The date: June 14, 2013. The writer: me, in despair, without a single non-art-house movie with a female lead playing anywhere near me. The piece: “At The Movies, The Women Are Gone.”
And now, two weeks later, it’s opening day for The Heat, the buddy-cop comedy starring Melissa McCarthy and Sandra Bullock, and The Bling Ring is playing, so instead of my local multiplex having zero percent of its non-animation showtimes starring women, now it has 22 percent! For this weekend only, men dominate only 78 percent of the showings! Girl power! Year Of The Woman!
But here’s what does matter: Not only is The Heat very, very funny, but it’s made with a delightful combination of self-awareness about the fact that it’s a rare buddy-cop movie about women and total commitment to being a buddy-cop movie, not a female-buddy-cop movie.
Let me tell you how it hooked me, without spoiling anything: there is a cliché about scenes in which women sit in their apartments. (There are actually lots of clichés, but there is this one in particular.) The Heat shows Sandra Bullock, who plays the uptight cop to McCarthy’s rule-breaking cop, enjoying some time at home. It appears for a moment to be embracing this cliché. I felt my heart sink. I felt my eyes roll. And then suddenly, in what’s both a very funny bit and a moment of tremendous meta-commentary, the cliché is upended and bent over the knee of screenwriter Katie Dippold and director Paul Feig, where it receives a playful but firm spanking.
This joke works for anybody, but it is specifically designed to delight people who hate clichés about single women in movies. Now think about that. It is a major motion picture debuting this weekend in your multiplex, and it is making wry, winking jokes about gender portrayals in major motion pictures playing in your multiplex. It was such a delightful moment, and such a relief, that I almost ran to the front of the theater to curl up physically in the glow of it. (As much as I love the writing of A.O. Scott — and I do — his review of the movie in The New York Times both unforgivably gives away this bit and, to my eye, misunderstands it.)