This article contains spoilers for Maestro, Napoleon and A Star is Born
Last month, in an interview between Michael Mann and Alejandro G. Iñárritu in Los Angeles, Iñárritu praised his fellow director on the unexpected emotional tenderness of his latest film Ferrari saying: “For me, [the movie] is about a character and what he has lost.”
“We are what we have lost in our lives. That defines us much more than what we have.”
Adam Driver as Enzo Ferrari in Ferrari.Credit: AP
Iñárritu was referring to a quiet moment in the film where Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver) is pushing a car in silence, grief-stricken after the recent death of his son, Dino.
I thought about this in relation to the women depicted in the latest big biopics: Oppenheimer, Napoleon, Maestro, and Ferrari – and the losses they suffered by being in the orbit of ‘male greatness’.
These films about ‘great historical men’, directed by the great male directors of our generation (Oppenheimer by Chris Nolan, Napoleon by Ridley Scott, Maestro by Bradley Cooper, and Ferrari by Michael Mann) extol the larger-than-life braggadocio of the mid-century masculine ideal.
It goes without saying these films are all about men — men building things, men going to war, men writing music — men exercising power. But it’s not just men in general they celebrate; each film celebrates a singular man.
The man who built the atomic bomb. The man who founded Ferrari. The man who wanted to take over Europe. The man who single-handedly ushered classical music into modernity in the 20th century.
These movies reiterate the role of women as the shunned wife, bringing her into the story only to help us understand her husband’s full, complex humanity.
It’s as if the only way audiences these days can understand Napoleon Bonaparte’s greatness is by getting a small insight into his interpersonal and romantic relationship with his wife. When he discovers Josephine’s infidelity, we feel betrayed too. The film conveniently leaves out Napoleon’s own affairs with several other women because it insists we empathise with him, and only him.
Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein and Carey Mulligan as Felicia Montealegre in Maestro.Credit: Jason McDonald/Netflix
Cooper’s sophomore film, Maestro was heavily marketed as a ‘film about a marriage’ — yet much of the film shows Leonard Bernstein’s musical genius, conducting big orchestras and composing music. A scene of him conducting a huge Mahler number lasts almost eight minutes, the camera lingering on Cooper’s face until the very end of the shot, in which we see Carey Mulligan’s character off to the side of the stage, wide-eyed with wonder, elation and admiration. Why can’t we simply extol Bernstein’s musical genius on its own terms? Why does Cooper insist we refract his life’s legacy through the lens of his suffering wife?
The film’s final shot is of Mulligan’s face, smiling at the camera, the title card of the movie appearing across the screen implying that the real maestro of this story is Felicia Montealegre, Bernstein’s wife – not Leonard. When I saw this, I literally jumped out of my seat with exasperation, screaming “ARE YOU SERIOUS?”
If the real hero of the story is Felicia, why does the movie poster show Cooper’s face? Why’s the movie titled Maestro and not Felicia or Montealegre? Let’s not pretend to give power to a woman who appears to have lacked it in her marriage to a very powerful man.
Florence Pugh plays Jean Tatlock, the mistress of Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer.Credit: AP
And as we see our greatest female actors take on these roles of the abused, betrayed, neglected wives (Penelope Cruz plays Ferrari’s wife, Emily Blunt Oppenheimer’s, Carey Mulligan Bernstein’s, Vanessa Kirby Napoleon’s) there’s a clear deficiency of the male-equivalent.
When was the last time Joaquin Phoenix played a supporting husband? The last time Bradley Cooper was cast as a sidelined husband in A Star is Born, the character died by suicide. The last three films Driver starred in, he played the leading roles. Same with Phoenix. As long as Hollywood’s biggest male actors are not cast in supporting husband roles, I don’t see how things are changing for women in Hollywood.
Both Mulligan and Cruz’s performances have been heralded as their career bests – the full spectrum of their acting chops allowed to let loose in the role of the “permanently furious wife”.
But at the end of the day, they’re playing wives. They’re playing wives in movies where most of the audience have bought tickets to learn more about their husbands.
Penelope Cruz as Laura Ferrari.Credit: Lorenzo Sisti/Leon via AP
The antidote is simple. A film like Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla demands we recognise the humanity of the woman who has always been associated with one of the world’s most famous icons.
Frances O’Connell’s Emily compels us to imagine the life of Emily Brontë. Nyad brings together Jodie Foster and Annette Bening to commemorate the incredible achievements of Diana Nyad, who at age 63 swam from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage. Hidden Figures, the 2015 movie that dramatised the real-life African-American female mathematicians working at NASA, was a huge commercial success.
Most of these films were directed by women, because we want to see more films that speak to our experience of the world. Regardless of their roles as wives, scientists, swimmers or writers, these movies insist audiences sympathise with the female lead. They centre a woman’s ambitions, and refuse to tell her story only as an adjacent fragment to a man’s life.
History’s men will always have devotees, dedicating years to bringing their hero’s story to new audiences. What we need now are more courageous creative filmmakers willing to bring those traditionally marginalised out from the shadows and into the light.
Ridley Scott’s Napoleon stars Joaquin Phoenix as Napoleon and Vanessa Kirby as Josephine de Beauharnais.
If women are buying tickets to sit through a movie that asks us to understand the losses suffered by history’s great men, men should be asked to do the same for history’s great women.
Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Andrew Mitrovica
Mort Laitner
Rami G Khouri
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Nikkei Editorial
visit website
