Crush; Oscar Notes

Movies about women rarely get a fair shake from critics, male or female. In the arenas of both criticism and marketing, a doltish double standard governs any film with the temerity to put a female actress front and center, then build its plot around romance, marriage or other so-called "domestic" concerns. Meanwhile, films about men?particularly self-destructive or violent men?are more apt to be granted a fair and serious reading. (Compare the condescension that soiled even positive reviews of Once Around, The Joy Luck Club, How to Make an American Quilt and the 1994 remake of Little Women?four elegant, smart, sturdy Hollywood movies that hold up well under repeat viewings?with the straightforward, even humorless critiques accorded to Fight Club, The Matrix, Gladiator and We Were Soldiers.)

I wish the new Andie MacDowell vehicle Crush were good enough to break the cycle; unfortunately, it condescends to its own characters so blatantly that it's apt to make the gender-biased hypocrites feel vindicated. Written and directed by John McKay, it's about a May-September romance between the headmistress of a girl's school (MacDowell, miscast in an obviously British part just as she was obviously miscast in Four Weddings and a Funeral) and a sexy young church organist (Kenny Doughty). In typical movie fashion, it begins with the presumption that a fortysomething woman in love with a barely postadolescent man must be unfulfilled, even pathetic, otherwise she wouldn't have gotten herself into such a predicament, and moves on from there, degrading its women more rudely with each passing minute.

McDowell's character, Kate, falls in lust with the dark-eyed, pouty-lipped Jed on first sight (there are so many lame double entendres about how well Jed handles his organ that I half expected Benny Hill to sprint through the frame at Keystone Kops velocity). Pretty soon they're screwing in the weeds behind the chapel and meeting clandestinely in the home that serves as a commons for Kate and two other professionally accomplished, romantically crippled fortysomething singles (wry Imelda Staunton and hardbitten Anna Chancellor). As soon as Kate and Jed start doing it doggie-style in the living room, you start counting the seconds until the other women pop in unannounced.

Crush can't (or won't) pull the trigger on the nature of its central relationship. Writer-director McKay seems aware that Jed is too shallow and Kate too emotionally messed up for the relationship to last, but at the same time he doesn't want the film to become too "serious"?by which I mean he's unwilling to take either character's wants and needs seriously?so he suggests there's something deep and meaningful in the central romance even as he keeps the tone kooky and feather-light. MacDowell, who has a narrow range but mines it with sensational effectiveness, can't help trying to give Kate several dimensions, but the film stays cruelly at odds with her efforts. She's in there playing a real woman (or trying to, anyway), her director is wrapping her in a Meg Ryan movie (or the kind of movie Meg Ryan might star in if she could let go of the compulsion to keep playing 25 no matter how old she gets). The schism between MacDowell's poignant awkwardness and the film's cutesy Sex and the City-style devices (flashbacks within anecdotes, quirky music, monologues that become voiceover narration) ensures that Kate is trivialized to a far greater degree than she might have been if the film had played things straight. The suggestion that Jed is just using Kate for his own selfish satisfaction hangs over the story like an unclaimed whiff of flatulence. McKay skirts the issue, allowing the charismatic Doughty?whose opaque face and bemused, predatory expressions suggest a gene-spliced merger of Richard Gere and Mick Jagger?to steal every scene he shares with the star and make her character seem even more lost and clueless.

Over the decades, cinema has given audiences countless examples of May-September romances between young women and older men, from Sabrina to the recent Autumn in New York, and while the age issue is frequently addressed, it's rarely dwelt upon. But with Crush, as in 1990's compromised but more interesting White Palace, the age gap dominates the narrative, and what would have been an age-gap-conscious but otherwise crowd-pleasing "Will they be happy or not?" movie becomes, instead, a reinforcement of tired old stereotypes about single, childless women in their 40s. (The diminutive, apple-cheeked Staunton, whose best-pal character gets a little action with a man her own age in a subplot, might have rescued the picture if she'd played MacDowell's part?but you can't get international financing with a film starring a 40ish female Brit who isn't model-beautiful, no matter how fine an actress she is.) The film's working title was Sad Fuckers Club; Crush isn't as witlessly vulgar, but it's no less belittling, because it implies that the emotions Kate feels, however tangled and impulsive they may be, are ultimately blinkered and false. (The filmmaker might be right?but he doesn't have the intelligence or guts to round up evidence.) It's easy to imagine a film on this same subject turning out rather well; the late, great Billy Wilder mixed razor-edged human comedy and poignancy with startling ease (and not just in Sabrina). But there are no Wilders anymore. That great director was routinely rapped as cynical and mean, but compared to John McKay, he was Frank Capra.

Framed

Last week's Oscar telecast was the first one in my lifetime that I didn't watch live; of course it turned out to be one of the only telecasts in the past 20 years worth seeing and discussing. Catching up to it on tape, I was struck by the gap between Hollywood's illusion of racial progress and the complex, contradictory reality. I was happy to see Denzel Washington win an Oscar, even though Training Day was basically an overproduced, underimagined B-picture that played like a Joel Silver remake of Serpico. (Washington got the Paul Newman in The Color of Money/Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman award, by which I mean the Academy was playing catchup. I would have much preferred to see him win Best Actor for Malcolm X, The Hurricane or Courage Under Fire, a heartbreaking, career-capping turn for which he wasn't even nominated.)

In Monster's Ball, Halle Berry made a game, occasionally heroic attempt to overcome being miscast, but she couldn't pull it off; between her unmodulated emoting onscreen and her tabloid-ready misadventures offscreen, I couldn't quite shake my awareness that I was watching a performance rather than a character. But what the hell; a woman of color finally won Best Actress, and whether the next honoree is more deserving, at least we can count on seeing another in our lifetime. (Knock wood.)

Whoopi Goldberg often gets criticized as a sourpuss who bites the same industry hand that feeds her, but when she noted the difference between the filmed tributes to Sidney Poitier and Robert Redford, she was right on the money. Poitier's reel contained no white faces, and nearly every interviewee talked about how much Poitier meant to them as a symbol of racial progress. Redford, in contrast, was treated as what he is?an actor, director, producer and activist?and race never came up. How much progress has Hollywood really made? When it thinks of black actors as black first and actors second, the answer is "Not that much." I'd like to think that when Washington gets a career achievement award 25 or 30 years down the road, his tribute reel will concentrate on his work rather than his pigmentation. Of course, if that happens, the honor will doubtless be accompanied with a separate award for some pioneering Latino or Asian actor whose tribute reel is all about uplifting the race. Such is progress.