.

A short while later, Carolyn calls Emilia into her office to reveal that William had overheard Emilia’s confession and demanded that Carolyn reexamine the autopsy for signs of suffocation, remarking upon the loyalty William feels toward Emilia. And so Carolyn reveals the coroner’s verdict, that Isabelle showed no signs of asphyxiation: Emilia could not have killed her baby. Even with this new revelation, Jack is initially reticent to repair a relationship with Emilia, but on the day Carolyn is getting remarried, William specifically asks to talk to her, and Emilia helps William to see this as a happy development in his life. Seeing how close Emilia and William have become has Jack reconsider his feelings, and they move toward reconciliation.

         The story could be described as Daphne de Maurier’s Rebecca meets Nathanel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, set in the modern day. The former deals with a young woman who falls in love with and marries a rich widower and only to be strangled under the shadow of his perfect first wife. Her natural self-consciousness is amplified as many external factors stoke the idea that she is not fit to be the wife of the man she loves. The latter follows the trials of a woman caught in adultery and is then marked by her community for her transgression.

More directly, this film is based on Ayelet Waldman’s 2006 novel, Love, and Other Impossible Pursuits. For a film that departs from the title of the book on which it was based, the movie is actually a fairly strict adaptation of its source material. Many of the film’s signature lines, the kind you see in the trailer, are lifted straight from Waldman’s writing. From what I can tell, the book was received very well, which makes the film’s reception interesting to me.

    Larger audience reception tends to fixate on things like Emilia as a flawed character, or else echo some of the deliberately vague reviews about the film being melodramatic. While I wouldn’t call The Other Woman beyond reproach, I don’t see any meaningful connection between this film and those I’d consider far inferior. Its drama is always rooted in understandable human experiences, its characters are sympathetic even in their faults, and the movie as a whole builds the viewer’s capacity for empathy.

Melodrama

The term melodrama refers to a style of writing that places heavy emphasis on strong displays of emotion over finessed characterization. The term wasn't necessarily conceived as a derogative, but it is most often used as such in the modern discourse. To be “melodramatic” is to commit one of the worst offenses in all of storytelling, to be base, uncultured, even desperate.

Critics offer such a diagnosis under the pretense that people in real life are not so subject to intense swells of emotionality that are so obviously detached from logic (a claim that I grow increasingly suspicious of the more I actually participate in society). Labeling a text, or for that matter a person, as melodramatic can be an easy way to render it unworthy of nuance or reflection. It becomes a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. By designating a thing beyond consideration, we excuse ourselves from having to consider it.

Casablanca (1942)

        But this label comes with some thorns. A lot of well-beloved films, both from recent memory and from the historied halls of cinema, could be described as melodramatic for stirring up powerful waves of emotion from both the characters onscreen and the audiences observing them. There is a sort of catharsis to be gained from seeing these emotions drawn out in displays that feel worthy of the emotional impact they inspire, and it is fallacious to dismiss that entire spectrum of storytelling.

Where melodrama becomes “MElOdrAmA” in my book is when you lose that human piece, when the plot turmoil feels detached from the characters and you suddenly can’t remember how you got to all this yelling and crying. A key part of keeping your audience oriented is making sure your characters have very strong and clear motivations.

This is not an issue we run into with this story. Even if you see the car crash coming, you at least understand the physics at work. There are some high-volume moments, yes, as in real life, but there is always a clear line between what a character is doing and why they are doing it. There are pieces of backstory that are concealed until late in the game, like Emilia’s confession about thinking she smothered Isabelle or her history with her father, but even before these come to light, the connections are still clear:

    Emilia had an affair with a married man because she felt connected to him and his marriage was on the fritz. Emilia acts prickly because her stepson’s mother is telling her stepson that he doesn’t need to feel bad about his baby sister dying because according to Jewish law, she didn’t live long enough to be counted as a real person anyways. When these volatile elements inevitably react and explode, I think the natural impulse is to avert your eyes. But film trains us in how to look at the hard things squarely and search for the grace in the chaos.

    I think the closest we get to real “melodrama” in this film is in the character of Carolyn, the spurned first wife. She is the character most prone to acts of hysteria, like tearing up her son’s school-made family portrait because she’s furious to see that it includes his new stepmother. She is also the one actively making Emilia feel out of place. In this version of the "Rebecca" story, the first wife isn't some spectral presence haunting the second Mrs. de Winter from beyond the grave, she is doing it to her face.

    Carolyn finds ways to make Emilia feel out of place, demanding that she wait in the lobby for William instead of coming up to her apartment. And because Emilia is the new substance in this foreign environment, she isn't really in a position to push back against this. Everyone knows this, but Emilia can't do a darn thing about it.

    That said, the film still couches Carolyn's hysteria in genuine human insecurity, same as everyone else in the film. Even as you recognize that Carolyn is being actively hostile toward our protagonist, the film never lets Emilia escape from the fact that this woman is also coming from a place of genuine hurt: Emilia has genuinely wronged her, and unlike Jack or Emilia, she did not choose this arrangement at all. The film displays that all her antagonistic behavior stems from her not unreasonable insecurities. She's scared of being replaced by this new mother figure. Hence, she antagonizes this encroaching element to fortify her territory. 

    Neither Emilia nor Carolyn ever really apologize to the other for their respective wrongdoings, but they do eventually arrive at a non-aggression pact. One of the most humanizing moments of the film comes at the end when Carolyn relieves Emilia of the ultimate thundercloud tormenting her—telling her that Emilia did not kill her baby, even offering a consolatory pat on the back to the woman who slept with her husband.

(Sidenote: I actually saw this film before I started watching FRIENDS. This was my first exposure to Lisa Kudrow, and so I went into FRIENDS thinking this Phoebe character was going to be the tempered, dignified one of the group, and all I can say is ... hats off to Kudrow in this movie for masterfully playing so far from her star persona.)

Part of reigning in the capital M "melodrama" is keeping all the plot whirlpools tethered to a basic narrative directive. The best movies have a clear rhythm in the issues they explore. There's clear trying, failing, and learning in sequence until the film and the characters reach their final destination. I'm not going to trace out all of the film's narrative turning points and what they mean the way I did with Finding Nemo, but I will submit there's a consistent alignment between the experience this film is trying to communicate and the roadblocks the characters encounter. That's not melodrama, that's just regular plot momentum. 

    There’s an episode early on, for example, when Emilia is trying to coax William into eating ice cream, deliberately ignoring the lactose intolerance she is certain Carolyn invented just to keep Emilia underfoot. Emilia gets William to partake in the forbidden fruit, and it becomes a point of bonding for the both of them. 

    Shortly after, William gets diarrhea at a birthday party, and Emilia immediately connects this back to her disregard, and she becomes convinced that she is the worst parent this kid could have asked for. It isn’t until later, after William has already tattle-taled to Carolyn, that Emilia is informed that the other kids at the party would exhibit similar symptoms and the originator was not the ice cream after all. 

This is all playing out while Emilia is walking around with the belief that she has killed her own baby. She has not told anyone this, but how could she? How could we expect anyone to just admit that they have failed at the most essential performance of parenting? That everyone who has told her she is a failure is right?  In her mind, Emilia has already disgraced the one thing that a mother is always supposed to do, and the film outlines the toll this takes on both Emilia personally and her relationships.

    Jack is probably the least developed of the mains. We get little to no solo time with Jack and spend little time in his head. In some ways, this makes him play like a blank dream boat for the female lead with little personhood of his own.

    But Scott Cohen helps endow him with a necessary layer of grounded-ness, playing him like the kind of guy who is just trying to keep everyone happy after he has already stepped on a lot of toes. Anyway, his relative non-presence only highlights a lot of what makes the film so insightful. After all, in many ways the film hinges more on Emilia’s relationship with William than Jack.

The possibility of Jack and Emilia having another child together is never really discussed in the film itself, though in the book, the reader learns that Emilia is not willing to subject herself to another potential loss. And so the story does kind of suggest that if Emilia is ever going to tap into whatever latent motherhood instincts she has, she will have to do it with William. There is some heavy baggage to the very setup of their relationship, but William is also played as being unusually cold for a child. 

    William inherits a lot of qualities from his mother, which makes the dynamic between him and Emilia very tense. It’s as though Emilia is interacting with a miniature version of the woman whose marriage she wrecked, and this is another space where the film is effectively delivering some form of poetic justice to Emilia for her sins.

One of the film’s first scenes, our sort of audition for these characters, has William, knowing full-well that Emilia is still in the thick of her grief, casually suggesting that they sell the baby’s old things because they don’t need them anymore. This culminates with Emilia yelling at William to shut-up, which he reports to his dad as soon as he gets home. It is played in the movie like William is taking advantage of his position as the kid who came first, such that he can get away with emotionally torturing his stepmother and then gaslight her and his dad into thinking “I know you would never want to hurt Emilia’s feelings.” 

In the book, William is five, but the movie aged him up to eight. This is one of the few changes made to the source material, and I see the motivation. The extra three years gives him a little more autonomy and personality, such that he genuinely feels like a player on equal narrative ground as Emilia even as they still occupy entirely different stations in life. In the book it is suggested that it’s all in Emilia’s head that this five-year-old would be so deliberately nasty to her and that she is just projecting onto him. The movie, though, makes it seem more plausible that William is enacting some kind of vengeance onto the woman who wrecked his parent’s marriage and gives the relationship a more dire starting point.

    A large part of what ultimately brings them together is that Emilia doesn’t really condescend to William. They’re almost played on the same level, which is certainly not how players like Carolyn interact with him. Where William has been treated all his life like this delicate instrument who must be curated and preserved, Emilia helps William experience something like a normal childhood. 

    There's a segment where Emilia keys in on William’s reaction to seeing his mother reel over him not getting into any of the prep schools, and this motivates Emilia to take William out ice skating to distract him from thinking that he’s washed up at eight years old. So much of what Emilia brings to this family, and especially to William, is this courage to exist outside of the regiment of the upper class. (Props also to Charlie Tahan for playing William at just the right amount of annoying for us to understand why Emilia would find him so grating while still leaving the door open for us to learn to love him too.)

    Another thing about "melodrama," is that is only shows up as a pejorative under specific circumstances--which really have nothing to do with how emotionally volatile a text is. Male stories, for example, are afforded a lot more runway. The Best Years of Our Lives sees the lives of three men after returning from war and reintegrating into American living, and that film won for Best Picture in its year. Half of primetime television is just rich white people engaging in increasingly bizarre displays of self-flagellation.

    But a major difference between a movie like The Other Woman and a show like The White Lotus, is that the latter puts you in a position to look down on its subject. People would probably love The Other Woman a lot more if it had some kind of satirical bend to it, but that's not at all what this movie is about.

 

“Should I Be Sympathizing with a Home-Wrecker?”

The English Patient (1996)

         Let’s establish upfront that, although cinema at large has made affairs out to be the ultimate bastion of romance, infidelity is an emotionally devastating thing, and the consequences in real life basically never resolve as prettily as they do onscreen. Everyone might have a “reason” for cheating on their partner, but the fact is it’s still a supreme violation of trust. It wasn’t a given that Jack and Emilia were “justified” in wrecking Jack’s marriage just because they had chemistry. 

         Even so, I can only spend so much time on whether or not Jack and Emilia are bad people for their affair because it’s not as though its fallout goes unexamined. The film doesn't cast them down into the pit the way some viewers seem to wish it would--"Hester Prynne must bear the Scarlet Letter for all time!"--but it does dig deeply into the fallout of Jack's infidelity.

    The real sting of Isabelle’s death is that it kind of reads like some sort of poetic retribution for Jack and Emilia's affair, like the death of the child that broke up the marriage somehow serves them right. That is certainly what Emilia walks around thinking when she sees the other mothers staring at her as she picks up William from school, and this film turns a spotlight on just how damaging that feels.

    I think a part of the reason why so many audiences find the film off-putting is that it puts into words exactly what a lot of people would say to or think about a woman in Emilia’s situation, and it forces these audiences to confront not only how nasty it all sounds when you actually say it out loud, but also just how useless that all is. A large part of what I respect about this film is that it forces audiences to reckon with the fact that these people don’t just get banished onto sinner’s island. Their personhood remains intact, and we are still left having to learn how to live among them.

    Something I think we need to really hit is that the halls of cinema are lined with characters who are not paragons of goodness and morality. The titular Cool Hand Luke can be hailed as an icon for no other reason other than the fact that he irritates his prison guards and apparently can down fifty hard-boiled eggs in an hour. Chances are, if we came across him drunkenly cutting down parking meters just because he had nothing better to do, we wouldn’t be that impressed with him.

Cinephiles are also quick to defend celebrating a character like Michael Corleone. "Godfather" enthusiasts will usually default to lines about “well it’s not like he’s a hero. It’s not like people are discussing him like he’s a good guy,” which is something of a fine line, especially where something like the murder of family members is concerned.

         I want to illustrate the disadvantages a character like Emilia faces in the discourse by drawing a comparison to one of the hero of one of film history's most hailed movies.

    Terry Malloy, the protagonist of On the Waterfront, is a sort of henchman for a mob boss controlling the workforce of the entire neighborhood. The very first thing we see Terry do in the film is lure a fellow dockworker up to the rooftops where said mob boss plans to “deal with him," though this ends with him being pushed off the rooftop. Terry insists he thought his boss was just going to “talk to him,” but we kind of get the idea that Terry was burying his head in the sand, something he presumably does a lot. The arc of the film has Terry gradually finding the strength to stand up to his boss and put an end to his reign of domination.

    So we see at the start of the film that Terry is not necessarily a model citizen. He is complicit in the subjugation of basically an entire community, and his dealings have directly resulted in the death of at least one person. But we also recognize the situation he is in. We get how extricating himself from that is no easy endeavor, and we recognize that the force he is standing up to is formidable. And more importantly, we recognize what he, and his community, have to gain by becoming a better version of himself, which is why we form a bond with him even before he has fully reformed.

Both Emilia and Terry are “flawed characters,” but there are a few reasons why a person might be inclined to sort a character like Emilia differently from a character like Terry. For one thing, Terry’s conflict is one of good vs evil. His story puts him into a position we’d be more eager to classify as “heroic.” Emilia’s situation is a lot more familiar. There is no good vs evil dichotomy to navigate, no supervillain whose reign of evil might be thwarted by our hero’s sheer perseverance—just the mundanity of regular everyday living. Where is the fun of that? Who is she to call herself the main character of anything?

    But few of us will ever be in positions like Terry Malloy, and when we do, these moments will be fleeting. And this is where I feel there is real value in stories like The Other Woman. Whether or not a person’s life is touched by infidelity or the death of an infant, it is still a story that deals with the intricacies of navigating love and family. Maybe that’s not as fun as escapism or celebrity, but there’s a lot more practical application in studying these kinds of stories and characters.

The scary thing about Emilia is that her motivations really aren't mysterious. She is not some temptress from the recesses of society or some psychotic nutcase. Her actions are, frighteningly, understandable. An essential piece of Emilia’s backstory is that her own parents divorced after her father cheated on her mother in a particularly humiliating way, and both Emilia and her mother were left scarred by this fallout. Within about two seconds, the audience catches onto the twisted poetic-ness of Emilia afflicting the exact same injury onto another family.

This is played like Emilia subconsciously making her own pain feel less drastic by replaying this same ritual with a man who Emilia notes shares a lot of commonalities with her father, and a part Emilia working through both her grief at losing her daughter and repairing the foundations of her marriage also entails her making peace with her dad. Her father is actually the one who tells her, “Isabell’s not dead because you needed to be punished,” and he is also the one who tells Emilia to not make the same mistake he did with Emilia’s mother and to fight for her marriage even after it had been broken.

Jack and Emilia were not fallen individuals, they were simply unhappy people who found an opportunity for happiness, and so they made a choice. It was a choice that had consequences—consequences that they were absolutely not spared from—but it was perfectly within the scope of leaps that reasonable people could make in their situation.

Jack and Emilia's story is not without illumination and their characters are not beyond sympathy. This is more or less the same thing we talked about with Passengers where people project a certain lack of social grace to the storytelling to distance ourselves from that second-hand vulnerability. But that impulse is neither helpful nor truthful. The family setup here may have emerged out of mess, and the process may have exposed some very raw nerves, but as all the players choose to look for the grace, it all does eventually form into something beautiful.

(Relatedly, it should also be noted that though Emilia is the one who gets the majority of the pushback, both in-universe and in the movie’s critical discourse, Jack is the one who moves the relationship into anything that could be considered an affair. This obviously doesn’t excuse Emilia from her participation, but it does betray a certain contradiction in how these situations get discussed. Namely, that women are held to a much stricter standard than men are in how we discuss character flaws or moral ambiguity.)

Describing his film, director Don Roos said, “There is no black and white in terms of people. Everything is more complicated than you think. There are no ‘villains.’ There are no ‘angels.’ It’s just that life is complicated.”

 

Labor of Love

A point that's worth driving home is that there is a difference between presenting someone as a sympathetic character versus a perfect character. The film never pretends Emilia is the latter, but it is adamant that she is the former.

    The story kind of rests on the fact that Emilia can be a very difficult person to get along with, the center of her flaws seeming to stem from her propensity for self-pity. The way this typically manifests is in Emilia being so caught up in her own problems that she behaves rather thoughtlessly toward her loved ones, like when she rebuffs her friend’s attempt to console her by asserting her own miscarriage is different than Emilia losing her baby.

    As the story progresses, these little outbursts build. This culminates in Emilia verbally lashing out at her father in front of all of her friends and letting them know that her parents divorced because he cheated on her with a stripper. Little episodes like this tend to push people away from Emilia, both in-universe and in the real world. Audiences like to air their dissatisfaction at having to entertain the exploits of someone abusing their position as "protagonist," like perfect individuals are the only people with stories worth telling.

    This sort of pushback kind of reminds me of the way a lot of people like to rake Frodo across the coals because of, say, his little moment of weakness in Mordor where the ring succeeds in doing what it has been trying to do for three movies and bringing out Frodo’s inner darkness.

    Yes, we stan Sam for being the emotional support trooper that he is, but the way that pop culture tends to discuss these things betrays a lack of empathy for people with genuine struggles, and in this way, it almost becomes a form of victim blaming. It wouldn’t make sense for Sam to just let Frodo fall into the lava because the weight of the world became too much for him, yet that is how a lot of people discuss a character like Emilia. The underlying motivation seems to be some incentive to communicate to the Emilias of the world that they need to start working on themselves.

    But the thing I have noticed in my own life with individuals who have “unbearable” character flaws? They probably already know they have them, and they are worried that they will drive everyone else away. For reference, here’s a passage from the book where Emilia narrates going to the movies with her mother:

“We share a popcorn, a package of Twizzlers, some Raisenettes, and a large Diet Coke. The movie is a romantic comedy, and it makes me so depressed I want to scream. I chose this movie because I knew it would have no babies in it, the actors were all too young to play parents, but sitting in the theater, two rows behind us, is a couple with an infant. Since when, I would like to ask them, is it considered acceptable to impose one’s squalling brat on an entire theater or paying customers, all of whom are seeking an escape from the real world, some of whom have surely paid money for a babysitter to watch their own children? But in fact, this baby is incredibly quiet and had I not turned around to see if the theater was sold out, I would never have noticed him. He does not make a peep. I make more noise than he does, shifting in my seat and blowing my nose.”

You see her indulging in a self-centered mindset, sure, but you also see her confronting herself with how pointless and even self-destructive this line of thinking is without another character needing to point that out to her. Very few people need to have their own character flaws pointed. More often, they just need the space to resolve them.

         I think we also need to distinguish between stories like this and those like The Notebook where the characters are actually romanticized in their transgressions. It’s one thing to insist that romance isn’t always pretty or that even flawed people deserve love. It’s another to frame character flaws and borderline abuse as endearing qualities themselves. “We’re only awful to one another because we’re just that in love.”

    That’s not what The Other Woman does. It centers on a flawed character, sure, and forces you to sit in her head, but these rough spots form the basis for discovery and character growth. This sort of story understands that in real life, the delicate parts of the human psyche don't want to be exposed. They put up resistance in the form of volatile behavior, the kind that pushes people away.

    But one of the powerful things about storytelling is that it gives you the chance to really try to understand the people that are victim to this human failing, and this gives you the chance to better understand how to live with them, perhaps even love them.

We never really see Emilia conquer her little vice, but we do see her get better about making amends. This runs in tandem with our understanding that having identified the true sources of her shame, she will be better able to navigate her own emotional turmoil. But the story just takes it as a given that Emilia’s propensity for wallowing is just a thread of her personality. It is a thread that comes with some consequences, but the story still takes a hard stance that “this flawed character is still a human being and worthy of the audience’s consideration—deal with it.”

Garden State (2004)

        And Portman plays this shade very well. Portman's star persona through the late '90s and 2000s generally typed her as either this walking sunflower who was wise beyond her years, or as a sullen woman-child who was also wise beyond her years. And so to see her play a character who feels somehow emotionally arrested marks a change of pace for her filmography. But her history of playing more demure characters also comes in handy in moments where Emilia does find herself very, very vulnerable, like the scene where she confesses smothering her baby, and she all around paints a picture of Emilia that is both uncompromising and sympathetic.

         Popular audiences are sometimes receptive toward character flaws if they demonstrate a certain performance of apology. Attitudes like this tend to betray that there is a sort of conditional to the way these things are discussed, placing the onus on the afflicted to prove they are worthy of respect or even sympathy. It supposes that a person must first be the perfect victim or the perfect griever in order to elicit sympathy, which puts the expectation on the bereaved to process their emotions in a way that is pleasing and gratifying to the onlooker. It places an extra burden of performance on the afflicted at a time when they are certainly not in a position to be tailoring their experience.

         One more time: grief is not a pretty process.

         This is obviously a taxing ordeal for those involved, but guess what? The film comments on that too. Jack and Emilia actually separate for a time when Jack decides he cannot keep up with her. We are meant to assume that they get back together after they do some reflecting, but it is presented as a legitimate option, and it spurs genuine reflection on the parts of both Jack and especially Emilia. That reflection helps spur both maturation and empathy. Those are two qualities everyone aspires for, but if these were easy to attain, we would probably never tell these kinds of stories in the first place.

There’s a scene unique to the movie that reminds me of the book passage from the movie theater. In this scene, we see Emilia finally attending the memorial walk for Isabelle that her friends have been trying to coax her into participating in for the whole movie, even though she doesn’t really want to go.

Emilia’s retrieving her candle when the lady at the desk remarks about feeling her own little angel still with her. When the lady asks Emillia if she feels the same way, Emily responds blankly, “She’s gone. I know the difference between here and gone …” The lady just smiles and hands her a candle with some instruction, then after a moment, and without having to be called out by anyone, Emilia apologizes for her insensitivity. And the woman just offers an understanding smile with a clear, unspoken message: I understand. This has been hard for me too.

Not a Mistake

I was motivated to fit this piece into my schedule this year owing to … a lot of factors, but especially one observation by filmmaker, Richard Linklater. I mentioned during my most recent Year in Review him saying that once upon a time,

Dave Made a Maze (2017)

“... There were these outlets that were very curious about what was going on in the avant-garde and the underground. And at some point, I don’t know if it’s just Hollywood or capitalism in general, the equation became, ‘Well, that thing’s small, no one’s going to see it anyway.’ Instead of amplifying this cool thing. It doesn’t qualify to be written about in our pages because it’s just not culturally relevant. And I think indie cinema has fallen prey to that. You don’t see a lot of serious writing about it.”

  The things that are making Hollywood constantly fall back onto movies they know no one will like but will see anyways, they have a lot in common with the things that keep journalists engaging with tried and true talking points instead of carving out the landscape they wish to see. Who wants to discuss a movie that no one’s going to see? 

A part of this also has to do with our cultural obsession in passing judgment on other things and other people. It was almost worth it for Netflix to give us that mid-temp "Avatar" series just so we could all collectively groan about how this new show “just didn’t get it!”  There’s something empowering, and even assuring, about looking at something someone else made and affirming to yourself that you are smarter than all that. “This movie is melodramatic.” “This person is unlikeable.” There’s obviously a use for this kind of thinking. Sometimes things end products don’t work out, and it’s to everyone’s benefit that we have the vocabulary to describe why.

You all should have seen Cyrano (2021)

        But this becomes a problem when “thumbs down” becomes the end goal itself. That is not where thoughtful dialogue happens, and that’s not how you create the kind of landscape where thoughtful art thrives. I have a lot of thoughts about things like the Disney remakes, a topic that gets a lot of attention on the internet, but I try to be very specific about when and how often I dip into that well. And it is a process I am still constantly trying to refine and hammer out, but I do believe in trying to build the kind of world you want to live in.

    Obviously, journalists have to keep the lights on, and part of that is just going where the conversation is. I also like talking about popular things too, and I shouldn’t feel bad for this. (I can say right now that the next two pieces I have lined up are both centered on headlining titles, and I am even trying to see if I can get another rant out before the end of the year.) I’m not committing to only ever writing about movies no one has ever heard of from here on out. 

But it is an exciting challenge to try to pull off this balancing act and to try to not just master the rhythm of the discourse, but learn how to redirect it to spotlight stories, and people, that maybe need it most.

                        --The Professor