First off, anyone who has learned more than two licks about Jessica Chastain knows that she clearly wasn't advocating for Meryl to take less parts (Jessica Chastain is in roughly eight million movies a year, so obviously she isn't advocating for that...kidding, I've met her and she's a sweetheart-this isn't how ardent film fan Jessica Chastain operates). What she was advocating for is that "women of a certain age," including the talented women that she name-checked (Jessica Lange, Susan Sarandon, and Viola Davis) seem to fall by the wayside, and the extremely limited number of parts that go to Streep shouldn't be so limited-there should be more and more interesting parts for actresses in their 50's and 60's.
Chastain of course has a point (though I always wonder if Viola Davis, who is considerably younger than Streep, Lange, and Sarandon, doesn't feel a bit of a twinge when she gets lumped in with these women as they are not in the same age group). While Lange and Davis have both enjoyed recent success on television (more on How to Get Away with Murder later next week when I manage to get through more of my DVR), cinematically the only American woman over 55 who consistently gets giant lead roles is Meryl Streep. Most of the women of Meryl's generation like Sarandon and Lange, as well as Glenn Close, Holly Hunter, Kathy Bates, Geena Davis, Sigourney Weaver, Sissy Spacek, and Kathleen Turner (amongst others) all struggle mightily to get major film roles. In the past decade, some of these women haven't even had a lead role, much less a role that would be critically-praised and widely seen (only Close has managed an Oscar nomination amongst this crew).
The question here, though, is two-fold. Will people actually see critically-acclaimed films from these women if Hollywood were to producer them? Hollywood does have a finite number of films that it can release each year, even if it seems like there’s an infinite number of screens to play films upon. However, I think that it has been proven that with a combination of strong female-driven films over the past few years that there is a large appetite for women at the Box Office. Bridesmaids, The Help, The Heat, Sex and the City, and It’s Complicated all cleared $100 million domestically. The specific lead women in these films (save for Viola Davis) seem to have seen a bit of an increase in their overall cache since then, but it still feels like (save for Meryl) none of the women have been showered with the sort of adulation and roles that greet a new male member of the A-list (see how Ryan Gosling basically got any part he wanted after Blue Valentine but Michelle Williams didn’t get remotely as many).
It’s worth noting, looking at Bridesmaids and The Help in particular, how Hollywood doesn’t seem to have a farm team system when it comes to female actors in the same way that it does for male actors. You get a hit like Wedding Crashers, and you see how Hollywood sees the potential in someone like Bradley Cooper in a supporting role, but then groomed for stardom. This happens with someone like Zach Galifinakis in The Hangover films or any number of supporting players in the movies of Judd Apatow. The same cannot be said for smash hits like Bridesmaids and The Help. Yes, Jessica Chastain and Melissa McCarthy were plucked out of obscurity and given stronger parts, but McCarthy was the only supporting player who got major Box Office opportunities as a result. Ellie Kemper, Octavia Spencer, Wendi McLendon-Covey, and even Rebel Wilson continue to get supporting parts despite having been major crowd-pleasers in these films. They are either given continued supporting parts in comedic movies or are relegated to television even though they’ve proven they have potential in cinema. This is clearly a gender-biased problem for Hollywood, as breakout male stars continually get limitless roles even when their potential is clearly tapped out (you think that a woman could have as many flops as Taylor Kitsch or Ryan Reynolds have had and still be working?).
If you expand beyond just looking at women of a certain age, and really expand to all women (as I have clearly done, though we’ll get back to Chastain’s point in a bit), you see an even more startling set of statistic. The Geena Davis Institute (founded by the Oscar-winning actress) took a recent study of films from 2010-2013 (rated lower than R, as their focus is frequently on how women are perceived by younger women), and found some damning results. Amidst some 5800 speaking or named characters, only 31% of them were women-nearly seventy percent of all speaking roles in films from that period were men. This gets even worse if you look specifically at American productions, where 29.3% of characters are female, and only 30% of films had female leads or co-leads.
The statistics get even more dire when you look at specific attributes of female roles. Only 23.2% of employees in work-place scenes in American films are female, compared to the actual workforce, which is 46.3% and continually growing (a disparity nearly as high as large as the 23.2% of women in films, meaning that the number of women in these scenes would have to double to be accurate to real life). If you look specifically at STEM (Science Technology Engineering Mathematics), you get perhaps the most disgusting imbalance: of the STEM jobs onscreen from the United States, only 12.5% were represented by women (half of what is true in the real workforce). These statistics may seem nitpicky, but the reality is that they add up to a startling under-representation of women in cinema.
And they add to Chastain’s point in general, which is that women are under-represented. That being said, the better question is why can’t we see more major films with our favorite actresses in their 50’s and 60’s. This is a true conundrum, because Meryl Streep should serve as an indication that there is a hunger for these sorts of movies. Streep’s films frequently gross over $100 million (even lower-tier hits like Hope Springs managed to do that), but she’s not the only one who is able to wow on the Art House circuit. Look at the recent movies of Judi Dench (Best Exotic Marigold Hotel made $130 million on a $10 million budget), Maggie Smith (Quartet made nearly $60 million on an $11 million budget) or Helen Mirren (The Hundred-Foot Journey made nearly $80 million on a $25 million budget). And this is just having these films play limited art houses across the country. Imagine what would happen if they were to follow Streep’s lead and give them wide openings so that people across the country are able to see these films. When a comic book movie or fairy tale movie plays well and makes a lot of money, Hollywood assumes that others will work-why don't they think the same when a comedy about a woman over fifty is successful? You'd think this would be a no-brainer.
But for some reason Hollywood refuses to listen, and Hollywood directors refuse to be inspired, so we as an audience need to take matters into our own hands by supporting the works of women until Hollywood is beaten over the head enough to take it seriously. That starts, for the record, today, and you can do it in a number of ways. For starters you can:
1. Go out and add ten female-led pictures to your Netflix queue.
2. Make a point to catch a female-led picture from an actress over forty this fall (in fact, try to do it multiple times). Some obvious contenders include Julianne Moore in Still Alice or Maps to the Stars, Meryl Streep in Into the Woods, or Maggie Smith in My Old Lady (this is a pretty sad indictment that there are so few, but if you see others on your screens, make a point of seeking them out). Eventually Hollywood won’t just think it’s a fluke or “this one actress” but instead that it’s both this one actress and a number of her extremely talented peers.
3. Follow a favorite actress that you aren’t currently following on Twitter that you aren’t currently. May I suggest Jane Fonda, Octavia Spencer, Ellen Barkin, Marisa Tomei, Goldie Hawn, Kyra Sedgwick, Cher, and Marlee Matlin, though there are countless others.
4. Write to your local theater when they aren’t playing a Still Alice or Philomena or Quartet and demand to know why these films aren’t playing-the more they know that people want to see these films, the more likely they are to play them and give more women stronger opportunities to prove they can demand a strong box office.
5. And because it’s so easy-look for a female-driven television show that you’ve been meaning to Netflix but haven’t because you’re too into Breaking Bad or The Wire or Dexter or…well you get my point when it comes to shows that aren’t Orange is the New Black in the zeitgeist. See what Scandal or Nurse Jackie or How to Get Away with Murder is like and you might just enjoy it.
These are just some ways that you can help Jessica Chastain’s mission. The reality is that this is a larger issue that affects everywhere from Congress to the board room to the theater, and only through demanding it with your time and money will we see more of these incredibly talented actresses in roles that are worthy of them.
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