How sweet is the taste of a movie with a female heroine heralded as the top-grossing non-sequel film debut weekend of all time?  And how sweet is it that The Hunger Games, the adaptation of the first novel in Suzanne Collins’s trilogy about Panem, a dystopian country that sacrifices its children for the amusement of its privileged leisure class, is a faithful, stirring, smart film that doesn’t pander to either sentimentality or sensationalism in translating Collins’s politically nuanced story to the screen?

Starring Jennifer Lawrence (Winter’s Bone) as Katniss Everdeen, the trilogy’s heroine, The Hunger Games creates a rich material world for a story imagined so vividly by so many readers.  Director Gary Ross and his production designers realize the fictional country’s twelve dispossessed districts and its excessively decadent capitol in a way that convinced me it was just as I’d pictured it as I read the novel, captivated by Collins’s narrative.

Katniss hails from District Twelve, where coal mines provide the Capitol with energy and the district’s residents with straitened lives of near-starvation and strife.  Katniss breaks the repressive government’s strict rules by sneaking through the district’s boundary fence to hunt for food with her friend, Gale (a handsome, stalwart Liam Hemsworth).  Her father died in a mining accident; his sudden death left her mother catatonic with grief and unable to care for Katniss and her younger sister, Prim.

Ross’s film establishes in deft strokes that Katniss is an accomplished hunter with a keen understanding of the woods in which she and Gale poach.  Wearing threadbare clothing and scuffed boots, she strides through the hills and trees (Ross filmed around Asheville, North Carolina) and confidently wields a bow and arrow to bag birds and the rare deer.  She and Gale have an easy camaraderie that comes less from romantic attraction than from similar survival instincts, the confidence of being good at what they do, and the imperative that they provide for their families.

In other words, The Hunger Games breaks stereotypes almost immediately by representing a friendship between a young man and woman that’s not based on facile heterosexual romantic rituals.  The stakes for Katniss and Gale are much higher—they could be killed for leaving the district borders, but they risk their lives to put food on their tables.

Their lasting bond is broken by the annual “reaping,” when two children between 12 and 18 from each of Panem’s districts are chosen at random as “tributes” to compete in the televised gladiatorial competition known as “the hunger games.”  In District Twelve, the children assemble in the town square wearing their best clothes, shirts and pants and dresses of worn, graying cotton, while the Capitol’s bubble-headed representative, Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks), parades before them in garish shades of pink and red.  Her excessively colorful outfit, make-up, and wig set her off as outlandish in the district’s drab landscape.

To begin the reaping, Effie plays the videoed reminder that the Games were established to assert the Capitol’s political primacy, after the districts tried unsuccessfully to rebel against its hegemony.  Before she picks the names of the unlucky tributes, Effie unctuously pronounces her benediction:  “May the odds be ever in your favor.”

When Prim is selected as the female tribute, Katniss desperately volunteers to take her younger sister’s place, and is promptly caught up in the horrifying preparations that propel the tributes into the fabricated arena where the games take place.  Along with the male tribute, Peeta (Josh Hutcherson, The Kids are All Right), Katniss travels by train toward the glittery, surreal capitol.

En route, the two District Twelve competitors are groomed for the games by Haymitch Abernathy (Woody Harrelson), District Twelve’s only previous winner.  His drunken apathy is downplayed in the film adaptation; as soon as he recognizes Katniss’s gumption and talent, he’s persuaded to be the mentor he takes much longer to become in Collins’s book.

Likewise, Cinna (Lenny Kravitz), the stylist who helps Katniss and Peeta make an impression on the Capitol denizens and the nation’s audience in the televised interviews before the games begin, demonstrates immediate sympathy for his tributes’ plight.  He signals his antipathy for the brutality of the whole proceedings even as he helps Katniss establish her infamy as the “girl who was on fire” in the pre-games parade.

In these preliminary scenes, before Ross brings us to the central agon of games in which 24 children and teenagers are meant to murder one another until a single victor remains, the director and his cinematographer show us District Twelve and the Capitol from Katniss’s point of view.  The reaping, for instance, rushes by in a blur, capturing moments and faces in fragments that seem almost Expressionistic as they look so resolutely through Katniss’s anxious eyes.

The kinetic editing and point-of-view shots help create an atmosphere taut with tension and fear, and beautifully capture Katniss’s confusion and terror (and intelligence) as she’s escorted by Peacekeepers (who look like soldiers from the Star Wars films) into the custody of her handlers.

By giving us visual insight into Katniss’s emotional vulnerability, Ross humanizes a heroine whose inner dialogue we can no longer hear, as we could reading Collins’s prose.  [Spoiler alert.]  Katniss’s strength enables her to survive the games, but it could also make her appear unsympathetic and impassive.

In fact, Mahnola Dargis, writing for the Times, found Lawrence’s performance “disengaged” in just this way.  But the film itself addresses this quandary; Katniss isn’t cut from gregarious cloth, and refuses to pander to the television viewers even when her life depends on it.  Similarly, Lawrence doesn’t play to Ross’s camera; hers is a nuanced and, I think, strong and successful performance of Collins’s signal heroine.

Instead, Ross uses his camera to bring us closer to Katniss’s feelings, while letting her retain the dignity of her strength and her intelligence and, in some ways, her privacy, despite the intrusions of rabid spectators into her life prior to and during the games.  For example, in moments of duress in the arena fabricated and controlled by the “Gamemaker,” Seneca Crane (Wes Bentley), the television director who engineers the games much like Ed Harris’s producer character manipulated the world of The Truman Show, we see flashbacks to earlier moments in Katniss’s life that help explain her resolve.

We see her father descending into the mines, and then watch a fiery explosion that implies his death.  We see her mother descending into madness. We see Katniss’s prior relationship with Peeta, the baker’s son, who defies his hateful mother by throwing bread meant for their pigs in Katniss’s direction, as she hovers in the rain outside the bakery, hungry and watching.

And when Katniss is stung during the games by horrifying “tracker jackers,” an insect engineered by the Gamemaker with stings so painful they bring on hallucinatory episodes and sometimes death, we see the venom’s effects on Katniss from her perspective.  Blurred, tunneled images capture Peeta’s distorted voice shouting at her to run, and the woods rushing by in a swirl of surreal light and color.  All of these filmic strategies place us squarely behind Katniss.

Ross and his team tell the story with a dynamic style that moves it inexorably forward, even in scenes that might otherwise be static.  The whole thing feels like a chase film, in which Katniss and the other tributes are being followed and watched not just by one another, but by the eyes of the state, which are always focused on them.

For instance, when Katniss first ties herself to a branch high in a tree on her first night in the arena, she hears a mechanical noise, and realizes that what she took for a knot in the tree trunk is actually an embedded camera.  As she peers into it curiously, Ross cuts to people watching “at home,” in large crowds outdoors in the districts, or on make-shift screens in their homes.

The Capitol’s technology invades their lives not for the pleasure of information and communication, but to insure its own hegemony.  This is technology as tyranny, the flip side, Collins suggests, of the high tech revolution as empowering.

In the book, Katniss’s inner monologue was protected from the ravages of such state surveillance, so the reader was insured a counter-point to the intrusions of President Snow and his minions’ power.  The Hunger Games on film, though, is also about watching.  The film’s spectators, too, have a kind of power over Katniss and, not insignificantly, over Jennifer Lawrence, the young actor chosen for a role that will rival Bella’s in the Twilight series for fan and media attention.

I read a snarky piece on The Daily Beast that suggested Lawrence was being ungenerous about her fame, self-deprecating and diffident.  I didn’t see the David Letterman interview to which the article mostly referred, but it sounded to me like Lawrence has taken a page from Katniss’s playbook, which is partly what makes her so wonderful in the role.

Lawrence is rarely off screen during The Hunger Games.  But her emotional presence is carefully modulated.  Rather than playing a more conventional girl—although the dystopian Panem begs the question of what a “conventional” girl would look or act like in such a hard-scrabbled existence—Lawrence plays Katniss as tensely coiled and focused physically and mentally on outsmarting the other tributes and, eventually, the Capitol’s manipulators.

In Lawrence’s keen interpretation, Katniss is a reluctant heroine.  She won’t pander to the Capitol’s media or its cameras in the ways that Haymitch, her perceptive mentor, suggests might be necessary for her to actually win the games.  If spectators empathize with or come to favor a tribute, they send help into the arena, little metal parachutes with containers full of much-needed medicine, food, or supplies.

Katniss is forced to think through the costs of her refusal to perform as a more typical, coy, feminine girl, but her continued unwillingness to capitulate makes her an important role model for what will no doubt be legions of the film’s teenaged girl fans.  Ross carefully establishes Katniss’s foils—the girly-girl tributes from the other districts who interview with the games’ television host, Caesar Flickerman (a terrifically campy Stanley Tucci, in a blue wig and practically Elizabethan garb).

Although they prove themselves to be quite tough in the arena, for their interviews most of the other girls wear sexy dresses and assume flirtatious manners. And during the games, they combine forces with the alpha males, playing the Bonnies to their Clydes.  These female tributes are also lethal—especially Clove (Isabelle Fuhrman), who throws knives—but they’re represented in relation to their young men.

Katniss can’t even fathom such gender performances or alliances.  Her subsistence-level life has taught her only to survive, and has stripped away the niceties of human interaction to a central, necessarily suspicious core.  Gale is the only person she trusts, with whom she can briefly let down her guard as they talk, before the reaping, in the woods.

But even there, Ross disallows any hint of romance.  Theirs is a relationship built on trust and need and a long-standing regard and love.  Only when Katniss leaves for the games, and her relationship with Peeta is broadcast around Panem, does Gale realize he’s jealous.  His own embarrassment and confusion makes him sweet and rather feminine himself.

Peeta, on the other hand, quickly understands that playing to the crowd might curry important favor.  He waves to the Capitol fans who watch their bullet train enter the city, crafting a charismatic smile to wear for them.  (Hutcherson’s appealing, low-key magnetism is perfect for the self-deprecating Peeta.)

He insists on taking Katniss’s hand and raising it in a show of victory as their chariot rolls through the gigantic presentation hall at their pre-games debut.  As their clothing flames behind them, he tells Katniss the fans will love their daring, and he’s right.  Katniss suspiciously jerks her hand from his, but he persuades her otherwise.

When, during his own interview with Flickerman, Peeta declares his love for Katniss, it’s not immediately clear if he’s playing to the cameras again or if he means it.  The rest of the film hangs on this ambiguity.

But if Peeta is wily about winning through an appeal to spectators, Katniss’s survival skills keep her firmly enmeshed in the immediacy of the arena’s challenge.  How wonderful to watch this girl-hero read the woods, feeling the soil for moisture, crushing leaves in her hand and releasing them to see how the wind blows, using her bow and arrow to bag food and, in the end, to protect herself and Peeta from the remaining tributes.

How lovely to see Peeta hang back behind her as they move through the forest, Katniss with an arrow cocked in her bow for their mutual protection.  How amusing the hear Peeta joke that he’ll take the bow to hunt, and to watch Katniss’s incredulous reaction.  How nice to see the girl save the boy, helping him into a sheltered cave when he’s hurt, risking everything to get medicine for him, and masterminding the actions that in the end will save them both.

Lawrence plays these actions with an understated performance that’s alive with nuance.  Her face registers everything, but in subtly expressive ways—with the twitch of an eye, a small compression of her lips, a hard-won smile, a flicker of confusion.  Her pre-games interview with Caesar Flickerman is a marvel of acting as reaction.  Katniss is startled and confused by the audience’s uproarious response to her answers to his questions, but she doesn’t have the vaguest idea how to play to their affections, as she’s been tutored.

Lawrence works for every smile Katniss musters.  Wearing her red, off-the-shoulder gown, offering to model its fiery train for Flickerman, wearing make-up that’s alien on her face and a hairstyle that’s foreign to her, Katniss looks like a girl in the drag of femininity, trying to work it as ridiculously as Sandra Bullock playing Miss Congeniality, but with much less comedy and much higher stakes.

Katniss’s final confrontation with President Snow (Donald Sutherland, oily and reptilian as ever) models a chilly resistance and promises quite a David v. Goliath confrontation as the trilogy builds momentum.  Lawrence’s performance is clear and strong; she does Katniss justice by acting with economy and reserve.  Katniss’s inscrutability serves her well among her enemies and the film’s spectators; it keeps her mysterious, unpredictable, and interesting.

Much has been made of the story’s violence, especially among young people forced to murder one another by heartless manipulators.  Although the film is tense with the sounds and ever-present threat of bloodshed, remarkably little of it is actually seen on screen.

The initial bloodbath at the cornucopia, when the tributes are first delivered to the arena, is cut in rapid sequences in which, once again, the briefly pictured parts—of faces, limbs, actions, objects—come to stand for the whole without directly representing the killing.

Occasionally, one of the more vicious tributes is seen murdering someone, but usually at a remove.  Katniss and Peeta are rarely shown directly inflicting violence; their humanity is always evident and operative.

Ross also keeps sentiment at bay, even in the more emotional, moving scenes. Katniss takes young Rue (Amandla Stenberg), a tribute from District Eleven, under her wing, after Rue helps her escape from the “career” tributes who’ve surrounded the tree in whose branches Katniss keeps herself safe. Their relationship mirrors that of Katniss and Prim.  Lawrence and Stenberg play their scenes together beautifully, creating a warmth and connection that belies their murderous environment.

That Katniss cares for Rue until her bitter end, and uses the occasion of her tragic death to gesture in solidarity to her comrades in District Eleven, begins the insurgency that grows through the rest of the trilogy.  Here, too, Lawrence productively underplays Katniss’s defiance, emphasizing her hesitant heroism.

In addition to its progressive and nuanced take on gender, The Hunger Games also presents a sophisticated view of an entirely multiracial future society.  Those with the most state power continue to be white—President Snow (pun intentional, I assume), Seneca Crane, Caesar Flickerman, and the others are all white (and male).

But in the Capitol and in the districts, Ross has careful cast the extras and other characters in a multiracial array.  Every crowd shot is full of people of color as well as people who look white, enough so that the racial and ethnic diversity of appearance is notable.

When Katniss’s alliance with Rue provokes a revolt against the Capitol in District Eleven, Ross films their riots in a style reminiscent of footage of 1960s American civil rights demonstrations.  The Peacekeepers subdue the protesters with water cannons.  People of various races, working together, overturn dumpsters and destroy property.

The scene is shot in a palette of black and white, and the protestors’ anger and determination, along with the Peacekeepers’ might and the general confusion of social rebellion, look very much like images from the 60s.

In addition to its admirable representations of gender and race, heterosexual romance is muted profitably in The Hunger Games.  Katniss’s tenderness is reserved for Rue; their sweet, more emotionally expressive moments are lovely and moving.  Katniss’s rage and grief when Rue dies is her most overt emotional moment during the games.

She also grows attached to Peeta, but because they’re both aware that they’re playing to the cameras, the authenticity of their romantic involvement is always in doubt.

Although by the film’s end, it’s clear that Gale is jealous of Katniss’s relationship with Peeta, and that the sincere and earnest Peeta very much wants to continue the romance they’ve performed, reducing these relationships to “Team Gale” and “Team Peeta” to parallel the Team Edward/Team Jacob triangle of the Twilight franchise is just silly.  The Hunger Games is about much more than a young girl choosing between two very different suitors; it’s about fascism and rebellion, about hope and social critique.

I find myself delighted by the amount of press this film has already generated, most of it positive, for a screenplay co-written (with Billy Ray) by a woman based on her novels, about a young woman whose ethical humanity, physical strength, and emotional intelligence is a terrific model for us all.

Looking forward to the second film (scheduled for Thanksgiving 2013).

The Feminist Spectator

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The HBO-produced adaptation of Mark Halperin and John Heilemann’s best-selling 2009 book, Game Change centers on the John McCain-Sarah Palin part of the ticket for the 2008 Presidential election.  While the book looked at Clinton and Obama’s dust-up over the Democratic nomination as well as McCain’s eventual fight for the vote against Obama, the film adaptation focuses on the selection and requisite care and feeding of the star personality who became Sarah Palin.

Impersonated with empathetic, uncanny likeness by Julianne Moore, Palin appears in Danny Strong’s script just as she did in Halperin and Heilemann’s book—as an ignorant, child-like woman thrust into the national limelight way too fast, way too soon, and way too recklessly by a campaign trying to “do something bold” to shift attention from Obama’s meteoric rise in popular favor.

With a breezy, rather snarky tone, the book doesn’t waste time lambasting McCain staffers for their lightly vetted choice of the then barely known governor from Alaska.  Based on the numbers game that now determines elections, the McCain campaign realizes that they’ll lose if they can’t close the gender gap that’s opened in the polls.

Although McCain is intent on selecting Joe Lieberman as his “bold choice” for a running mate, to demonstrate that bipartisanship is possible on a presidential ticket, Lieberman’s pro-choice reputation makes him a bad pick for holding onto the far Right voters who are now necessary to secure the Republican base.  (Game Change takes place in 2008.  The present contest for the Republican nomination demonstrates how much farther the extreme Right has thrust itself into the party.)

When Rick Davis (Peter MacNicol), McCain’s national campaign manager, stumbles across a YouTube video of Palin chatting with an interviewer, he’s captivated by her charisma, poise, and attractiveness.  The brief scene underlines that Palin’s competition wasn’t stiff; the other women Davis watches are obviously competent politicians but dreary, uninspiring (and, not insignificantly, unattractive) performers.  Game Changeemphasizes that Palin is an adept political actor, following the footsteps of her hero, Ronald Reagan (who was nothing if not a consummate, Hollywood-trained matinee idol).

Davis and other McCain staffers quickly realize that Palin has much of Reagan’s magnetism, and soon, she’s on the ticket, appealing to Republican voters with her “aw shucks” performance of ordinariness.  What soon appalls the McCain campaign is how little real knowledge of the political system supports her sudden appearance in the national arena.

Where the book was a biting indictment of Palin and what it painted as her self-involved, self-aggrandizing machinations, the film adaptation, directed by Jay Roach (Recount), is in most ways kinder to the former governor.  Strong’s script underlines that she never asked for the spotlight, and was invited to take the number two spot on McCain’s ticket without being carefully vetted.

In a scene illustrating her only pre-announcement interview with Steve Schmidt (Woody Harrelson) and Mark Salter (Jamey Sheridan), McCain’s most powerful staffers, they ask questions to determine her willingness to play by McCain’s rules and espouse his views (a promise on which she ultimately reneges).  But they never dream that she can’t cite a single Supreme Court case or that she might not know what “the Fed” represents.

The film portrays the McCain campaign’s incredulity when Palin’s real deficits begin to emerge.  Attempting to prep her for debates and interviews on national television, Palin is truculent and withholding, reducing frustrated staffers to providing boilerplate answers to the questions they anticipate will be posed.

But the film suggests it’s not really Palin’s fault that she’s in way over her head.  She excelled as the governor of a small state in which she met voters at the fair with her family (represented in an early scene), and chatted with constituents one-on-one as she took her daughters on the rides.

Moore perfectly captures Palin’s folksy, somehow sincere warmth in those early pre-vp selection scenes, and demonstrates, in her first meeting with Schmidt, that Palin has more steely reserve than first appears.  Her debate prep scenes are both horrifying and pathetic, as Palin sits with a pencil and a notebook furiously scribbling down information that staffers lecture at her.  She seems a reluctant student, but one eager to prove that she can pass the course.

But she passes her way, and becomes the wrong sort of maverick in the McCain campaign.  As she gains confidence from the warm crowds she attracts at personal appearances, power begins to change Palin into a more Machiavellian operative who’s more concerned with her own image than the campaign.  But because Game Changedoesn’t hold her entirely responsible for being on the ticket in the first place, even her shift into a more calculated power-grabber doesn’t read as an utter indictment.

In one of the film’s most poignant scenes, Moore-as-Palin watches Tina Fey-as-Palin re-perform on Saturday Night Live the real Sarah Palin’s devastating Katie Couric interview.  Moore’s face (as Palin) is a study as she gradually registers that Fey is making fun of her.  Alone in front of the television, Moore carefully builds Palin’s hurt resentment, as she realizes she’s being ridiculed.  The scene humanizes Palin by imagining her feelings as she watches Fey, and helps viewers understand why she soon becomes obsessed with her image and approval ratings.

Game Change also presents Palin’s family respectfully.  Todd Palin’s political peccadillos are washed with a patina of innocence, and even Bristol’s pregnancy seems like just another adolescent indiscretion.  Of course, the story picks up before their lives have been invaded by a rabid national media, but the film depicts the family as sincere and rather naïve, as wounded as Sarah by what they see as the campaign’s and the press’s betrayal.

By giving Palin’s personal life a pass, and through Moore’s remarkably sympathetic performance, Game Change’s discerning critique falls more softly on the mercurial personality quirks of a woman untested in the baiting and switching of hardball national life than it does on an expedient political system driven by television cameras and polling numbers.  The film emphasizes that Schmidt, McCain’s senior strategist, was full of hubris to think that Palin would solve the campaign’s problems, and the movie’s narrative turns mostly on his trajectory.

Played by Harrelson with a swagger that dissolves into humiliation, Game Changetraces Schmidt’s horrified understanding of his mistake and the consequences it could have had for the nation had McCain been elected.  The film is bookended by scenes of Anderson Cooper interviewing Harrelson-as-Schmidt about his reflections on the 2008 election after the fact.

Schmidt deflects Cooper’s direct probing about whether Palin was truly ready to assume the presidency.  He does, however, squirm when Cooper reminds him that she was the vice presidential nominee for a candidate who was 72-years-old during the campaign and had already suffered two bouts of melanoma.  These framing interviews are juxtaposed deftly with Game Change’s scenes of Palin stumbling over basic knowledge of the American political system, which allows the film’s critique to laser in on handlers like Schmidt, for whom performance and the superficiality of capturing the camera’s attention was, for a time, more important than anything else.

Game Change chronicles Palin’s change alongside Schmidt’s.  If they start as uneasy allies, by the film’s (and the campaign’s) end, they’re adversaries.  Palin insists on giving her own concession speech the night of the election; Schmidt practically spits at her when he tells her that vice presidential candidates never give such speeches.  For Palin, unburdened by knowledge of precedent, the rules are up for grabs.

Her willingness to put her finger in the eye of Washington went on to endear Palin to Tea Party-ers looking for a heroine.  Her empty charisma and her superficial ease connecting with voters through a medium that looks intimate while it maintains a boundless distance did indeed change the game.

Frank Bruni, writing in the New York Times, published several blogs on the film that address the question of McCain’s campaign staffers’ loyalty.  Bruni argues that if the dirty laundry of necessarily brutal campaign practices is hung out publically to dry, as it is in this film, honorable potential candidates will shy from the most bruising, most prominent races.

But the confidentiality of the political process seems an already dead issue.  What Game Changeunderlines for me was how mercenary McCain’s male staffers were in playing to the gender gap, choosing a female vice presidential running mate not on the basis of her qualifications, but on her appearance and a charisma they thought would buy votes.

Their thoughtlessness and implicit misogyny (choose a woman, any—pretty—woman) brought the body politic the persistent problem of Sarah Palin, a woman who went on to co-opt feminism for her own selfish purposes, who continues to champion her political ignorance, and who remains the star of a fictional “Main Street” on which “ordinary” American people are white, straight, racist, homophobic, anti-choice, and proud of their political stupidity.

Game Changeends with Schmidt, Davis, and Salter drinking in a bar on election night after McCain has conceded.  They ruefully agree that McCain’s loss let them dodge the bullet that Palin as vice president would have shot into the American political system.  But the film (and the book) also lets them off the hook.  They down their drinks, shake their heads sheepishly, and go off to run other campaigns, bearing no on-going responsibility for ushering Palin so far into political power.

Scary stuff.

The Feminist Spectator

Game Change, HBO and on-demand.

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This controversial production comes to Broadway with the baggage of both historical and contemporary critique.  First produced in the 1930s as a “folk opera” by George and Ira Gershwin, and DuBose and Dorothy Heyward, this production, directed by Diana Paulus with a revised book by Suzan-Lori Parks and Deirdre L. Murray, opened August 17, 2011, at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, where Paulus is the artistic director.

Before he’d even seen the production, Stephen Sondheim excoriated the artistic team for what he found unethical meddling with the Gershwin’s original work.  But as Hilton Als wrote in a lovely background piece and review for The New Yorker, the “original” was full of racism, an artifact of a moment in theatre history when white people represented their skewed vision of people of color for other white people.  Why in the world would anyone want to preserve such original intentions for a 21^st century audience?

More than a bit of sexism surfaced in Sondheim’s argument, too.  Here’s a young white woman director and two talented women artists of color engaging one of famous narratives of American opera and theatre, all with an eye to renovating the central character of Bess, the drug-addicted woman whose desires drive this revision’s plot.  Given this refocusing, Sondheim’s unfortunate objections might derive from his personal taste and respect for some artists over others, as well as from his professional investments in preserving the sanctity of the original text.

The Sondheim kerfuffle sent the production to Broadway on a cloud of critique, but from my perspective, this Porgy and Bess provides a transformative theatre experience.  With a simple set by the talented Riccardo Hernandez; unobtrusive but evocative choreography by Ronald K. Brown; a superb ensemble, each one of whom seems to follow his or her own grounded and nuanced narrative arc; and stage pictures that seem organic instead of posed, the production offers a thrilling experience at the theatre.

Hernandez creates down at the heels Catfish Row, in Charleston, South Carolina, with a one-dimensional curvilinear back drop, all corrugated tin and wooden window frames through which light (designed by Christopher Akerlind) projects in geometric patterns that change with the time of the day.  A simple working water pump establishes the outdoor scenes, and performers bring on wooden chairs and crates to give the stage picture levels and textures.

Yet with so few props and such a schematic set, Paulus and her actors create a whole world, an African American community of fishermen and washerwomen, of tinkerers and tradespeople, of grifters and preachers, and of good people and bad.  The ensemble moves constantly, providing a living backdrop to the story of Bess and Porgy’s doomed relationship.

Paulus draws attention to her stars through their costumes.  Bess (the sublime Audra McDonald) wears a beautiful, bold red dress when she arrives in Catfish Row on the arm of her evil lover/procurer, Crown (Phillip Boykin).  Costume designer ESosa leaves McDonald’s arms bare and her breasts heaving over the bodice, accentuating her figure with a high slit up the side and barely supportive straps.  Porgy (Norm Lewis) wears layered, dirty but pure white shirts, which help him stand out among the rest.

In Catfish Row, women are supposed to channel their sexuality into marriage and child-rearing.  The upstanding, loving couple Jake (Joshua Henry) and Clara (Nikki Renée Daniels) represent the ideal relationship, one to which Bess knows she should aspire but can’t quite figure.

She holds Jake and Clara’s new-born baby with great wonder and tenderness, staring into its face as though it holds a secret she wishes she could fathom.  And when the couple dies in the hurricane that rocks Catfish Row, Bess insists that their baby now belongs to her.  But exactly this contained and proper domesticity eludes Bess, however truly happy she seems in Porgy’s embrace.

Although Porgy repeatedly scoffs that “no cripple can hold Bess,” he never really seems to believe it, because the character’s goodness radiates from Lewis’s presence whether or not he’s speaking.  Lewis’s is a smart, clear, intensely human performance, in which the typical pitfalls of the “crippled” character redeeming the “abled” through his unsullied humanity admittedly is present, but not as salient as it might be.  In this revision, his character feels fuller and more fleshed out, and in fact, Porgy doesn’t ever really redeem Bess.  The typical trope is foiled in ways that help play against the stereotype.

Porgy loves and protects Bess, and finally finds his manhood by killing Crown, who continues to appear in their lives like a demon that just won’t die.  After Porgy stabs Crown to death in a stage fight in which they struggle on the ground, the only level at which Porgy might have a chance to even the odds against Crown, Porgy struggles to stand and declares that he’s now a man.

It’s unfortunate that the disabled Porgy distinguishes himself through violence, and that his gentler, more domestic masculinity is pitted against Crown’s volatile force in the first place.  Boykin, as Crown, is a muscular, large, dark-skinned African American man, who presents the character in all his brutal sexuality and contrasts starkly with Porgy’s less stable physical presence.

Even after Porgy kills Crown, theoretically freeing her from the violent man’s hold, Bess is seduced by Sporting Life (played by David Alan Grier as a kind of Ben Vereen-as-the-Leading-Player-in-Pippin spin-off), who tells her that Porgy will be imprisoned for life and that she belongs in a big city.  Sporting Life smoothly urges her toward the boat that’s leaving soon for New York (in another of the musical’s many numbers that became standards in the American repertoire).

Played by the truly astounding McDonald, Bess’s desires muddle her, pulling her from one choice to the contradictory next.  She clearly feels safe with Porgy, but her blazing sexual heat draws her to danger and to a larger palette on which to paint herself.

Bess never looks quite comfortable in the cotton shifts in muted prints and soft fabrics that signal her acceptance into the quotidian life of Catfish Row.  The image of her lush body presenting itself draped in red in those first scenes always haunts her attempt to be just one of the women, to domesticate herself for her own safety and acceptance.

Nonetheless, this production doesn’t demonize Bess and neither does it leave Porgy broken by her disappearance at the end.  He decides he’ll follow Bess to New York to win her back.

What will happen after is anyone’s guess, but that future isn’t as important as knowing that both Porgy and Bess have opted to move out into a larger world, one less predictable, perhaps, one less full of love and care and fellow-feeling than the landscape of Catfish Row, but one in which they can find bigger, more ennobled versions of themselves in which to live.

That, in itself, is an achievement.

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What’s a feminist spectator to make of an awards show that honors films that have so little to do with women behind the camera or as central to their stories?  Other writers have detailed the appalling lack of women nominated for Best Director this year, after Kathryn Bigelow’s historic win for The Hurt Locker in 2011.  God forbid a pattern should emerge of even nominating, let alone awarding, work by women directors.  In my alternate reality version of the Oscars, Dee Rees (Pariah) and Maryam Keshavarz (Circumstance) would both be on that list.

Instead, Academy voters nominated nine films for Best Picture, only one of which has anything remotely to do with women.  And that’s The Help, a movie whose racial politics are so compromised that it’s difficult to applaud its nomination, though its actors were uniformly excellent.

Frankly, Viola Davis was robbed by her friend Meryl Streep, who won her third Oscar for Best Actress.  That Streep should win for playing Maggie Thatcher as some sort of pseudo-feminist heroine, instead of Davis winning for bringing dignity and empathy to Aibileen, an entirely oppressed African American maid working in the heart of the pre-Civil Rights racist South . . . that’s just cruel and unusual.

Streep was right when she anticipated that people watching Sunday’s telecast would say, “Aw, no!  Not her again!”  But when she won a Golden Globe for her role this year, Streep named her fellow nominees with admiration.  She even mentioned actresses whose glorious work wasn’t nominated (including Pariah’s Adepero Oduye).

Instead of repeating that generous gesture at the Oscars, Streep smugly brushed off imagined objections to her win and didn’t even nod at the pack of excellent actresses she bested for the award.  She did embrace Davis on her way to the podium, but some more sincere public recognition of her steal would have gone a long way.  Even her pithy and earnest speech about the importance of friendship was too oblique to acknowledge the surprise of her win over Davis.  When will Davis, even with her talent and stature in the industry, again be cast in an Oscar-worthy role?  We can only hope soon.

Also robbed last night were Annie Mumolo and Kristin Wiig, whose biting, knowing, hysterical screenplay for Bridesmaids deserved recognition.  Sure, Midnight in Paris, which did win, was clever and even heart-felt for the typically more cynical Woody Allen.  But how predictable for him to write still another movie about a younger version of his anxious and conflicted self.  And how predictable for the Academy to acknowledge him again (even though he never attends the show, nominated or not).

When have we ever seen characters like those Mumolo and Wiig wrote for their comrades inBridesmaids?  When have we seen a woman conflicted about losing her best friend to the bridal industry and social prerogatives of marriage?  When have we seen a story about women so invested in being “the best friend” that they practically fist-fight to speak into a microphone at an engagement party?  When have we seen a stocky, pearl-and-bowling-shirt wearing woman seduce a man pretending he’s not an air marshal on a plane?  Or seen women getting sick every which way in the bathroom of a bridal shop?  So much of Bridesmaids was refreshing because it was told from a smart, talented, desiring, and ambivalent woman’s point of view.  Why wasn’t that story honored by the Academy?

Perhaps because it turns out that most Academy voters are white men whose median age is 62.  A recent Los Angeles Times study found that 94% of voters are white and 77% are male.   Of course that crowd will nod instead to Woody Allen.  Of course they’ll honor other stories about boys and men, like Hugo (however sweet), Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (however sad), War Horse(however wrenching), The Artist (however quiet), Moneyball (however smart), The Descendants(however noble), and Tree of Life (however oblique).  Even in the Oscar show’s montage curated to demonstrate how much we love the movies, all the clips showed either heterosexual love scenes or men racing to get themselves out of trouble.

The only girls or women in evidence outside of those embracing men in the montage were Linda Blair, layered in her extreme exorcism make-up, and Meg Ryan, doing her extremely fake public orgasm in When Harry Met Sally (a rather self-serving scene for host Billy Crystal).  This, then, is how we love women in the movies?  Only if they’re in love with men, possessed by demons or by sex, or completely absent?  Please.

I liked the interstitial interviews with actors and filmmakers on the Oscar show, in which they described when they began to love the movies.  But only Reese Witherspoon seemed to get any screen time there, among a host of men telling anecdotes.  At least a few women got to speak to their work during the production clips, for which short quotes from interviews with nominated artists played alongside images from their films.  Those moments brought dignity and respect to the profession, in stark contrast to the ubiquitous, mindless prattle between presenters who can only seem vacuous in that context, regardless of their intelligence.

(But even those short clips elide the fact of women’s lack of advancement in the film industry.  Martha Lauzen’s recent study about women and the “celluloid ceiling” reports the dismal percentages of women producers, editors, and cinematographers working on the top 250 films of the year.)

The Christopher Guest crew’s funny spoof about focus groups, in which the assembled tweaked The Wizard of Oz out of its Dorothy, offered the best writing (and some of the best performances) of the Oscar show evening.  The standing ovation for Octavia Spencer, winning for her performance asThe Help’s stalwart Minnie, was moving, but I wish she’d won for better material than the stereotypically sassy maid who’s redeemed by the socially mobile white woman who tells her story.

Watching Beginners’ Christopher Plummer accept his award for his fine performance as a gay man coming out late in his life was heart-warming.  But his win for playing gay didn’t make up for the fact that no one awarded this year thanked same-sex partners or referred in any way to queer lives.  Along with women, LGBT folks were invisible in the show (unless you count the vaguely homoerotic flying men in suits in Cirque du Soleil’s strangely out-of-place spectacle).

I’m glad The Separation was the first Iranian movie ever to win a Best Foreign Film award.  But the film’s wife/mother in the story is demonized for wanting a better life for her daughter, and for precipitating another woman’s tragedy by “abandoning” her own family.

What kind of message do these awards send about women?

Finally, here’s Billy Crystal, trotted back out to host the show for the ninth time.  How self-congratulatory of him to structure his entire opening monologue about whether or not he should accept the invitation to host?  His shtick all evening seemed to me like Jewish minstrelsy.  We won’t even mention his blackface routine as Sammy Davis Jr. alongside Justin Bieber in that silly, manufactured scene from Midnight in Paris.  Crystal shrugged his shoulders like a low-rent Bob Hope and tried to raise eyebrows that looked paralyzed by Botox.  Crystal seemed a parody of himself, a canned, predictable, self-immolating copy of the quick-witted, genial host of shows past.

I’ll just keep hoping that next year, things will change.  Maybe Tina Fey and Kristin Wiig will write and host the show.  Or maybe they’ll write and Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer will host.  Or maybe Janet McTeer and Glenn Close will do the honors, dressed in matching tuxes.

And maybe the nominated material will be rich examinations of the lives of women, people of color, and LGBT people, as well as straight, white, male people.  Wouldn’t it be nice to hear and see stories that say something we haven’t heard before?

Eternally optimistic,
The Feminist Spectator

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