Can Hollywood fix itself? Is that already happening? Let’s go to the cinema together and find out.
It’ll have to be my local Everyman – a genteel chain where they transmit a lot of productions live from the National Theatre and sell yoghurt-coated nuts instead of Minstrels. Might not be your cup of tea. On the plus side, you can also get a cup of tea. It has to be that venue, because the trip has already happened.
I’d like you to come with me on the trip I took, last week, to see Molly’s Game. The experience was complicated, raising unexpectedly intense thoughts about the topical issue of Hollywood’s women, and I’d like to talk it over with a bigger group. As my friend the Chimney Sweep would say: “Let’s have a mass debate!”
The Sweep was actually with me at the cinema. He and I have held a weekly poker game for nearly 20 years, so you can imagine why we might be interested in this biopic of Molly Bloom, who ran high-stakes games in New York and Los Angeles. The Sweep loved her book. I thought the font was too small. So we were both, in our different ways, delighted when Aaron Sorkin announced a film version.
Factor in that my own poker memoir, For Richer For Poorer: Confessions of a Player, has been “under option” for five years without anyone figuring out how to film it, and I was so interested to see Molly’s Game that I could barely sleep at night. Although that may just have been the noise of my teeth gnashing.
I went to see it with the Chimney Sweep so that we could spend pleasurable hours afterwards discussing poker and the accuracy or otherwise of its depiction. Knowing that it couldn’t be better than The Cincinnati Kid or worse than Runner Runner, we stuffed our smuggled Minstrels into a rucksack and hurried in.
Before the main feature, there were two refreshing – even exhilarating – trailers. One was for The Post (which has just opened), in which Meryl Streep plays the celebrated 1970s newspaper publisher Katharine Graham in her battle with major government corruption.
The other was for I, Tonya, which opens in February, about the controversial figure skater Tonya Harding, played with challenging defiance by Margot Robbie, and her mother, played with savage comedy by Allison Janney (“I made you a champion knowing you’d hate me for it; that’s the sacrifice a mother makes”…) Even in the promo, both mother and daughter managed to be simultaneously unsympathetic and likable. Historically, in most films, women are only allowed to be one or the other. Interesting.
And both these trailers were in advance of a film about Molly Bloom: a clever, determined, greedy ex-skiing champion who ran an illegal poker game! Not a cute girl running a pastry shop in a romantic comedy, nor a kooky, wise-cracking friend; not a staunch/frightened wife in a thriller; not a brave virgin in a horror film; a really weird and uncategorisable person.
I was properly excited. On TV at home, we’ve been watching Feud: Bette and Joan on BBC iPlayer, a joyful series that relishes all the nuance of having Joan Crawford and Bette Davis reminisce about a Hollywood in which “everything written for women fell into three categories – ingenues, mothers or gorgons”, when the roles of Crawford and Davis in the 21st-century show (taken by Jessica Lange and Susan Sarandon) are so juicy, unpredictable and complex.
What with that, the Graham and Harding trailers and the promise of Molly’s Game, fortuitously hot on the black heels of the Golden Globes protest, it all felt like real change in the type of stories being told.
Whether you think it matters or not – and maybe it doesn’t – there has been an ongoing problem with the representation of women on screen, before you even get to the weird idea that it’s such an honour to embody some lame and hackneyed “ingenue” that actresses can hardly complain about the odd rape as they wait in the queue.
In British television and radio – while it’s embarrassing how little power or equality female performers continue to have – at least nobody argues that, if you want to be one of them, you shouldn’t mind if people wank on you.
So, by the time Jessica Chastain skiied on to the screen in the quirky, multidimensional character of Molly Bloom, her own golden globes a thing of healthy magnificence, I was already full of hope and optimism for a more interesting and realistic world.
And it’s a great film! Great performances, great dialogue, great portrait of a modern poker landscape. I loved it and recognised it.
And then Molly Bloom got beaten up. Just as I was feeling all excited and happy: punch, thud, scream, bleed. I mean, zzzzzzzzz.
It’s an important part of Molly’s true story, of course. But did we have to watch it in such visceral detail? Could the attack have been depicted with metaphor or sound? With anything oblique, surprising, new or imaginative?
Whether it could or not, it wasn’t. On and on and on went the attack. Fists to the face. Boots to the stomach. Beautiful, proud Molly helpless on the ground. It sure showed her. And we all got to watch.
What instinct is that playing to? Who is it for? I love the film but I really hated this section. Will we ever get away from glossy, sexy violence?
But maybe I’m wrong. Was it actually a good, honest way to show the horrible truth of what happens to women? Maybe it was.
After the beating, Molly strips off and has a long, painful shower. Like they always do on camera. She doesn’t just stay, shocked, where she is. Or go somewhere safe. Or scrunch up under the duvet. Or sit with her back to the door, making sure it’s locked. Nah. Kit off and under the water.
Let the mass-debating commence.
