The Inside Line by Jessica Emerson and Patrick Fraleigh, Inside.com
It's your typical coming of age story: The young protagonist is a headstrong and careless teenager, strong but not yet self-sufficient, ambitious but not yet accountable. The character has a wizened elder for a mentor, gets into physical altercations as a means of expressing frustration and blossoms sexually, discovering the wonders of the flesh with a partner who is easily manipulated.
It's been done hundreds of times in literature and film, from "The Catcher in the Rye" to Good Will Hunting. And in this year's Oscar-nominated Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the formula once again proved to be successful -- at the box office and with critics. Unlike most such stories, however, the young protagonist in Crouching Tiger is a girl. A really tough girl.
"We really wanted to make her character a narrative and spiritual experience," says James Schamus, who wrote the Crouching Tiger screenplay with Hui-Ling Wang and Kuo Jung Tsai. "We wanted to make her a subject in her own right."
Despite perennial complaints about the dearth of women's roles, the Oscar roster this year -- manly Gladiator notwithstanding -- has an unusually strong lineup of female-driven stories. And many of them put women not only in the center of the narrative, but in positions usually reserved for men -- providers, business owners, politicians, saviors and warriors. In other words, they're running the show.
Erin Brockovich's title character pulls herself up by her bootstraps to become a successful career woman despite a lack of education, while providing for her family and maintaining a romantic relationship with a man who -- gasp! -- resents being at home with the kids while she consistently works late.
In The Contender, Joan Allen plays a U.S. senator up for the vice presidency -- hardly your typical woman's part -- yet her gender is hardly the film's central issue, and her husband is actually forced into the background while she goes about the important business of lobbying for her appointment.
Laura Linney's character in You Can Count on Me is a responsible single mother who, while having an affair, maintains ultimate control over her life and is able to overcome emotional and familial problems.
Veteran actress Ellen Burstyn challenged stereotypes simply because she is 69 years old and starred in Requiem for a Dream, against an ageist standard by which Hollywood supposedly consigns over-40 actresses to the scrap heap.
In Chocolat, Juliette Binoche plays a single mother who rejects the norm of settling down with a man and opens her own shop -- challenging the ultimate authority in the town, taking on the church and the government, and protecting another woman from an abusive spouse to boot.
And, of course, the women of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon kicked and fought their way to personal achievement without a bit of help from the other sex. In fact, Schamus and director Ang Lee took flack from their Chinese producers because Chow Yun Fat -- Hong Kong's biggest martial-arts star -- is killed by a middle-aged woman in the film.
BREAKING A LAW OF NATURE
"During pre-production they begged us, 'please, don't do it, it's like breaking a law of nature,' " said Schamus. "Let me tell you, we really had to think about that." But the filmmakers stuck to their story, and even though Hong Kong films have long featured women as resilient fighters, rarely in Chinese or American films are female characters woven so deeply and intricately into the fiber of a compelling story as the trio of women that propels Crouching Tiger.
"The culture's already got a lot of the ass-kicking, leather-and-lace stuff," says Schamus of women in movies. "However we don't present them as cultural artifacts embodied in a package. We've managed to make female characters central to a culture's dreaming."
Now compare this trend to 1999, which saw five male-driven movies -- American Beauty, The Cider House Rules, The Green Mile, The Insider and The Sixth Sense -- share the Best Picture nominations, despite an attention-grabbing performance by Best Actress Hilary Swank in Boys Don't Cry.
Kenneth Lonergan, writer and director of You Can Count on Me, is thrilled about the trend. "I think it is really great that there are all these interesting women's parts and that they happen to be in movies that are making money," he said. "Because it will encourage the powers that be to do more of the same."
Oscar-nominated for the Erin Brockovich screenplay, Susannah Grant believes contemporary Hollywood has yet to develop a tolerance for female leads who are less than perfect. "The movies that were around when I was in high school and college were full of really real women," says Grant. "If you turned in Kramer vs. Kramer now, everyone would be worried about whether or not we were going to hate Meryl Streep. That's what you hear a lot. 'Oh, are we going to hate her?' There is a fear of women who make unpopular choices or flawed choices that, I think puts this unfair burden on female characters to be both perfect and interesting. Perfect is not interesting."
WOMEN AT THE CENTER
From Schamus's perspective, the important shift of 2000 is that women are at the center of the narrative of many of these films -- the narrative of female destiny, he submits, isn't something our culture is used to. "When you look back at the epic myths around which cultures often arrange their dream lives, whether it's "The Iliad" or "The Aeneid" or "Paradise Lost" or the Star Wars trilogy, you'd be hard-pressed to find a female who carries the weight on her shoulders," he says. (Though things changed, to be sure, with Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace; Natalie Portman's Queen Amidala did indeed have the weight of the galaxies on her shoulders.) But in Crouching Tiger, Erin Brockovich and The Contender, among others, the women are at the center of the story, drive the action and their roles in the world don't depend upon them being female or beautiful -- as in a film such as Charlie's Angels. Rather, their success and power derive from their skills, their talent, their knowledge, their might and their dedication.
"In so many movies with men, you see that more than with women," says Allen. "I was so happy to be involved in a project with a woman who had a profession and was good at her traditionally male job, and had very high convictions and standards about what was acceptable for her."
Lonergan thinks that women still tend to get short-shrift in American cinema, especially when they're relegated to personality-free wives and girlfriends.
Burstyn says that generally when she gets a script and asks what it's about, she's told that it's about a man, and the role she's supposed to read for is his wife or mother. "I'm always happy to see pictures that focus on the woman's story as the central character, there's just been so many films where the female characters are on the periphery," she says.
Conversely, The Contender portrays a woman in a role that challenges stereotypes, which was one of writer/director Rod Lurie's goals when crafting the film. Lurie, who acknowledges that the hero-rising character in movies is almost always a man, didn't want the film to be about a female in power, but just about a politician facing adversaries. "The fact that she is the first female to have a shot at the vice presidency is never really an issue in the film," he says. "Historically speaking, very few women have ever been at the forefront of this, so I thought that this really would be turning a traditional male world on its head."
And Allen, for whom Lurie wrote the film, loved the part immediately. "I'm drawn to flip-flopping the stereotypical roles that you see," she says. "I love all kinds of stories, but seeing women in a proactive, accomplished sort of way is one very important story to tell."
FEMININITY -- AND SEXINESS -- INTACT
Perhaps even more remarkable than the recent bevy of flip-flopped female parts is that these characters are able to maintain their femininity -- and often sexiness -- without abandoning their positions or undermining their power. "For the first time women are allowed to be tough but maintain their femininity," says Lurie. "Before you almost had to be a chick with a dick, like in Thelma and Louise. But (Allen's character) likes to be pretty. So does Erin Brockovich.
That's one aspect that drew Allen to the part, and she points out that many of the female politicians today have almost an asexual quality to them, and that it was important that her character be secure in her sexuality. "She still had a healthy marriage and sex life with her husband," says Allen. "You can function as a woman in this world and still hold on to your femininity."
Besides the year 2000 films already recognized by Oscar, Girlfight, The Virgin Suicides, Nurse Betty and, arguably, Dancer In The Dark, also feature female characters incongruous with the typical Tinseltown model. In fact, not since 1993 -- a year that saw What's Love Got To Do With It, The Piano and Remains of the Day -- have women's roles appeared to be as strong, despite a recent Washington Post article claiming Hollywood's climate has worsened for women.
Taking issue with the Post's judgment, Burstyn, who appeared in three major films last fall, says: "That's just not been my experience ... I'm busier this year than I've ever been in my life, I've had really good roles offered to me, I'm executive producing a film for Lifetime that I'll be starring in and I'm doing this fantastic women's movie, The Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, so I don't see how anybody could say this is a weak time for women."
And the more parts there are available to women, the better the opportunities for actresses to play diverse characters from all walks of life.
Even B. Ruby Rich, an independent critic and author of "Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement" who thinks that Hollywood has lost its way when it comes to female characters, admits that it was a "fabulous year" for women in film. But will it last? In a year where Russell Crowe's ultra-alpha-male performance in Gladiator unleashed hell at the Academy -- the film took the most nominations (12) and appears positioned to do well on awards night -- the future doesn't look entirely smooth for women (who, says Burstyn, have never enjoyed equality at the box office). Lonergan, who thinks it's nice to see the kind of strong women's roles that were prominent in the 70's coming back, wonders if it's not just a blip on the male radar screen.
But screenwriter Grant insists, "I'm really heartened by this year." Maybe, just maybe, she says, "People are starting to realize that you can't ghettoize women's parts in women's movies. If you make a good movie and have a female lead, it won't alienate a soul."
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