For actresses, it is no longer enough to be young and beautiful onscreen, they have to be dead and famous, too — one of history’s immortals. Filmmakers have long resurrected the dearly and notably departed with actors and actresses who flatter their memories, of course, partly because Academy members like to reward other success stories. Last year, Marion Cotillard warbled her way to the awards podium for her turn as Édith Piaf in “La Vie en Rose.” Since 2000, six of the best actress awards were for biographical performances, most of dead women. This year, Julia Child, Coco Chanel, Queen Victoria, Keats’s great love, Fanny Brawne, and now Amelia Earhart are all making a run for it.
You can’t blame filmmakers (or actresses) for raiding crypts. It’s rarely been more difficult to be a woman in the movies than now, particularly in the United States, where for the past few decades most blockbusters and microbudgeted D.I.Y. enterprises have been overwhelmingly male.
Last year, only on
e movie about a woman — “Twilight,” the vampire romance about a living teenager and her undead but supercute boyfriend — squeezed into the ranks of the Top 10 grossing titles, a chart dominated by superheroes and male cartoon characters. Another two female-centric stories climbed into the Top 20. That sounds shocking except that only three such stories made it to the Top 20 in each of the previous two years.Genre titles like “Twilight,” however, don’t generally attract the critical love, peer regard and statuettes that performers and executives crave. That’s why Charlize Theron, who began her career brandishing a lot of leg and doing time as the usual masculine accessory, packed on the pounds in “Monster” to play Aileen Wuornos, a Florida drifter turned serial killer. Ms. Wuornos was executed in 2002 for the murder of seven men; the movie hit theaters a year later, and Ms. Theron soon went on to win the Oscar for best actress on what would have been Ms. Wuornos’s 48th birthday. It’s also why Nicole Kidman wore a fake schnoz to play Virginia Woolf in “The Hours” and Cate Blanchett put on clown makeup to impersonate the Virgin Queen.
Hilary Swank doesn’t wear a prosthetic to play Amelia Earhart in the new movie about the aviator: she has a man on her arm instead. The film “Amelia” subscribes to the Great Woman Theory of history, which, as is often the case with distaff stories, largely involves the great woman and the men in her life. In male biographies, women tend to silently suffer or whine and shriek on the sidelines. The main suffering here is done by Earhart’s husband, the publisher G. P. Putnam (Richard Gere). His tears help domesticate the aviator, who’s never allowed to fly solo, at least metaphorically. The real Earhart urged young women to pursue careers: “If we begin to think and respond as capable human beings able to deal with and even enjoy the challenges of life, then we sure will have something more to contribute to marriage than our bodies.”
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