Charlize Theron gained more than 22kg (3st 7lb) in weight to make the new film Tully. A distinction must be made between this and the time – for Monster, in 2003 – when she had to gain almost 14kg. That time, she also had to look raddled, wrecked by life, desperate and unlovable, whereas this time, she only has to look pregnant.
Nevertheless, she has been in the eye of that queasy-making, quasi-feminist praise, where everyone calls her “brave”, with the putative sisterliness leaving unspoken the known fact that getting fat is the worst thing that can happen to a woman, and doing it on purpose for your art is more or less on a par – mad, bold, tragic – with chopping off your ear.
Theron agrees with me – I knew she would, I’ve thought of her as a kindred spirit ever since Monster (by pure coincidence, and nothing at all to do with her weight gain). “Me gaining weight for the movie,” she told a Q&A audience for the movie, “it’s hard when somebody’s like: ‘Wow, that’s really brave!’ Moms do this all the time and we don’t call them brave. We’re like: ‘Why are you still carrying that baby weight?’”
Right, I think I can help, delving all the way back to the Bridget Jones years, when Renée Zellweger was cast as the regular British Jo-ette, who squeezed into control pants and counted calories, while always forgetting to figure-in the ones in white wine, yet Zellweger herself was built like a gymnast who had once seen a carbohydrate across a crowded bar, but never locked lips. The most ridiculous feminist/pretend-feminist/anti-feminist debate ensued. People pored over the fine details of her weight gain strategy (Guinness and pizza) in an almost lascivious way, luxuriating in all these things that no decent woman should eat, which she ate on purpose. A magazine editor “bravely” earmarked her for the cover, then took her off again because she didn’t look “comfortable”. Some argued that if you were making a film about how a woman could be a normal shape and still be a romantic heroine, why not cast a woman who was already a normal shape? But that was taken as an attack on the actor herself, which wasn’t very feminist either.
Tully is different, practically speaking, since when you are making a film about a woman who is heavily pregnant, the last thing you tend to want is an actual pregnant woman. Yet the debate has the same unspoken curve: in lauding the bravery of a woman who allows her body to disintegrate to the degree that she looks like a regular human in the female lifecycle, we are implicitly saying that womanhood is, outside a very narrow and unusual form, well, a bit disgusting. It’s such a dispiriting conversation, it’s enough to make you wish that all women in films were incredibly thin, just so we didn’t have to discuss it. But, making a broad survey of the rest of cinema, that doesn’t seem to help either.
