CULTURE

...And so it is understandable that addiction itself often serves as cinematic metaphor for such spiritual desperation...

...It offers no hope for those of us who would like to see the entire corrupt political and economic system revamped...

...Shue...

...It was only later, when I had recovered from the emotional blows, that I began to realize that the film is hollow, the characters ultimately flat and unbelievable...

...Thus does Hollywood periodically wish away the sorrv truth about female degradation and its true causes and cures, and send its male viewers home with clean consciences...

...But Sharon Stone...

...No surprise that Woody Allen, the man for whom the term "denial" was invented, has stuck with this hokey, "whore-with-a heart-of-gold" image in Mighty Aphrodite...

...To Die For...

...Mike Figgis's Leaving Las Vegas manages to avoid the failings of both Georgia and Casino...

...And yet, in each of her encounters—with pimps, with Johns, with landlords, with casino bouncers—she meets insult and assault with a dignity that seems to grow from her core...

...Who would have guessed that anv of them would have turned in hauntingly powerful, nuanced performances in such challenging, downbeat films as Casino...

...Boys on the Side...

...Jennifer Jason Leigh, brilliant once more in Georgia, is the only one of the bunch that one might have expected to be "Oscar-qualitied...

...And the third...

...Male directors have, in fact, been obsessed with the theme of the "fallen woman...

...No, the primary reason is...

...Family dysfunction (and here the film parallels the thinking of the recovery movement itself) is seen as operating in a social and economic vacuum...

...But that is only because the film is so much less honest than Casino...

...in ! truth, an embarrassment of riches this year for those of us who are perennially starved for the sight of powerful women on the big screen...

...We've seen this version of the Hollywood whore millions of times...

...Two—Sharon Stone as a hustler and addict, and Elisabeth Shue as a streetwalker—are set in the seediest of American landscapes: Las Vegas...

...There is no acknowledgement of the larger context in which "dysfunctional" families are produced...

...In fact, they all tend to merge into a single, soppy blur of sugary sentimentality, with onlv the barest hint of spice...

...And what unlikely actresses most ot them were...

...And each—refreshingly and realistically—is closer to Divine Brown than Julia Roberts...

...Not because they are "'bad.'" Not even, in most cases, because they were "'victims" of some sort of abuse (although that is a factor in too many cases...

...But the fact that it is presented so casually, so matter-of-factly, works as an endorsement of its legitimacy: she must have done something to deserve such a fate is the implicit assumption, since no other explanation is hinted at...

...for me, one of the most inspiring movies of the year...

...But while all three are worth seeing, only Mike Figgis's remarkable Leaving Las Vegas manages to allow its heroine to emerge from the squalor of her life with real dignity and self-respect...

...For it showed a woman trapped in the worst kind of social and spiritual degradation, yet managing to rise above the sordid conditions with her humanity and nobility intact...

...Leaving Las Vegas doesn't hedge or skirt around the harsh truths of life on America's bottom rung...

...But as welcome as these candy-coaled valentines to female audiences were, they amounted to pretty thin stuff...

...The domestic-housewife role stifles and destroys her, and she ends up as a pathetic, grotesque junkie...

...That's because, like most Scorsese films, it delves deeply, relentlessly, and unsentimentally into the source of America's moral and spiritual decay: the driving lust for power and wealth as ends in themselves...

...But what makes the film particularly interesting is that Martin Scorsese—the classic director of male-centered, tough-guy films in which women play the usual brutalized roles—sees fit this time to include a woman in his rogue's gallery of lost souls...

...they have chosen to give us only the most degraded or romantically absurd stereotypes of such women...

...But until now...

...after all...

...Most critics have viewed this film as Cage's, but that must surely be because most critics see films from the male point of view and assume what film theorists call the "male gaze...

...In a market-driven, sexist society, the female body is the one economically "valuable" commodity' a woman will always be able to sell...

...And it is Sera, not the doomed Cage, who acts and grows and changes throughout...

...the designated "serious young actress" of the moment now that Jodie Foster has turned director...

...Even Waiting to Exhale—the only one of the bunch with any spirit or passion at all—in the end was no more than a cartoon cutout version of the feistv novel upon which it was based...

...As I watched this film, I was mesmerized and emotionally drained by the power of Leigh's performance as a self-destructive bar singer with no talent but lots of guts...

...Among the uplifting films were How to Make an American Quilt, Moonlight and Valentino...

...Sadie and Georgia are the perennial "bad girl" and "good girl" of American culture...

...The parallel with the "black, single mother on welfare," so popular in political discourse, is obvious...

...Casino, like all Scorsese's darker films, is a tragedy about people who are brought down by their own character flaws, and by the built-in booby traps of the system they choose to work within, and hope—desperately and foolishly—to beat...

...Sadie envies and tries to compete with her successful, much-loved sister...

...Little Women...

...Rather, the standard role for female prostitutes (and junkies, for that matter) is not even supporting, but more often merely bit...

...The film's answers are not political...

...Bv contrast, the performances that have stuck in my mind have all been bad-girl/loser roles...

...But neither is there the cynical despair and hopelessness about the human condition that fuel most serious films about such people The premise of this film—the notion that these few, often sordid and painful weeks might be the best that a woman like Seta could aspire to—is depressing...

...As Oscar time approaches, 1 can actually name—tor the first time in memory—more than ten actresses cast in meaty enough roles to make the Best Actress and Supporting Actress races interesting and serious this year...

...It is therefore inevitable that every one of them, including Ginger, will end in ignominy, and, more often than not, brutal death...

...Now and Then, The Bahy-Sitters' Club (a preteen version), and Waiting to Exhale—noteworthy for its presentation of African-American women as successful and upwardly mobile...

...In our world, the most unfortunate among us are also the most often stigmatized and blamed for their sorry fates...

...Linda Fiorentino in Jade—I could go on, and " you probably could, too...

...no hint that—to use a cliche that is nonetheless true—"the personal is political...

...Hollywood has always loved its bad girls, especially its whores...

...Of course, to feminists who insist on positive images, this list of portrayals must hardly seem heartening...

...Spiritual desperation will often accompany this kind of economic despair...

...And so, despite its often rivetia| scenes and characters, it remains an essen-tially disingenuous picture of white, middle-class, female degradation...

...to a predictably soft-focus moment of sisterhood triumphant...

...The current hit Heat is classic: virtually every teniale character is betrayed, humiliated, and exploited, but only the African-American woman, a prostitute, is brutally strangled and disposed of in a five-minute sequence...

...In fact, this film is Sera's, It is narrated by her and seen from her perspective...

...For a variety of reasons, we were offered an unprecedented number of well-meaning movies last year: more women in decision-making positions in studios and in the director's seat...

...Her sister, although the film fails to develop this much, is (yawn again) a classic "passive-aggressive" type who "enables" her sister's addiction by constantly "rescuing" her from "hitting bottom" and "seeking help...

...In these films, the prostitutes and addicts are central characters, not bit players to be mutilated and discarded...

...And her tragedy reveals something about the sexism of the system that Scorsese hasn't previously tackled: the gendered playing field that puts women—forced into traditionally stifling roles—at so great a disadvantage in the male world of power and money...

...A League of Their Own, and a few others hit pay dirt...

...There are no happy endings here, no family wiring funds for detox, no Prince Charming to wipe away the tears...

...But there was a surprisingly long list of "good-girl," '"female-bonding" movies in which groups of mismatched friends saw each other through conflict and crisis, good men and bad...

...And the reason is that there is absolutely no social—much less economic or political— context to its near hysteria over human suffering...

...Nor does it cynically damn its characters along with their environment...

...This remarkable low-budget film tells the story of an alcoholic screenwriter (Nicolas Cage) who comes to Vegas to drink himself to death, falls in love with a streetwalker named Sera (Elisabeth Shue), and spends his last dying weeks with her...

...Mira Sorvino in Mighty Aphrodite...

...more women seeing movies, and buying their own tickets: more female stars, desperate for decent scripts, producing their own movies: more Elayne Rapping, most recently the author of "The Culture of Recovery" (Beacon), appears in this space every other month...

...Thus the endless list of "whore-with-a-heart-of-gold" fables—from the euphemistic "showgirls" in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes to Julia Roberts's star-making performance in Pretty Woman...

...What makes the Stone, Leigh, and Shue vehicles so much more interesting than any of these earlier film versions is that they reverse the Hollywood tradition...

...By refusing to deal with any of the Hollywood cliches or stereotypes about addiction and prostitution, the film achieves something startlingly original...

...And when she meets a man who treats her with respect, she manages to offer him a caring, loving last few weeks...

...In these, and their many clones, prostitutes with virginal souls find Prince Charmings who recognize their essential goodness and carry them off into a diamond-strung sunset...

...In the character of Sera, we have a woman who is beaten down, and beaten up, daily, by the world she lives in and the men who control it...

...Ugh Truth Number One: manv decent women do—indeed, often must—turn to prostitution when all else fails...

...If you want to say something socially and emotionally important about women in American life, you are obliged today to tackle the gloomier areas of our social and psychological landscape...

...It takes as given the corrupt, male-dominated, money-and-power-driven Las Vegas landscape, and then proceeds to ask a really interesting question: For those who find themselves in such a state of material and spiritual squalor, how might it be possible to live with a degree of dignity, self-respect, and even love...

...Sharon Stone's Ginger McKenna is a player, a woman who uses her body and her seductiveness to elbow her way into the high-stakes male game on her own terms...

...But the tragic dynamic they act out—in which love and success and approval are seen as scarce goods for which women must compete to the death—is rooted in social, economic, and historical conditions this film never dares to exjjft ine...

...When Sadie reaches the point where most such women begin turning tricks for drugs and booze, her sister wires her money to enter detox and nurses her back to health so she can return for yet another round of this childish routine...

...Casino, despite its many, oft-noted flaws, would be well worth seeing even if it didn't offer so powerful a female character...

...Prostitutes, junkies, and cold-blooded killers are not exactly the role models we would choose for our daughters...

...Sadly, that's where the most serious truths about gender are still most likely to be found...

...For all the understandable clamor for "positive" roles and representations, the movies in which female virtue and talent were rewarded—whether with love or money, personal fulfillment or professional triumph—ran the gamut from forgettable to annoying to inane...

...and Leaving Las X'egas'l Nor were these the only remarkable and unexpected female performances...

...It lays out the economic and political workings of Las Vegas—always a perfect metaphor for American capitalism at its rawest...

...and always has been, economic...

...Jennifer Jason Leigh as a failed bar singer, alcoholic, and junkie, is set fairly close to that spiritual vicinity...

...Nicole Kidman'1 Elisabeth (who...

...For Scorsese, human nature never rises above the level of the degraded world that spawns it...

...When you get past the two predictably stunning performances in predictably '"uplifting" roles—Meryl Streep in The Bridges of Madison Countv and Susan Sarandon in Dead Man Walking—what you have left is a list of highly unlikely actresses in far from uplifting, or even typically Hollywood, roles...

...The uglier—and far more common— him version, the one in which the woman meets a tragic end in the gutter or morgue, is less likely to form the central storyline of any Hollywood movie...

...It is truer to life, unfortunately, than the "prostitute as virginal princess-to-be...

...Georgia is another matter entirely...

...She is...

...But when she agrees—because she is offered more money, gold, and jewels than she can refuse—to give up her role as a partner in crime to Robert De Niro's casino manager and become a wife and mother, she is doomed...

...For my money, the three most outstanding performances were the three that dug deepest into women's experiences in the dark side of American life...

...Nonetheless, the figure of Ginger McKenna, doomed and degraded as she is, is intriguing...

...money men willing to take risks on female-driven movies since Thelnui and Louise...

...that the pain and destruction Sadie's family experiences are a direct reflection of the pain and destructiveness of so much of American social and political life itself...

...What this film does offer is, in its own way, precious...

...L'sually we see a prostitute, cast as a woman of color, on screen briefly to be brutalized—a prop to illustrate the vi-ciousness (or even worse, the macho bravado) of a male character...

...Georgia chooses to analyze its character's downfall—not surprisingly in these days of "recovery"—in terms of the dynamics of a (yawn) "dysfunctional" family...

...There was...

...Jennifer Jason Leigh—as Sadie, the talentless sister of a semi-big-time folk-rock singer (the Georgia of the title)—does not play a hooker and does not make it to the Las Vegas big-time of American, and female, degradation...

...She does well in this game, as long as she sticks to hustling...

...But Leaving Las Vegas was...