Is Hollywood afraid of older women?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/11/is-hollywood-afraid-older-women-debate

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Catherine Bray, film critic and producer

It has just been announced that Marisa Tomei is to play the traditionally grey-bunned Aunt May in the next Spider-Man film. It seems like this is happening because male Hollywood execs only want to cast women they want to have sex with. Comedian Amy Schumer recently did a sketch about this very topic. In it, Tina Fey, Patricia Arquette, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus are gathered for a picnic. Schumer happens by and asks what they are celebrating. “We’re celebrating Julia’s last fuckable day,” laughs Arquette. The trio explains that this is the moment when the media decides you’re no longer “believably fuckable”. Fey swigs her wine and gives an example: “You know how Sally Field was Tom Hanks’s love interest in Punchline and then, like, 20 minutes later she was his mum in Forrest Gump?”

A more recent instance would be the revelation from Maggie Gyllenhaal that she was deemed too old, at 37, to believably play the love interest of a 55-year-old actor.

It doesn’t cut both ways. When was the last time you saw a fortysomething lady paired with a twentysomething chap? Only in films like Catherine Zeta-Jones vehicle The Rebound, where that’s the whole point of the plot.

Guy Lodge, chief UK film critic for Variety and Observer film writer

A glance at the current roster of Hollywood’s most bankable leading ladies suggests they’re not necessarily afraid of women north of 40, or ones who aren’t conventional sex symbols. The unapologetically full-figured 44-year-old Melissa McCarthy propelled Spy to a $100m (£64m) gross this summer; Meryl Streep, meanwhile, is still headlining multiplex releases and racking up Oscar nominations at 66.

I agree, however, that studio execs seem reluctant to play up the sexuality of such stars. McCarthy had sprightly chemistry with Jude Law in Spy, yet the script never fulfilled her character’s unrequited crush on him; Streep’s last romantic lead of sorts, in Hope Springs, saw her trying to keep a very tame flame burning with Tommy Lee Jones.

As for Marisa Tomei, she achieved a modest victory against this system only last year: romantic comedy The Rewrite saw the equivalently aged Hugh Grant dallying with young Bella Heathcote before finding true chemistry with Tomei’s fortysomething mature student. Yet the film flopped, suggesting that audiences aren’t much more keen on middle-aged romance than producers.

Small wonder, then, that Tomei is biting the bullet and accepting sexless wise-elder roles just seven years after exposing her nipples in The Wrestler. It’s not inappropriate casting: Tomei is a suitably auntly 31 years older than new Spider-Man Tom Holland. But let’s get real here: Aunt May is a flat, gormless part for an actress of any age, let alone one of Tomei’s status and vivacity. The problem isn’t that they’re casting her too young – why shouldn’t Peter Parker have a hot aunt? It’s that this is a 50-year-old Oscar winner’s current best offer.

CB Yes! As you say, a film like The Rewrite qualifies as a victory against the system, and that’s where the problem lies. It’s not that Hollywood is so terrified of older women that it never offers them interesting roles, it’s that such roles are the exception, rather than the rule.

There’s also the question, applicable to the wider cultural landscape as much as Hollywood, of what constitutes an “older woman”. You cite Melissa McCarthy, at 44, as an example. For sure, she’s not someone you’d cast as a high schooler (even applying the Dawson’s Creek logic of casting twentysomethings as teens). But McCarthy’s male contemporaries Jared Leto, Mark Wahlberg, Jon Hamm – all around McCarthy’s age – rarely find themselves described as “older men”.

There’s a glorious moment in 30 Rock that bears repeating here: TV exec Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) dismissively purring: “Fifty is the new 40 for men. Fifty is still 60 for women.”

GL Yes, a double standard does seem to exist as to where middle age begins, and it’s not just between women and men. Marquee names are permitted to age at a very different rate from character actresses – even ones as desirable as Marisa Tomei. Sandra Bullock is 51 this month, yet no one is making her play Aunt May: she’s anchoring outer space itself in Gravity, and got to romance the 12-years-younger Ryan Reynolds in The Proposal. Compare her career to that of Laura Dern, now 48, playing the mother of 39-year-old Reese Witherspoon in last year’s Wild. It was Witherspoon, at least in flashbacks, playing a role far removed from her actual age; Dern, while not miscast, would never be granted the same leeway.

Male movie stars essentially aren’t permitted to age until they’re pensioners. Tom Cruise is playing the same level of action hero in the latest Mission: Impossible outing that he did when the franchise started in 1996. As actors, ageing through your roles should be rewarding, not insulting. Yet the stingy allocation of roles in mainstream Hollywood determines otherwise.

CB This is why I can’t wait to see Zoe Cassavetes’s film Day Out of Days, which is about navigating Hollywood as a fortysomething actress. What a wonderful topic for a film in the midst of what feels like a never-ending parade of films about the mid-life crises of Woody Allen aspirants. You know the films I mean: some are good (Sideways), some are bad (Barney’s Version), they usually feature Paul Giamatti (see previous examples) and there are just way too many of them (not that any of us will complain too hard about Giamatti getting more work; the man is a delight).

Cassavetes says of her actress-in-crisis piece that much of it was taken from life. She is quoted as saying the story comes from: “a lot of actress friends… hearing all those stories, her stories, my stories, when I tried to be an actress all those years ago”, in the hope of airing “that creepy feeling that someone’s not telling you the real reason that you’re not getting [a part]”. And this is a major part of the problem: no exec wants to publicly say: “Laura Dern? That old hag? Get out of my office!” And so the discrimination becomes unspoken, unsaid, and like any invisible opponent, that bit harder to fight.

GL It’s not all doom and gloom, though. Even if industry leaders are slow to catch on, the audience for older female perspectives is emerging in a way that should become harder to ignore. The post-Holocaust legal drama Woman in Gold may be dreary, but it’s the highest-grossing independent film of the year so far in the US – a testament to the continued pulling power of Helen Mirren. I’ll See You in My Dreams, a romantic drama with 72-year-old Blythe Danner discovering life after widowhood, has stunned industry pundits, quietly taking $6m (£3.8m) this summer on a barely there marketing budget.

Even Magic Mike XXL, the year’s most inclusive Hollywood production, devotes a considerable slice of screen time to the candid erotic confessions of a red-hot, 57-year-old Andie MacDowell – and was rewarded with a startling 96% female turnout on its opening weekend. That stat would suggest the message is still in transit to men, but how long can it take?