Brian C wrote: ↑Mon Dec 28, 2020 12:21 am
And I like how Fennell, as writer-director, essentially structures this as a superhero movie - like, for instance, Batman, she leads a double life while fighting against villainy by night, and dealing with the complications that this causes her relationships by day. Like a superhero movie, the ins and outs of plausibility are not quite nailed down, even within the terms of its own universe, but still it works for me. And a lot of the film is wickedly, darkly funny even if the underlying tragedy feels very real.
Yes,
Promising Young Woman is without a doubt the angriest 'superhero' film I've ever seen. At first this seems to be taking
Sorry to Bother You’s gonzo satire and mixing it in a bitter cocktail with deep compassion for Carey Mulligan’s psychosocial schema. The balance between some unapologetically exaggerated farce and authentic (probably verbatim) conversations in male-female interactions reveal implicit truths about the female experience (the "you’re beautiful without makeup" line was a sharp skewering of Nice Guys). However, the trauma is exhibited in pretty astute regressive developmental characteristics and the narrative goes down windy roads of solipsistic perspectives clashing and emotional bottoms that are so unbearably heavy without a leg of support. My comparison to the Boots Riley film is purely in attitude: Fennell tries to do so much, hits seemingly every idea and tone one could imagine on the subject(s) and pulls nearly all of them off successfully.
I like the Batman analogy
where 'not being drunk' is the costume inspiring fear. The idea of inebriated women as the 'alter egos' men buy and seek out, allowing them to hold their position of power in a safe space from any challenge to their fragile egos coming from actual engagement, is pretty scathing, and depressing, to each gender respectively. I like that she essentially dons her costume every time she breaks from expectedly complacent feminine norms in both loud and soft ways, even in daylight. The nature of her trauma as vicarious trauma drawn from empathy resembles a Batman-esque ethos but rooted in our world, and Fennell even addresses the self-destructiveness and consequences of vigilantism.
The film is also a great depiction of what it’s like to cope with both the end of emerging adulthood when you’re not ready to transition, and the impotence to find catharsis for our pain in tangible actions. The drama comes from as many directions as the comedy’s eclecticism, which is so black, goofy, mean, and ironic. There is also a very disturbing truth coming out in Mulligan’s “experiments”, that people only become motivated, empathize, and spring into action when confronted with their own avenues to identify, or have personal stakes in raw experiences that cause a moral crisis (like Molina). This isn’t even criticized so much as plainly delivered for us to sit with, acknowledging the cognitive dissonance from ignorance with admittance and ferociously clawing outwardly at once.
I've also long felt that Mulligan is a phenomenal performer with a presence hadn't been tapped into in the right way for quite some time. She brought a groundedness to
Drive that made the rest of the histrionics feel earned around her humble humanism as not a prize, but a pure soul whose dignity is divorced from all the happenings, an icon who doesn’t need to be exalted but who it’s a privilege for others to exalt.
Brian C wrote: ↑Mon Dec 28, 2020 12:21 am
Anyway, I enjoyed almost all of this movie a great deal, until
Fennell's anger gets the better of her, and she decides to take it out on Cassie. I don't really know how else to describe the decision to martyr this character, except that she's willing to kill her off if it means bringing the bad guys down. Frankly, it seems like the kind of condescending thing a male filmmaker would do - kill off their female character and then celebrate the purifying effect of her death. It would have been one thing if it had been written to serve a "they always get away with it" narrative that led to the events of the film, but the way it's written makes that extremely far-fetched, and at any rate that's not even how it plays out. And it's weirdly written as a more-or-less explicit satire of Peter Berg's Very Bad Things, of all movies. It just seemed discordant and bizarre given the stakes.
I also thought of Very Bad Things, and holy shit, this destroyed me. I can't concoct any rational arguments against your points, and the martyr celebration really bothered me too in a way that I think is incredibly harmful (like 13 Reasons Why's controversy around glorifying suicide, which I see this as a form of). Still, the shocking event brought to a head several incongruous ideas that highlighted the hopelessness of Cassie finding harmony against a cruel patriarchal world: the inevitable consequences of her self-destructive behaviors, the self-preservation of toxic masculinity through buried morality (even when there's a murder victim in your face to cover up), and the tragedy that the only way for Mulligan to find her catharsis was in death, a state she couldn't reach in life because a) the sociological forces beyond her control wouldn't allow it, and b) she wouldn't allow it. She felt broken beyond repair, had all the signs of being suicidal, and was looking for an endpoint that didn't exist- nothing could bring her friend back and she was unable to accept 'life on life's terms' and move on- which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but also not to be championed unequivocally.
A better film would have more clearly weighed this as both a strength and a fault- a strength because to ignore such ubiquitous evidence of rape culture would be a form of complacency, and a fault because her self-destructiveness took hostages in her parents, Laverne Cox, all the people who would be lucky enough to know her, and drove a stake between Cassie and her self. I do think this was handled well overall, and for the most part Fennell examined the enigmatic 'line' between action and passivity from a neutral distance, begging the question: Doesn't everyone live with cognitive dissonance, ignores their moral compass sometimes, compromises themselves ethically, and flexes morality consciously to their own selfish gains? Bo Burnham's statement that everyone has a skeleton in their closet, has made mistakes, etc. isn't wrong, but instead of resting in this grey space where he's both responsible and capable of rehabilitation, not deserving of forgiveness but capable of being forgiven if Cassie felt like it- putting the onus partly on her, he makes the situation about him and Fennell turns himself into a two-dimensional bad guy. It's a rather cruel "revelation" because there was an opportunity for Cassie to be held accountable for where she draws her 'line' without being shamed. No guy is perfect but instead of a "also" it's left as a negative reframe to All Guys Are Evil, which I suppose dilutes complexity in step with Cassie's mental state, but it takes a position of weighing morality in absolute terms in an objective manner as a diagnosis, which is the part that doesn't fit with the diversity of perspective on these issues we've been allotted thus far.
The notion that only the Cassies of the world, who live on a one-note death wish as Superheroes without having a life of their own, can live a life devoid of cognitive dissonance because they indulge in nothing that would force compromise, is a cynical view and one that Fennell admirably tells- but to celebrate it... I guess I'd like to think that Fennell is giving Cassie her martyrdom because, since Cassies don't exist in prevalence, she is noticing the part of many women- and some men- that want to take more action and live their lives in social consciousness but don't; that perhaps if we all took more action this hopelessness black hole wouldn't be there to suck Cassie up, and Cassies wouldn't need to exist in such a purified tragic form. I guess I'll choose to read between the lines on this one, because I don't believe Fennell intentionally undoes all her grey posturing throughout the film to arrive at a clearcut conclusion, even if it seems a bit diluted in the final moments. But I think the narrative shift where we had to sit in that bedroom with her body for what felt like ten minutes was a point made beyond martyrdom- that even absent of blame, the state of western culture's staticity is fucking devastating.
All of <that> considered, one of the best movies of last year, and certainly one of the most audacious.