Mommy Nearest
The Guardian is my newspaper of choice, so it always pains me slightly when their film coverage goes wrong. Their monthly film mag has yet to find a way to fill its pages with interesting stuff of the kind Guardian readers might like (I think there were two very good pieces in the latest issue, the rest, meh, as I believe they say in America) and here’s a piece by Hadley Freeman that ran a couple of days ago. Link.
Freeman is the paper’s witty deputy fashion editor, and a good writer. Not being a film reviewer shouldn’t prevent her from having her say. Her article focuses on what has long been recognised as a dreadful mix of sexism and ageism in Hollywood, using the particular angle of movies that cast actresses as the mothers or older lovers of actors who are nearly as old as the actresses. Leaving aside the fact that the article misses the famous example of Jessie Royce Landis playing Cary Grant’s mum in NORTH BY NORTHWEST, and the fact that, running out of examples, Freeman is forced to vamp furiously for several paragraphs, dragging in older-woman narratives like THE GRADUATE (where Anne Bancroft was only five years older than Dustin Hoffman), actors who play opposite much younger women, and actors who date much younger women in real life. Almost as if there wasn’t much to say.
But the real howler comes when Freeman condemns BACK TO THE FUTURE for casting Lea Thompson as Michael J Fox’s mom. I think a basic familiarity with a movie should be required if you’re going to write about it, and one might assume that almost everyone in the UK of walking-and-talking age has seen Robert Zemeckis’s time travel comedy, which is about time travel, and stars Michael J Fox as a time-traveller who travels back in time and meets his mother as a teenager…
Wait, Lea Thompson was 24? Maybe time for a piece about how older actors are robbing teenagers of roles. Hold the presses.
Oh, and Freeman evidently hasn’t seen GIANT either. Or has and just doesn’t care.
shadowplay 
March 26, 2009 at 11:14 am
As Marcel Proust wrote, let us leave the beautiful women to men with no imagination
March 26, 2009 at 12:18 pm
Aw, must we?
March 26, 2009 at 1:05 pm
Issues of age and ageism aside, my take on the beauty of women is that there are at least two types thereof. There is what I call a mainstream, generic sort of beauty, of which there seems to be no shortage, and there is that which I call idiosyncratic, where I find a woman attractive but her appeal is not as obvious and readily defined. I’ve always preferred the latter. The worst thing a man can do is find himself a slave to women’s beauty, where he’s willing to tolerate the ugliness (or blandness) within in order to sidle up to the beauty without.
March 26, 2009 at 1:35 pm
Wise words. Maybe the second worst thing he can do is get the deputy fashion editor to write about some films she hasn’t seen.
“A truly beautiful woman is always on the verge of being ugly.” – Billy Wilder.
March 26, 2009 at 3:05 pm
wow–talk about taking a really important subject and rendering it trivial! (I hope they revoke her film/cultural analysis license immediately!)
I wonder if she noticed that dad Crispin Glover was ALSO younger than Michael J. Fox …
March 26, 2009 at 4:57 pm
For me there are all kinds of beauty. Marilyn Monroe is beautiful but so is Judy Holliday. Joan Bennett is very sexy in SCARLET STREET but she’s at her most beautiful in THE RECKLESS MOMENT. A great example is THEY LIVE BY NIGHT, Cathy O’Donnell is kind of simple and plain in the beginning but she becomes more and more beautiful as the film goes on, especially that scene where she stretches on the bed.
March 26, 2009 at 6:28 pm
Nicholas Ray was particularly adept at designing a visual character arc that transforms a performer as the story goes on. He does something similar by softening Natalie Wood in Rebel.
And good writing is enormously helpful in making a player beautiful. Because you can fall in love with a character and find them beautiful if you get to understand them.
Since Liz Taylor actually ages during Giant, has a child, which grows up to be Dennis Hopper, it seems a bit fatuous to object to that one too. Maybe Hopper’s role should have been played by a two-year-old throughout, and that would have satisfied The Guardian.
March 27, 2009 at 4:45 pm
I read this as well and agree! It was thought provoking but did nothing to expand on what is a very interesting issue, I do find the lack of roles available to older women interesting and the possible correlation between that and the phenomenon of casting women who are way too young as someone’s mother.
I thought the gabbing about men with much younger partners in reality was just irrelevant and it’s a shame because it should have been a very interesting article.
March 27, 2009 at 5:48 pm
It always drives me nuts when someone goes outside their standard area of expertise and feels they don’t have to apply the same standards. I do research on audiences and popular culture in Africa, and it’s disheartening how frequently historians of Africa, for example, completely screw up even basic film history when they happen to work in an area on the intersection of African history and film history. The Africa stuff might be perfect but they’ll make howlers on the movies for lack of cursory attention to detail.
March 27, 2009 at 6:38 pm
Hi Vicky! Agree with both of you. One fun thing about The Believer movie issue is literary types weighing in on film — sometimes it’s good, sometimes it doth make me crazy. But that can be stimulating. But factual errors like that are quite unnecessary.
Freeman writes good gossipy stuff, a bit like Marina Hyde, whose Lost in Showbiz column I admire. But it was out of place here, and could have been easily replaced with some actual consideration as to WHY too-young actresses get asked to play mums. I mean, obviously it often has to do with trying to convince us that an aging leading man is younger than he actually is. But to make any kind of case you must disregard movies like Forrest Gump where the hero starts off as a child, because obviously they needed to cast young for the mum and then age her up as the story goes on. Nowadays, post-Benjamin Button, that may be less true, but it’ll be a while before the costs come down enough to make casting old an option.
And obviously at the root of much of this is ageism and sexism, and some of our best actresses are being deprived of roles when they’re at their peak of talent AND beauty — but you don’t make a good argument about this by dragging in irrelevancies.
March 28, 2009 at 5:11 pm
Sir,
When I Googled Laurence Harvey and Angela Lansbury to check the Mother-Son age gap in The Manchurian Candidate (three years, by the way) I came across this: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/nov/11/ask-parky-laurence-olivier-age-gap-lotte-reiniger-verne-troyer
“Michael J Fox was a mere three years older than Crispin Glover when he played his son in Back to the Future (1985)”
It appears that the Guardian had already made the same error (but with the opposite sex) just last November.
Yours,
Indignant of Surbiton
March 28, 2009 at 6:50 pm
Yup. I’d be more inclined to let Parky off, since he’s merely noting ages rather than protesting them, but it still seems odd to fail to note that in come cases there are good reasons for the discrepancy. Speaking of which, since There’s only 3 years between mother and daughter in the first Mancurian Candidate, while in the remake there’s 19 years between Streep and Schreiber in the sequel, using the old quote-a-random-example approach, we could say that the problem’s improving…