Chick flicks for all ages, or why I don’t really like Nancy Meyers

by Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux

The New York Times Mag‘s feature this week is about ladies.  Specifically, ladies in cinema – a topic that has been much chewed over in the past few weeks, ever since this year’s movie-ticket sales were tallied and female actresses seemed to be coming out on top.  This is a big deal because Hollywood is something of a final frontier.  I wrote several posts around last year’s award season about the gendering of film awards (somebody remind me why we still have “best actor” and “best actress” as separate categories?) and general inequities in show business.

The statistics are pretty sobering.  A 2008 study by the University of Southern California evaluated nearly 7,000 speaking roles in recent Oscar-nominated movies, and found that only 27 percent of those roles belonged to women. In films with female directors, however, the percentage skyrocketed to 44 percent. But then again, no female director has ever won the Best Director Oscar, and only three have ever been nominated.

But this week’s Mag seems to be offering up some kind of solution to the women-in-Hollywood conundrum: Nancy Meyers.  You may know her as the director of Something’s Gotta Give, What Women Want, and my least favorite of her movies, The Holiday – but she also wrote Private Benjamin and Father of the Bride, and even the movie of my youth, The Parent Trap.  She has been around for a long time, and the feature’s author, Daphne Merkin, opens the article by saying that she may be the most powerful female writer in Hollywood.  Even though there’s not much competition.

Nancy Meyers is a conundrum for me, because on the one hand, her films are very admirable.  She depicts middle-aged women, who are usually completely absent from glossy blockbuster films, and instead of “bombarding [her] with reminders of her vanished youthfulness everywhere she turns, places her in an alternate universe, where she is not only visible but desirable just the way she is.”  Meyers delivers the romantic comedy, repackaged for women who are normally written out.  They can have one man (or even two, as in Meyers’ new film, It’s Complicated, released on Christmas Day) who think they are just the bee’s knees, a gorgeous house, a nonspecific but extremely lucrative career, and lots of adorable neuroses.  And as easy as it is to mock the romantic comedy as a genre, it’s important to make sure that all kinds of women are represented in these unrealistic fantasies.  Which Meyers certainly does.

But the thing is, I don’t like Nancy Meyers’ movies.  And this is not because I am opposed to the idea of middle-aged women being given center stage – they’re just not good movies.  Perhaps this is just my dislike of romantic comedies at work here, but Meyers, while certainly offering something fair in her films (i.e. including older women in romantic films), isn’t offering anything particularly new or revolutionary.  She isn’t showing ageing in a realistic way (Merkin adds, somewhat sheepishly, that it helps if the middle-aged heroines “look like Diane Keaton or Meryl Streep, and if [they] get to wear a carefully chosen wardrobe of flattering clothes”), which isn’t bad if you’re expecting a film that doesn’t show life in a realistic way.  But the reason that I can’t stand romantic comedies has everything to do with the crazy fantasies that they project.  It’s great Meyers can play out a romance for women who are culturally cast as undesirable, but the fact is, I don’t want that kind of romance to begin with.

Perhaps my hopes for film are too high for romantic comedies (or Nancy Meyers’ films) to fulfill them.  After all, Meyers is not trying to do anything particularly ambitious.  A film critic explains, “She makes it easy for the actors and the audience.  They can slip into their parts and be happy, and we can slip into our seats and be happy.”  And Meyers herself seems fully aware that she is creating an entirely fake world.  She orders that the dead trees be edited out of the background – she is quoted as saying, triumphantly, that “every plant that is spiky is removed from this movie.  You have no idea. Keep it all soft.”

So maybe this is more about my preferences than anything else.  But this is why it bothers me so much that gender is such an enormous part of Meyers’ shtick – that she assumes that she’s creating what women want.  Richard Schickel has some harsh conclusions, hinting that Meyers and the studios have struck a devil’s pact of sorts. “Clearly there is an audience for sweet little middle-class romances of the kind she makes,” he told Merkin, “and it pleases the studios to indulge a woman, whom they would not trust with more vigorous projects. It’s as if they’re trying to say: ‘Hey, we’re not sexists. We make Nancy Meyers movies.’ ”

Inevitably, I think this article is much ado about nothing.  Merkin concludes: “The middle-aged woman as dream icon: lovable, desirable, unleavable. What’s not to warm to about that?”  And sure, if people want that, they should have it.  But let’s not make this about how Hollywood is changing to include older women, or different kinds of women, or erasing gender at all – if anything, we’re making those gender stereotypes more real.  There have been a lot of beautiful movies about slightly sad middle-aged men (Sideways, anyone?) that have been heartbreaking and lovely because of their truth.  And even if that’s not the life most people want, it resonates because there are small pieces that seem familiar, at least to some audiences.  Is the thought of a similar movie about women just too dismal to contemplate?  What about the middle-aged women who can’t identify with Meryl Streep or Diane Keaton?  And what about those who don’t want to?