Movies you may not have seen #8
Not long after Hillary Swank won her first Best Actress Oscar, she starred in an HBO movie called Iron Jawed Angels, about the last years of the woman's suffrage movement leading up to the constitutional amendment finally giving women the right to vote in the U.S. I remember at the time the reviews were mostly mixed to negative, not so much because the movie wasn't good, but because everyone seemed to have enormous problems with the anachronistic quality of the film. What for some people is innovation and audacity, to take a staid, period setting and modernize it a little bit in dialog, musical selections, editing, and film technique seemed to strike a lot of others as somehow wrong, or making light of a serious topic.
I'm definitely in the "innovative and audacious" camp. When you first start watching it, you're thinking, wow, this is gorgeous, and then you kind of go, huh, that's an interestingly... uh, modern choice of music, and then when you get to some of the first bits of dialog between Swank's character, the suffragist Alice Paul, and Frances O'Connor's, you're thinking, whoa -- that is not a phrase from 1917! But then it starts to grow on you -- or rather, it did me. I loved the fact that they used modern techniques and dialog to make a story about a period a lot of people find yawn-inducing into something much more compelling.
Initially, in fact, the story is slow -- Paul and her fellow "take a more aggressive approach" activists are embroiled in some more political maneuvering as they gradually begin to make a split with the main suffrage organization at the time, and that is never terrifically exciting. Though the cast is incredible -- Angelica Huston, Julia Ormond, a pre-McDreamy (but no less dreamy, OMG) Patrick Dempsey, Vera Farmiga, and even Alma from Deadwood! -- political machinations are often not that engaging for modern audiences, but the director's really unusual approach and the beautiful cinematography pull you in.
The right to vote for women has way too often been downplayed in our history texts -- I didn't know about, for instance, the jailing and torture of many of the women until I went and researched it on my own in junior high. Most of the time it's just a note on 1920 -- women were granted the right to vote by an amendment blah blah. The best thing about Iron Jawed Angels is that it brings to life people who have been shoved into the margins of history, and shows us just how terrible their fight was for something we all take for granted. Toward the end, when the U.S. goes to war in 1918, things start to get very, very ugly, and they do not stint on showing just how horrific force-feeding of hunger strikers actually was.
For me, the movie was a great example of just how engaging film can make history to a modern audience. We seem to have this belief that history has to be told in epic presentations, with everyone using faux British accents if they're not already from there (because god knows, no other accent would be historically accurate! Look at the pasting Scorsese took when he let his American actors use their own voices in Last Temptation of Christ), and with quasi-symphonic music as a background. Iron Jawed Angels is gorgeous, living proof that you can make history and the people who made it engaging, fascinating, and thoroughly relatable. If it weren't for a steamy bathtub scene with Swank and a few swear words, in fact, this would be a perfect movie to show junior-high kids to make them fully understand the cost of the rights they will probably soon grow up to take for granted and ignore.
I'm definitely in the "innovative and audacious" camp. When you first start watching it, you're thinking, wow, this is gorgeous, and then you kind of go, huh, that's an interestingly... uh, modern choice of music, and then when you get to some of the first bits of dialog between Swank's character, the suffragist Alice Paul, and Frances O'Connor's, you're thinking, whoa -- that is not a phrase from 1917! But then it starts to grow on you -- or rather, it did me. I loved the fact that they used modern techniques and dialog to make a story about a period a lot of people find yawn-inducing into something much more compelling.
Initially, in fact, the story is slow -- Paul and her fellow "take a more aggressive approach" activists are embroiled in some more political maneuvering as they gradually begin to make a split with the main suffrage organization at the time, and that is never terrifically exciting. Though the cast is incredible -- Angelica Huston, Julia Ormond, a pre-McDreamy (but no less dreamy, OMG) Patrick Dempsey, Vera Farmiga, and even Alma from Deadwood! -- political machinations are often not that engaging for modern audiences, but the director's really unusual approach and the beautiful cinematography pull you in.
The right to vote for women has way too often been downplayed in our history texts -- I didn't know about, for instance, the jailing and torture of many of the women until I went and researched it on my own in junior high. Most of the time it's just a note on 1920 -- women were granted the right to vote by an amendment blah blah. The best thing about Iron Jawed Angels is that it brings to life people who have been shoved into the margins of history, and shows us just how terrible their fight was for something we all take for granted. Toward the end, when the U.S. goes to war in 1918, things start to get very, very ugly, and they do not stint on showing just how horrific force-feeding of hunger strikers actually was.
For me, the movie was a great example of just how engaging film can make history to a modern audience. We seem to have this belief that history has to be told in epic presentations, with everyone using faux British accents if they're not already from there (because god knows, no other accent would be historically accurate! Look at the pasting Scorsese took when he let his American actors use their own voices in Last Temptation of Christ), and with quasi-symphonic music as a background. Iron Jawed Angels is gorgeous, living proof that you can make history and the people who made it engaging, fascinating, and thoroughly relatable. If it weren't for a steamy bathtub scene with Swank and a few swear words, in fact, this would be a perfect movie to show junior-high kids to make them fully understand the cost of the rights they will probably soon grow up to take for granted and ignore.