Men Are in Trouble and Hollywood Wants to Help - The New York Times

Near the end of Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman,” Frank Sheeran, the mob heavy played by Robert De Niro, asks a priest if it’s Christmas. It is a crushingly lonely moment but Scorsese isn’t soliciting our pity. Over the course of the movie, Frank has married two women, baptized several daughters and murdered countless men.

Now, after a lifetime of obedience to his masters, Frank is old, decrepit and alone, seemingly abandoned by his family. Good at his job, he was a loyal soldier, but he was a failure at home life and especially at being a father. He’s a classic figure for Scorsese, our bard of sacred and profane male tribes with an ethnographic interest in masculine cults. In “The Irishman,” guys pal around, slapping backs that they will eventually stab. It’s the most brutal movie about men in a year defined by uneasy masculinity.

Men are in trouble. Even Olaf, the snowman from “Frozen 2,” gets that something is up. “Who knows the ways of men,” he ponders in the sequel. I laughed but wondered what the movie’s youngest viewers would think. The quip is aimed at their parents, of course, who will just nod or shake their heads. Everyone understands it’s been rough for men, never mind that we’ve been talking about the crisis in masculinity for decades. Things have worsened with the allegations against Harvey Weinstein and the emergence of the #MeToo movement. Since then, the accusations have grown, as have questions about what this great reckoning means, perhaps especially for men.

What’s striking about so many of this year’s men-in-trouble movies is how women don’t factor into the stories or solutions. This marginalization isn’t new. But it is arresting given how very loudly and insistently women have been broadcasting their presence, demands, grievances, traumas, desires and plans for the future. The feminist resurgence of the 2000s that has affected every sphere of American life, both in public office and in the streets, has seeped into the movie industry, long a citadel of male power. That power has responded with apologies, promises to do better and some directing jobs for women. It also keeps making movies about how hard it is to be a man.

But what exactly, to flip Freud’s famous question about women, do men want? A recent Twitter hashtag, #menneedabreak, offers answers. Hollywood has long had its own ideas on the subject, telling us that men want power, success, money, women, camaraderie, a good smoke, a fast car, a hero’s journey, a valiant return. This year, movie after movie — from “Ad Astra” to “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” — has also told us that men want, or rather desperately need, better life goals, greater self-awareness and deeper, more authentic relationships. That all sounds good to me.

Sensitive, emotional men aren’t new in movies; a lot of war movies are soap operas with heavy artillery. “You’re tearing me apart,” James Dean wailed at his befuddled parents in the melodrama “Rebel Without a Cause,” a paragon of 1950s male anguish. In 1971, the British critic Raymond Durgnat observed that the “rationalist puritanism” of some critics meant that they often disliked female-driven soap operas and the emotional vulnerability they stir up, but didn’t object to what he smartly called the male weepie. Yet surrendering to the weepie, whether male or female, and embracing “emotional immediacy,” he wrote, “might be the beginning of maturity.”

Maturity remains elusive in American movies, but we still love our male weepies, with their torrents of blood rather than tears, and their ravaged, redeemed male bodies. For all their chatter and violence, Quentin Tarantino’s films are male weepies of a type, and one way to look at his “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” is through the complementary relationship between Leonardo DiCaprio’s twitchily self-doubting actor and Brad Pitt’s self-confident stuntman. The actor bares himself and his doubts, but when the stuntman takes off his shirt, Tarantino throws his lot in with an old-school ideal — behold, the cool man of action — and telegraphs the film’s frenzied violent end.

The easy camaraderie of the two men in “Once Upon a Time” evokes that in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” the buddy movie that topped the box office in 1969. It also helped usher in a cinematic gender shift that by 1974 found Molly Haskell sounding a bleak, familiar alarm in her book “From Reverence to Rape.” Seen from “a woman’s point of view,” she wrote, the past decade with its “covert misogyny” (“Lolita”) and abusive male violence (“Straw Dogs,” et al.), had been “the most disheartening in screen history.” Although female performers had delivered memorable turns, she argued, even their great roles embraced stereotypes.

“Icebergs, zombies and ballbreakers,” Haskell wrote. “That’s what little girls of the ’60s and ’70s are made of.” She connected the demise of women’s onscreen prominence with the end of the old studio system and its image-making machinery. Actresses may have had more freedom, but they no longer had the power that great female stars had commanded. (The end of the industry’s self-censoring Production Code, which was replaced by the rating system in 1968, also meant actresses could be sexualized more graphically.) Yet even as the old system disappeared, Hollywood remained — and remains — hooked on old forms and ideas, which is why it has such trouble expressing the real-world changes affecting its audience, including shifting gender roles.

Feminism had an impact on Hollywood, whatever the industry’s reluctance. But it’s no surprise that an industry long dominated by men has resisted sharing power with women. In the decades since Haskell sent out her warning, the industry has rationalized, and normalized, its discrimination with every possible excuse: the market, fan demand, creative “vision.” It invested in male-driven blockbusters (from “Jaws” to “Avengers”), elevated boy geniuses and hired male hacks over qualified women. It still does. Some male filmmakers — themselves liberated, perhaps by feminist mothers and partners — make stories with gentle, sensitive men who are already good dads and thoughtful spouses, and who can share, care and cry. At times, as in bromances, they outsource traditional femininity to men.

As men got in touch with their feelings onscreen (or not), it sometimes seemed that the mainstream industry — with its male geniuses, brotherhoods, bad boys and superheroes — came close to abandoning women. Things have recently improved because women have spoken out, as high-profile movies from and about women suggest. Men are listening. That much seems evident from this year’s male crisis movies, even if men often appear most interested in working on their issues and their feelings in stories about masculinity. For all the male introspection, though, our movies still love heroic and villainous men, spirited and supportive ladies — the majority white — along with simple moralizing and tidy, exultant endings. As “Ford v Ferrari” reminds us, the movies still love stories about men who change the world while women wait.

Women wait in “The Irishman” too, which is about the mob, power, the labor boss Jimmy Hoffa, the passage of time and the pleasure of eating bread dipped in wine. Mostly, it is about men and work. Now and again, you see Frank with one of his wives and his children, but he is mostly married to the mob. His gangland mentor (Joe Pesci) makes as much clear when he gives a ring to Frank, who then slips it on his own wedding finger. The mob is a perfect match for Frank, who says that the highlight of his life wasn’t the celebration of a wedding or the birth of a child but the reception where Hoffa honors him. Frank is Hoffa’s minder; at times he seems more like a spouse, as when they sleep in the same room in Ricky-and-Lucy twin beds.

Frank’s most unforgiving witness is his daughter Peggy (played as an adult by Anna Paquin), whose increasingly dark looks at her father mirror your gaze. Scorsese has been called out for the character’s lack of dialogue, criticism that is understandable given how movies sideline women. But I see the daughter’s silence as period-appropriate and chillingly persuasive. Victims don’t always speak out against their victimizers, delivering triumphant speeches to make the audience feel nice and warm. If anything, this silence speaks to the terror created by her father’s murderous brotherhood. Her refusal to speak is finally the only weapon that she has.

I get why “The Irishman” focuses on men, though I wish that Scorsese, who’s given us great female characters — in “Goodfellas,” “The Age of Innocence” and “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” — had given us more. I’m greedy, and women who speak up and out can be hard to find in movies. To be an American female film lover means that you spend a lot of time watching men do stuff and feel stuff, both in corporate and independent cinema. You can love the movies of Scorsese, Michael Mann, Spike Lee and Paul Thomas Anderson, to name some of my favorites, and still regret that they rarely create female characters as fully realized and human as their male protagonists.

The sins of the fathers hang heavy. That seems evident from all this masculine woe, this deep pain. That’s true in James Gray’s “Ad Astra,” where the patriarchy threatens the world’s existence, giving this science-fiction film a grim documentary frisson. A parable about masculinity, the movie critiques the ideology that places a man’s work above all else, including the people he loves. It centers on a divorced astronaut (played by Pitt, this year’s patron saint of masculine correctness) who is sent into deep space to find his long-missing father (Tommy Lee Jones). Through much of the story, Pitt’s character grapples with that legacy (“I do what I do because of my dad”); at last he saves himself and the world by letting go of his father.

“Ad Astra” suggests that the only way to shed the paternal burden is to make peace with Dad, who must then, well, die. A similar idea surfaces in the otherwise dissimilar “Waves” (about a family split by tragedy) and “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” (about a cynical man’s path to masculine enlightenment through Mister Rogers). Both include crucial dads — a strict patriarch in one, a near-saintly paterfamilias in the other — as well as teary deathbed reconciliations between sons and dying, estranged fathers. Each movie suggests that for the younger generation to move forward, it must forgive the trespasses of the old, a reminder of just how Christian our movies are.

Like “Waves,” Noah Baumbach’s “Marriage Story” is divided into his-and-hers sections and includes the wife’s version of their relationship and the husband’s. (Disclosure: I am friends with Baumbach’s mother.) Critics have weighed whether “Marriage Story” is fair to both partners, a question that was asked about Robert Benton’s “Kramer vs. Kramer” in 1979. Baumbach owes a debt to that film, but the differences between them are notable. Whatever side he prefers, Baumbach makes room for the wife. In “Kramer,” Meryl Streep’s wife walks away from her young son and shocked husband (Dustin Hoffman) about eight minutes after the movie opens and isn’t seen again until midway through when she returns for the son.

Released in the wake of second-wave feminism, “Kramer vs. Kramer” is about the husband’s education as a father and is an exemplar of the era’s sensitive-man movies. It’s one in a spate of Mr. Mom flicks in which men comically or seriously (or both) step into the primary parenting role. The movies have banished mothers temporarily or terminally — no one kills Mommy like Disney — setting loose tots whose vulnerabilities turn the audience into a sobbing pulp. In “Kramer vs. Kramer” and other movies about single fathers, missing mothers give dads an excuse to take over and nurture children, a laudable theme and a handy justification for keeping women offscreen.

In the decades since “Kramer vs. Kramer,” male characters have continued to evolve along with their creators but at times it has also felt as if men and women had been banished to opposite cinematic corners. This effective segregation remains, as evidenced by this year’s macho caper flick “Triple Frontier,” the art film “The Lighthouse” and the war drama “1917.” It’s also a defining factor in the crime stories “The Kitchen” and “Hustlers,” where women form uneasy, contingent sisterhoods as a bulwark against male power and as a way to provide for their families. Each movie suggests that women can create supportive female communities (and make and spend big money), sororities doomed by the friendship-killing pressures of the larger world.

But can men and women figure it out together? Both “Waves” and “Marriage Story” are both family melodramas about a crisis created by male characters, who also carry the brunt of that crisis. In “Waves,” a loving father’s overbearing behavior toward his teenage son directly pushes the son into catastrophe. In “Marriage Story,” an actress seeks to divorce her husband, a theater director, because she has — with help from him — lost her sense of herself in the marriage. “I just went along with him,” she says, but “I got smaller.” The husband pushes back at her, only stopping after he breaks down and later falls to the floor bleeding, a literalization of his self-inflicted wound.

Both movies turn into male weepies and are better for it, offering viewers “emotional immediacy,” to circle back to Durgnat. Part of what I find especially appealing about them is how they place their his-and-hers lives into dynamic play. The first half of “Waves” is dominated by the teenage boy as he’s swept up in the tragedy, while the second part centers on how that tragedy affects his younger sister. These accounts are separate yet also connected, visually and narratively, through spaces, camera movements and turning points. The full story in “Waves” is only knowable through both the brother and the sister’s points of view, much as the drama in “Marriage Story” is only understandable because you hear from both the wife and the husband.

Take away half the story and there is none.

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Men Are in Trouble and Hollywood Wants to Help - The New York Times
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