There’s never been a better time to be a woman in cinema. In a manic effort to make up for decades of oppression and inequality, the powers that be are twisting themselves creatively to accommodate more women-driven efforts. And that’s all good and great, but it doesn’t equate to quality. Quality remains pretty much gender-free.
There have been many instances of actors turning directors and doing a great job of it. The latest streak of the female actors turned directors on Netflix (a company that never met a bandwagon it didn’t eagerly jump on) falls quite short of that greatness. Not in the acclaim department, mind you, these movies are seemingly tailor-made for acclaim. Great talent…acting their butts off. Sure. But…here comes the but…if you want your cinematic experience to be exciting, to be fun, to be properly engaging…these are not the movies for you. We’re not talking CGI-driven superhero extravaganzas, we’re talking just good movies, movies you can enjoy, be wowed by. This isn’t it. It seems that actresses turned writer/director/book adapters all follow the same model…languid paced narrative with striking scenery and long actor takes where they can just act, and act and act. And that’s great in a way, because good acting is important, but it’s also not the end-all be-all Excalibur they think it is. To hang the entire movie upon acting is like hanging the entire movie upon CGI – not ideal. And yet, this formula was followed to a T, first in Passing and now in Lost Daughter, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s debut effort. She took a book by a famous female author who writes exclusively female-driven stories and adapted it into a slow-paced bonanza of emotional motherhood medication. Also, she got a great cast, a great location, and then sat back and let them act. And so, the ever-excellent Olivia Coleman plays the self-proclaimed unnatural mother, a woman who hasn’t done her best at mothering because she (gasp) was really into her academic career. Not apparently because her children were annoying brats the way most kids are. Why did Coleman’s character (played in youth by Jessie Buckley who does a really good job despite the absence of physical resemblance) feel the need to have kids in the first place? Especially have them so young? Especially have more than one? No idea. She’s supposed to be smart. And yet, she did her biological duty anyway, and then complained about it, and then abandoned it for a few years for good measure. Now, she’s 48, her babies are adults, and she comes alone to Greece for a relaxing vacation, a vacation that continues to be somewhat interrupted by the presence of a large loud family who may have some criminal connections. The women in the family are either pregnant or already babied. Dakota Johnson (almost unrecognizable with jet-black ‘do) has a young daughter, who proves to be a major trigger for Coleman’s character. And so Dakota vamps it up, while flirting with the hunky Irish boy who summer-works there, and trying to cope with her annoying baby girl, who mostly cries. She mostly cries because Coleman’s character straight-up stole her dolly. Yes, you read that right. The trauma is doll-related and we’re not talking Chucky. Coleman cradles the doll like her lost youth and tends to it like she didn’t to her kids back in the day. Other than that, she just goes around having a fairly decent vacation. The locals are rude, but the scenery is unbeatable. In flashbacks, she is given more to do, as she tries and fails to balance out her professional and personal lives, eventually resulting in an affair with Gyllenhaal’s main man, a striking hirsute Sarsgaard whose hairy torso she fondles lustfully while they whisper in Italian to one another. But overall, it’s a meh of a movie. Strikingly so. Yes, motherhood is tough and balancing it out with a career is doubly so. I mean, RBG did it, remember that movie. That movie was about something. This one doesn’t really have a message outside of acknowledging the issue itself. It also doesn’t really have any especially likable characters and the dolly stealing just comes across as sadistic and weird. Everyone’s peculiarly obsessed with ages. Everyone asks everyone how old they are in a way people just don’t do in real life. And then everyone fawns over how young Coleman looks for her age (she doesn’t). The movie begins decently enough, it promises something of a mystery or at least, a dramatic denouncement that is stab-worthy as Coleman drops on the shore with a bloody wound, but it doesn’t deliver on that promise or any others for that matter. Because the plot is so clearly secondary to the art of acting. And the art of acting is overdone. 120 very slow minutes later and all you’re left with is a desire to have picked another movie. But here, bet this’ll do great come awards time.
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