You've Got Males
PODHORETZ, JOHN
You 've Got Males Cameron Diaz, Kate Winslet, two guys, and what? by John Podhoretz Who's the most successful female movie director in the world? If you even hazard a guess, chances are you'll...
...They long for the simple things in life, mostly because they have everything else...
...In Private Benjamin, a sheltered Jewish-American princess finds her inner strength after she is tricked into joining the Army...
...Meyers wants to catch sociological lightning in a bottle when it comes to the lives and careers of American women...
...These movies are surprisingly long and surprisingly heartfelt...
...There has to be something else, something more arresting, going on as well—trying to balance family and career, finding love at midlife after divorce, falling for a colleague who might be trying to steal your job at the same time...
...Her characters live in dream houses so sumptuously designed and lasciviously photographed that the term "real estate porn" could have been invented to describe them...
...Meyers's great insight as a moviemaker was that fatuous romantic dilemmas aren't enough to catch our attention any longer...
...She has made one monster hit—What Women Want, the last comedy Mel Gibson will probably ever make, in which Gibson finds himself gifted with the supernatural power to damn all Jews to the nether regi . . . sorry, to read women's minds...
...And it is precisely the lack of a career struggle on display that makes The Holiday so unmemorable and disappointing...
...And she has made the fresh, bright, and peppy Something's Gotta Give, the glossiest romantic comedy out of Hollywood since Tootsie, with Diane Keaton as the 58-year-old divorced playwright who finally tames a sexagenarian sexist sex symbol played by Jack Nicholson...
...Are these silly fantasies...
...don't think of Mira Nair...
...She had a potentially inspired idea—L.A...
...She looks as if she could step on him like a bug...
...Her name is Nancy Meyers...
...But Heckerling hasn't done anything of note this decade...
...Meyers just makes sure that she adds career contentment into the mix for the perfect fulfillment of a contemporary woman's dreams...
...For two decades she was a screenwriter and producer, collaborating with director Charles Shyer (then her husband) on a remarkable string of comedy successes—Benjamin, Baby Boom, the two Father of the Bride pictures with Steve Martin...
...If you even hazard a guess, chances are you'll say Nora Ephron, who made Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail...
...Her movies from 1980 onward offer a kind of pop-culture chronicle of feminism and its discontents...
...Well, then, Meyers will see to it that Keanu Reeves hungrily pursues Diane Keaton in Something's Gotta Give before the bounder played by Jack Nicholson comes along begging for a second chance with this aged goddess...
...Well, if you're Diane Keaton in Baby Boom, you leave the heartless precincts of New York for the cutest little town in Vermont you ever saw, start your own organic baby-food business, and find love with the hunky local vet...
...In fact, the world's most successful female film director is someone of whom you have almost certainly never heard...
...In Baby Boom, a hard-charging executive learns what really matters in life when a relative dies suddenly and leaves a six-month-old baby in her care...
...Of course, by the end of the picture, Winslet ceases her mooning days while Diaz learns to moon over the conveniently sexy but geographically undesirable Jude Law...
...But when you think of box office, you John Podhoretz is The Weekly Standard's movie critic...
...But Meyers failed to make either woman even modestly interesting or her struggles even remotely believable...
...And they are lovable bundles of neuroses whose inability to enjoy their enchanted lives makes it possible for the rest of us to like them when we should feel free to hate them...
...How can you work at a job and raise children and give them both the attention they deserve...
...Is it unfair that a woman just shy of 60 might find it hard to get a date...
...No sillier than romantic fantasies of any other age...
...But in fact, Ephron hasn't had a hit since 1998...
...In the meanwhile, Meyers has taken The Holiday Directed by Nancy Meyers off into the stratosphere as a writer-director...
...The Holiday will not mar Meyers's standing as the world's most successful female director...
...Diaz is depressed because she's so controlled and polished that she doesn't moon over anybody...
...There's nothing else going on in The Holiday besides the romance or lack thereof, and as Lorenz Hart once put it, unrequited love's a bore...
...Or Amy Heckerling, who made Look Who's Talking and Clueless...
...There are others you might name, like the Indian director Mira Nair, whose Salaam Bombay and Monsoon Wedding are among the cinematic highlights of the past 15 years...
...chick Cameron Diaz and London chick Kate Winslet swap lives for two weeks, with Winslet bopping around Diaz's immaculate Beverly Hills mansion while Diaz curls up in Winslet's cozy suburban cottage...
...And in Something's Gotta Give, a woman past menopause finds new artistic inspiration when she has her heart broken by a shallow cad—and even wins the ardent devotion of a doctor 20 years her junior who loves her for her mind...
...Whether she is its writer-producer or its director, a Meyers movie is a very recognizable object...
...Winslet's character has wasted three years of her life mooning over a colleague she once dated...
...Maybe Meyers's frustration will offer her some fodder for a new picture that won't just lie there like a wet sock the way The Holiday does...
...Here's the thing: Why should anybody care that Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet—two of the most gloriously attractive people on this planet—are forlorn or unlucky in love...
...But it won't do anything to help her achieve recognition on a par with Nora Ephron, either...
...Now, she has made the chick flick of the Christmas season, a transatlantic life-swap picture called The Holiday with Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet—and initial returns suggest it's going to do decent business...
...Like any romantic comedy in any other era, these movies end with an image of domestic contentment...
...They clearly reflect Meyers's own life struggles and are resolved in a way that fulfills not only her audience's wishes but, clearly, Meyers' own wishes as well...
...And how on earth did Meyers make the colossal mistake of imagining that the elfin Jack Black—who can be a dynamic performer at times but can't act his way out of a paper bag—would be any kind of match for the formidable Winslet...
...After their divorce, Shyer has descended to the B-list after two horrendous and financially disastrous movies, The Affair of the Necklace and Alfie, suggested to everyone in Hollywood that perhaps Shyer had coasted for years on his wife's talent...
...In What Women Want, another hard-charging female executive is revealed to be self-doubting and self-critical, forced to hide her extremely kind nature behind a noth-ing-bothers-me fagade...
Vol. 12 • December 2006 • No. 15
