HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 2008: In which cinema inters a recently-finished television staple

The question has been nagging at me for some weeks: six years later, is there any sort of value to be had in another white male critic lambasting the first Sex and the City movie? The good news, then, is that I'm not entirely inclined to do that. Not all of it, anyway. The trick, I find, is to muscle through the utterly foul first hour to get at all the stuff that's actually kind of smart, sensitive to its characters, and at least slightly willing to interrogate the franchise's status to non-fans as the thing that sold a grim late-capitalist hallucination of rampant consumerism in a bluntly fictive version of New York. The other trick is to have one's first real engagement with that franchise having been the rather vile 2010 feature Sex and the City 2, compared to which just about anything would seem measured and intelligent.

Set three years after the conclusion of the 6-season HBO Zeitgeist hit of the same name, Sex and the City tells of the travails that happen to four beloved archetypes of all women who live privileged lives in a white urban enclave, after they think they've all found their happily ever after. Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), the narcissist with abysmal taste in expensive clothes (first thing in the movie: Carrie walking by a gaggle of teens who are all in awe of her dress, dominated by a hideous fucking crepe flower the size of a dinner plate that's perched on her right shoulder like a badly conjoined head), is just about to move in her hunky millionaire boyfriend John James Preston AKA "Mr. Big" (Chris Noth); brittle, feelingless lawyer Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) is barely tolerating life in Brooklyn with her husband Steve (David Eigenberg) and son Brady (Joseph Pupo); mousy doormat Charlotte (Kristin Davis) is so happily married to Harry (Evan Handler) and so happy to have just adopted a daughter, that the film can't even come up with a decent plotline for her. Samantha Jones (Kim Catrall), the voracious sex addict and generally awesome deliverer of filthy quips and the only one of the four who doesn't threaten to plunge me into a rage of woman-hating Marxism, is living in Los Angeles with Smith Jerrod (Jason Lewis), and starting to feel sad about all the sex she's not having. They're all four about to be pressed back together as close as close can be, thanks to Carrie's out-of-character impending nuptials to Big; so out-of-character, in fact, that he starts to panic, and she freaks out, and they split up, and this triggers a range of difficulties in all their lives.

Eventually, that happens, anyways. First, we have the wedding planning, and it is horrible, rancid, consumer porn bullshit. I tried to prepare myself: I tried to figure out what, besides gender, makes something like James Bond "okay" and Sex in the City "not okay", and was all prepared to grapple with that question, but really, fuck it. Sex and the City's depiction of attaining things is unholy, particularly with the film coming out right at the tipping point of the world economy into disarray, and the lifestyle of Carrie & company turned into something not just distasteful, but actively repellent. For very long stretches, it doesn't seem as though the film is able to communicate any other thought than "buying things makes you happier and better"; no matter how many anonymous brown people James Bond guns down, it doesn't offend my sense of basic decency nearly as much.

But after an hour of this, something magical happens: it all just sort of melts away, and in its second hour, Sex and the City turns into a comfortable, lived-in depiction of four female friends who know each other well trying to help everybody else keep it together during a series of emotional crises. This is not without its swerves into idiotic comedy: it is based on a sitcom, and there's a consistent regression towards that mean in the way the script by director Michael Patrick King (a regular contributor to the series as both writer and director) builds its jokes and steps through all of its character arcs according to nice, neat principles of episodic dramaturgy. It is not possible, that is to say, to mistake Sex and the City for elegant cinematic storytelling: even setting aside that the first two-fifths of its running time is given over to godawful non-drama (and setting aside, also, the fact that it's two and a half fucking hours long, with enough content to stretch itself out to 90 minutes). It has lumps, and it has painfully obvious punchlines, and it has an almost comically misjudged sense of pacing, with a moment at the 110 minute mark that clearly seems to be cuing up the last spate of reconciliations until- nope! let's grind another half-hour out of this sucker.

What it also has, though, are four actors who are not all equally gifted, to be nice about it, but whose comfort level in the skin of their characters is enough that even with my unfamiliarity towards the series (and hostility to the little bit I knew of it), the warmth of the relationships between the four women feels alive and real and quite inveigling. It's downright pleasant to watch them interact with and support each other, even though, by all logical rights, it doesn't really make sense that Charlotte would want to hang around these people, and it makes even less sense that anybody in the whole world would want to hang around Miranda.

The film's human-level coziness clearly marks it out as a simple bit of fan-pandering, but done with enough affection towards those fans that it's not impenetrably insular. Mind you, this coziness doesn't gel at all well with the film's need to be cinematic: it has an acute awareness that justifying the leap from the little screen to the big screen requires a kind of Event! sized storytelling to match (in which respect it certainly bests the stubbornly low stakes of The X-Files: I Want to Believe, from later in the same summer), and that Event! focus is the source of many of the film's problems. It keeps interrupting the characters for enormous drama, life-changing stakes, and so on, all of it feeling bloated and unnecessary, and all of it should with stiff ineffectivness by King and cinematographer John Thomas, another veteran of the show, who between them have very little sense of how to do anything with the visuals but make them look large and flat.

In short: the film's strengths are those of television, not of film; it doesn't look like a film; and yet here it is, a film. The odd impulse to make things into movies that are perfectly well-suited to television neither started nor ended here, of course (did we not just find ourselves examining The Simpsons Movie?), and at least Sex and the City tries to go big. It simply doesn't succeed. Intimacy is the right fit for this material, and when it allows itself to be intimate, it's charming in its way; it would, undoubtedly, have been better for this never to have pretended it was a movie at all. But that is not the thinking of Hollywood accounting, which prefers above all and especially in the 21st Century, to use established brands to make money off of established fanbases. And if there's one thing that Sex and the City can teach us, it's the almighty importance of brand names.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 2008
-Pixar's WALL·E makes the fate of a dirty robot the stuff of the greatest soul-stirring drama
-Iron Man and The Dark Knight create the only two flavors that future superhero movies will ever come in for the rest of time
-Sensitive indie poet of natural spaces David Gordon Green reinvents himself as a bro-com auteur with the pot epic Pineapple Express

Elsewhere in world cinema in 2008
-The unbelievably bleak and distressing British/Irish political drama Hunger makes director Steve McQueen and star Michael Fassbender into major artists overnight
-Pascal Laugier's Martyrs instantly becomes one of the most talked-about examples of the French extreme horror scene
-Israeli director Ari Folman produces the unclassifiable animated docu-biography Waltz with Bashir

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THE LIGHTS THAT STOP ME

There is much to be argued for simple things done well. I present for your approval Beyond the Lights, a backstage melodrama and love story that invents nothing, does not surprise, and is still one of the most rewarding films to come out (and then almost immediately vanish) in the waning months of 2014. Blame an tiny distributor without the means to push it hard, blame marketers who are skittish about pushing movies about non-white people for mass consumption, blame the disfavor of audiences towards anything that feels even a little bit like a soap opera. Regardless of who to blame, the film deserves so much more than it's gotten or will ever get: this is not world-changing cinema, but it's satisfying like few movie remember how to be.

The beginning sets the stage for all that follows: Macy Jean (Minnie Driver) is an angry stage mother, and her tween daughter Noni (India Jean-Jacques) is a gifted singer with a retiring and accommodating personality. When we meet the pair of them, it's to learn that Macy has a hard time comprehending this thing that is her daughter: she can't figure out how to do anything with mixed-raced Noni's hair, and practically throws her at a thoroughly unimpressed hairdresser (Deidrie Henry, packing enormous detail and racially-aware backstory into a role that takes up a grand total of two scenes) to solve this problem for her. One second-place finish later, and the tyrant mother vows to her daughter and the heavens that they'll never settle for second-best again.

Skip ahead to the present day, and Noni (now played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw) is a genuine musical superstar, winning a Billboard award for her collaboration with Kid Culprit (rapper Machine Gun Kelly, credited under his given name of Richard Colson Baker), a musical artist whose leering lyrics and pelvic dancing are like a lab-created experiment in distilling rape culture. And this before she has even released one single solo track. But though she has everything, and her mother is as happy about it as a pig in shit, Noni is miserable with what she does, who she has to be in order to do it, and the hope she has of ever doing anything else. And so she prepares to throw herself off a hotel balcony in Los Angeles. She's saved only by the quick work of Kaz Nicol (Nate Parker), a cop who took a night working the celebrity security detail for some easy money. Having finally met a person who responds to her as a woman in pain, Noni starts to make excuses to see Kaz more often, and soon enough, romance is in the air, or at least far more tender and mutually rewarding sex than she's been used to. Macy is pissed, and Kaz's father (Danny Glover) is even more pissed, since this threatens to derail his son's political aspirations, but you know how it goes with gorgeous young people in movies about secret emotional pain.

It's all thoroughly generic, but writer-director Gina Prince-Bythewood, making her third feature in 14 years, commits to her story completely, without either talking down to it, or apologising for it. It's every inch a melodrama, but a melodrama that treats the characters, situations, and emotions with ragged naturalism in the filmmaking and acting alike, not with florid escapism. The result is a film that has all the pleasures of melodrama (sweeping emotions, big moments, hot people making out) without any of the histrionics - even Driver's Macy, a snarling monster of a mother for much of the film, is written and played with one foot in kitchen sink realism, built out of desperation and fear for the future and not just slovenly, trashy greed.

The greatest pleasure, though, is Mbatha-Raw, in her second leading performance of her big debutante year (I haven't yet seen Belle, the first, but based on what she does here, I want to). The woman has a commanding ability to play for the camera, making every moment smaller and smaller, pulling us in and making for a more intimate act of character building: the whole performance is a masterful combination of small glances, little details of body position, carefully chosen stresses in her line deliveries. Prince-Bythewood's script and the tonal balances she achieves are already terrific at exploring topics concerning the sexualisation of women in entertainment, the way that money doesn't buy happiness, the torments of mother-daughter relationships built around a power struggle, and the film could certainly be interesting on those fronts with anybody. But Mbatha-Raw's performance isn't an "anybody" sort of thing: she takes all of the film's concepts and sociology and filters it into the lived experience of one single damaged person trying to determine what she wants her identity to be, who functions beautifully as an individual and an embodiment of The Trouble Facing Women Today. It's a simply terrific performance in every respect, a fully-formed Star Is Born moment as exhilarating as the one Noni receives in the film.

On the back of that performance, Beyond the Lights could be much worse and still work. But the fact of the matter is, it's biggest "problem" is predictability in the general shape of things, and rather than using that as a crutch, the writer-director uses that as a tool to guide us into the emotional truths she wants to depict. It's hard to imagine how this stock material could be treated in a more adult, satisfying manner than it is here. This is sturdy, rather than clever filmmaking and storytelling, but sturdiness is a virtue, especially in service to such a convincing, engaging character study of a young woman in turmoil. The vogue for this kind of well-crafted romantic is by no means at a high ebb, but Beyond the Lights demonstrates with crowd-pleasing earnestness and hard indie film seriousness just how effective and necessary the oft-derided world of chick flicks can be.

8/10

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WOMEN SCORNED

There's a terrific and deeply necessary movie that could have been made out of the basic DNA of The Other Woman. It is, for starters, basically a platonic rom-com about how a pair of mismatched women come to rely on each other as friends, and cinematic depictions of female friendships are achingly rare (contra the general buzz, the film manages to meagerly pass the Bechdel Test - two named women have a conversation that's not about a man - though not nearly as easily as a film whose three leads are all females should have done. I believe there's a hefty total of three brief conversations in 109 minutes that qualify). And the notion of these two people bonding because one of them is sleeping with the other's husband, and they both feel horribly betrayed is, I'd say, a genuinely durable and smart plot hook with a sophisticated, old-school tang; it recalls the 1932 Rachel Cruthers play When Ladies Meet, twice adapted into solid, rewardingly grown-up movies.

But The Other Woman is neither terrific nor deeply necessary; it is, not to put too fine a point on it, pretty damn bad. Not as bad as the reputation it has already built up for itself: at an absolute minimum, it boasts one good and one surprisingly open performance, from Leslie Mann and model Kate Upton, respectively (the third leg and de facto main character is played by Cameron Diaz in unyielding "Come on, I deserve better than this, right?" mode), and anyway I did not choke to death while watching it, which some of the reviews had suggested might be a realistic possibility.

The film is basically a showcase for the comic and dramatic stylings of Mann, who dives into her role with nearly frightening gusto, like setting off a nuclear bomb in a tea party. It's honestly difficult to say if it's amazing acting or terrible; committed and fierce and energetic beyond a shadow of a doubt, but also prone at every moment to knocking all the balance out of the film. Particularly in the moments when Mann heavily emphasises the raw red pain and disorientation of a woman who has just learned that everything she's been building over the many years of a marriage that has left her without a profession or life of her own is null and void. There's a dizzying mania to that, which reads as "comedy" very often; not always funny comedy. No sir, The Other Woman is not, at any rate, invested in funny comedy. Its humor is of a particularly guttural, shrill level, in which most jokes are either "it's funny because the ladies are screaming invective" or "it's funny because the ladies are taking about sex and vaginas". It is better for the film when it does not leave this area, for its efforts to expand beyond the most limited idea of what comedy can be typically goes horribly awry: on two separate occasions, the film puts a complete halt on any kind of momentum to tarry and linger over a shit joke. The second, and by far the more robust, even requires shifting perspective for the first and only time away from one of the leading women, as though it was such an exciting and innovative and life-changing shit joke that the filmmakers were fully willing to break the basic narrative structure of their movie to make sure that it could be included. Even setting aside the basic intellectual and comic poverty of the shit joke, this was the wrong one for this movie.

But back to Mann. Her wild mania can play as comedy, but just as often it plays as savage emotional naturalism, a desperate woman swinging from moment to moment of sheer existential terror which can only be put off by eager self-medication or by grasping onto whatever passing human being she can make some kind of emotional connection with, even - especially! - if that's the other woman whose unwitting actions have been the source of all this trauma. That is also potentially the meat of a great movie, though probably not a great comedy (or, at least, not a very funny one), and when given this shockingly intense performance, director Nick Cassavetes and company are plainly at a loss; thus the whole thing is is treated as the ditzy lark it was written to be, and Mann looks dangerously unmodulated and overly Big.

Nothing else about The Other Woman is remotely as interesting to talk about, though I legitimately admire Upton's gamely self-effacing performance as a sexy blonde idiot with enthusiasm and good cheer and no illusions about who she is ("I see a dolphin", in context, is a genuinely funny delivery of a genuinely funny line). It's a lazy attempt to cross-breed The First Wives Club and John Tucker Must Die, the first of which had some minimal charm owing to its charismatic cast, the latter of which is truly without merit; it is this genealogy that points out that the film in its current incarnation lives and dies not on its cynical "women get revenge on a man" plot that comes from no kind of feminist place that I have ever heard of (it's nominally in favor of empowered women, but it doesn't seem to have any real sense of what such a creature might look like in the wild), but on the chemistry in between its stars. With Diaz being plainly disinterested in a role that makes her recite perfunctory lines about self-reliance and sex, from beneath a deeply unfortunate amount of mascara, there's no real spark of chemistry to speak of, and Cassavetes seems content to assume that by having Diaz in his movie, he's got that famous Diaz Spunk lined up already and doesn't need to do anything to coax it out of her. The result is three leads who feel like they're in three movies: Mann in some kind of sobering dramedy about betrayal and recovery, Upton in just a chill hang-out movie where everybody's having too much fun to bother with characterisation, and Diaz in a shitty cash-in comedy that has feeble jokes and unhealthy attitudes about humanity. Diaz, of course, is correct; but it doesn't make The Other Woman any more survivable when it's specifically trying not to be better than its worst impulses.

4/10

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