The recasting of male-centric film franchises with women is a welcome development, but should hardly be touted as groundbreaking progress.
The phrase
“total reboot” isn’t exactly an oxymoron, but when applied to the
Hollywood practice of dusting off pre-used premises and characters, it’s
something of an exaggeration. Poised to join the recycling queue of
movies based on movies are a couple of projects propelled by a gender
switcheroo: Bridesmaids director Paul Feig is in talks for an all-female retread of 1984’s Ghostbusters, and Sylvester Stallone is working on an Expendables spinoff featuring female operatives, potentially starring — if Stallone gets his way — Sigourney Weaver, and called (really?) The Expendabelles.
Whether distaff versions of established franchises are an emerging
business model is yet to be seen. But regardless of how good the movies
turn out to be, or how well they perform at the box office, this is a
promising development only because it means high-profile roles for
actresses. In the bottom-line reality of the dream machine, it also
acknowledges that female stars can open films and carry them to
box-office heights, as Feig’s Bridesmaids demonstrated a few years ago and Luc Besson’s Lucy has done in recent weeks.
Despite that, given two of Hollywood’s most persistent problems — gender imbalance and a reliance on formula over freshness — the recasting of proven (i.e., safe) male-centric properties with actors of the female persuasion hardly qualifies as earth-shattering progress.
As the dispiriting statistics attest year after year, movies that are
written and directed by women are in short supply in Hollywood, as are
substantial roles for actresses. Industry watcher Martha Lauzen,
author of the annual Celluloid Ceiling analysis of films released
stateside, has found that only 11 percent of screen protagonists are
female. She points, understandably, to “gender inertia” in the industry.
Filling a movie with women is a start, but it doesn’t necessarily
make for full-blooded storytelling. It’s true that not a single
character with XY chromosomes appears in George Cukor's classic The Women, yet the 1939 comedy-drama defines its ladies who lunch by their relationships with men. Bridesmaids
expanded the mainstream movie universe, ever so slightly but with great
warmth, comic energy and relatability, by moving beyond the default
setting of bitch-fest to focus on female friendship in all its
complications.
Characters who are recognizably human in their messy, conflicted
longings and behavior are naturally compelling, whether the movie’s a
contemporary comedy, a period romance or a sci-fi adventure. But in
Hollywood’s often misguided attempts to shift the gender equation, it
has overcompensated for a lack of variety and complexity with that
paper-thin conceit known, with increasing disparagement, as the Strong
Female Character. The SFC is a trope that many female critics deplore,
and for good reason. Carina Chocano, formerly of the Los Angeles Times,
has pinpointed the lack of dimension in female roles that essentially
amount to male stereotypes of toughness, and The Dissolve's Tasha Robinson writes trenchantly of the bait-and-switch that presents intriguing, self-defined female characters — like the Jane Goodall-voiced-by-Cate Blanchett mother in How to Train Your Dragon 2
— only to have them retreat into domesticity, romance or the woodwork
before being thrown into peril, all in order to give male characters
someone to save.
The Ghostbusters and Expendables reboots will, at
least, showcase female action heroes, not damsels in distress (albeit,
in the latter case, ones whose mission requires them to pose as
hookers). Considering the winking nature of both projects’ source
material, it’s unlikely that they’ll adopt the SFC template of
killing-machine invulnerability. They might even offer a playful insight
or two about women in the movies, along the lines of 22 Jump Street's meta-spoof of the whole reboot business.
But there’s another meta angle to consider when looking at women in
Hollywood: Beyond the characters themselves, there are the careers of
the women who play them. Scarlett Johansson, at the
ripe old age of 29, has defied ingenue expectations and made bold
choices, and whatever you think of the films themselves, her recent
output, particularly the trifecta of Her, Under the Skin and Lucy, suggests movie-star possibilities beyond the Oscar-focused A-list mold.
Lucy has divided critics for a number of reasons. The most
provocative question to arise concerns whether the title character is a
fully conceived 21st century woman or just a curvier version of a male
action figure. LA Weekly critic Amy Nicholson and The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis came down on opposite sides of the debate, with the former calling Lucy “a flat male fantasy” and the latter applauding “the latest brush stroke in Ms. Johansson’s emerging portrait.”
My experience of the film is closer to Dargis’. Lucy is a
whacked-out rush of cinematic adrenaline, and the action is truly
female-driven because it’s character-specific. However nutty the story,
the breakneck transformation of a party girl into a superhuman registers
in flashes of emotion via Johansson’s performance. Thrill rides are an
essential part of movie tradition, and Besson and his leading lady
provide exhilarating evidence that women can embody the pure-cinema
kicks of ultra-kinetic action in ways that are rooted in their
experience — in this case, in the combustible mixture of Johansson's
no-nonsense physicality and Lucy's mental and spiritual awakening, even
as she moves at warp speed beyond mere humanness, each backward glance
at her former life briefer than the last. A character doesn’t need to
represent, signify, enlighten or redeem to be fully developed and
enthralling, although Lucy’s trajectory goes the extra mile,
transcending kick-ass for goddess.
It’s safe to expect nothing so eccentric from a female team of
Ghostbusters. The original comedy, however beloved and quotable, is a
pretty mild exercise in genre riffing that could stand a jolt of
complicating character development. Though it’s no “total protonic
reversal,” the prospect of suiting up a cast of ace comic actresses to
track down nasty spirits might take female-driven action in diverting
new directions. For true innovations in solving the gender
imbalance problem or paving the way for richer female roles, though, the
answer to “Who you gonna call?” lies somewhere else.
