Mike Nichols made films about women – sadly a rarity in Hollywood
|
Version 0 of 1. If you count success in Oscar nominations, then Mike Nichols certainly didn’t fulfil his early promise. His 1966 debut film, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, got 13 nominations and won five. His second, The Graduate, got a mere seven nominations and one win. The 20 other films he went on to make managed 22 nominations and one Oscar between them, for best song. Nichols died this week, at 83, and the obituaries have been full of praise. But an Observer piece 10 years ago summed up, I think, the general feeling about his career as a film director: “Nichols is now regarded as a safe pair of hands in Hollywood, a mainstream, middle-brow director who is wonderful with stars.” “Wonderful with stars.” Talk about being damned with faint praise. Nichols, actually, was wonderful at making films that offered realistic portrayals of women. Perhaps this went unnoticed because it has not, historically, been a Hollywood priority. But it was the outstanding feature of those two early films, and of many of his films since. Quite a few of his movies have been about women or written by women. Silkwood starred Meryl Steep as a nuclear power whistleblower, and was written by Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen. Postcards from the Edge starred Streep again, as a drug-addicted actress, and was based on Carrie Fisher’s screenplay. Gilda Live was a film of Gilda Radner’s one-woman Broadway show. Two of his films, Primary Colors and 1996’s The Birdcage, were written by his former comedy partner of several decades earlier, Elaine May. Even the fact that the guy had a female comedy partner in the 1950s suggests that his view of women was notably progressive for its time. Nevertheless – and despite the fact that he dated Gloria Steinem – you’d be hard-pressed to argue that Nichols’s films were feminist. Even Working Girl, which celebrates the idea of a secretary, Tess, fighting her way into investment banking, is criticised on that score because her horrible boss, Katherine, is also female. This rather misses the point. The great thing about Working Girl was that the leading women – Melanie Griffith, Sigourney Weaver, Joan Cusack – had enough critical mass to ensure that the men – Harrison Ford and Alec Baldwin – became the romantic interest, in an inversion of the usual movie dynamic. Working Girl is a liberating film because it’s about women, not because it portrays women as good and men as bad. (If you count success in Oscar nominations, all three women were nominated for their performances in that film.) It’s about women – and they’re not just pretty faces. In Nichols’s films, they never are. If you look at the way women have been portrayed in Nichols’s films as his career went on, you can trace the rise of female equality within them. The early films, Virginia Woolf and The Graduate, are quite obviously tragic portrayals of frustrated women, angry at where the limitations on their own lives have taken them. Later, in Silkwood and Working Girl, women are seen questioning the passivity of the roles assigned to them, and struggling to change things. By the end, in Closer and Charlie Wilson’s War, gender is simply a less reliable predictor of behaviour. It’s harder to see a line between typically male traits and typically female traits. It’s not that Nichols did women huge favours. It’s just that his work always displayed an acceptance of women as interesting that is conspicuous by its absence in a lot of mainstream Hollywood output. The women in Nichols’s films shouldn’t be remarkable, and to his credit, Nichols never claimed that they were. Yet it’s hard to think of another body of work that charts the changing role of women in this way – as part of life rather than as something to be consciously examined or proselytised about. Maybe it’s just the consequence of a long career, this subtle, seemingly unintentional examination of women and their place in society. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable. One striking feature about Nichols’s work is that despite the wide range of genres he tackled during his career, he has pretty much steered clear of storylines that involve women being physically maimed or killed (with the exception of Silkwood, a true story). Sometimes – even now, perhaps especially now – it can seem like women are only allowed to appear on screen if there’s some gaffer tape mixed up in the plot somewhere, owned by a psychopath. In Nichols’s films, women are often seen struggling. But they struggle against the narrow exigencies of their own lives, not against scary monsters. Nichols’s women may at times be powerless. But they are never passive. The sad thing is that this is both so remarkable and so little remarked upon. |