I don't know about you, but normally a movie that trades heavily on jokes pegged to hemorrhoid wipes, stool softeners and anti-fungal cream doesn't prompt me to leave the theater thinking I've seen something that significantly advances the cause of women in film.
But that's precisely what happened with Spy, the Paul Feig comedy starring Melissa McCarthy as a lonely CIA analyst who goes from being a patronized team player to saving the world over the course of a funny two hours. In addition to McCarthy's secret agent, Spy sports an ensemble of strong women -- Allison Janney as a CIA boss, Rose Byrne making like Marie Antoinette playing the villain, Miranda Hart as McCarthy's overlooked colleague and best friend. They're women in power, though Feig never calls attention to their status or remarks on it. It just is.
Spy won't win any awards -- humanitarian, Academy or otherwise. But in addition to being wildly entertaining, watching the film makes one thing clear: Feig is one of the most important filmmakers working in Hollywood today. With his last three movies, Feig has obliterated the wall that separated the sexes in movie comedies. First he made Bridesmaids, a raunchy, liberating comedy about female friendship, and followed it up with The Heat, a raucous buddy cop comedy, and now Spy, which toggles between being a James Bond spoof and a giddy saga of self-actualization.
Spy, from 20th Century Fox, feels like the movie Feig wrote for all the women in Hollywood who have had to deal with doubters and dimwits their entire careers. McCarthy's character, Susan Cooper, begins the movie as something of a high-tech Moneypenny, communicating with Jude Law's 007 stand-in via an earpiece, tipping him off to every enemy and obstacle around the corner. The reward for her expertise? She's asked to pick up his dry cleaning (and fire his gardener) before he arrives home. Despite her obvious expertise, Susan is ignored and belittled. She wants to work in the field but doubts she'll ever be given the opportunity.
"They would never let me be a spy," she laments.
Hearing those words, it's hard not to think of the recent ACLU review that found a "very disturbing and compelling picture of long-running systemic discrimination in the film and television industries."
The success of Bridesmaids was supposed to help change all that. The movie, written by Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo, grossed $288 million worldwide with more than 40 percent of the take coming from overseas, dismissing the notion that foreign audiences won't see female-driven movies. Before Bridesmaids premiered, Feig told The Times that "all my female writer friends had their projects on hold, on probation" with executives telling them they'd have to wait to see if audiences embraced the film.
They did. But it would seem that many of those projects must still be on probation. Women wrote only 11 percent of the top-250-grossing films in 2014, according to San Diego State University's Celluloid Ceiling Report, a drop of 2 percent from the late '90s. A University of Southern California study found that in 2013 and 2014, women directed just 1.9 percent of the 100 top-grossing films.
Feig is doing what he can to increase those totals, working with Katie Dippold on The Heat and the forthcoming Ghostbusters as well as Wiig and Mumolo on Bridesmaids. (He wrote Spy.) But really, the most important thing he's doing with these movies is creating emotionally honest female characters who are strong, funny and driving the plot. Yes, the films are silly and profane. They also own a carefree feminism that feels organic to the storytelling. Their politics remain primarily focused on the democracy of comedy. If you're funny, you can be a star, regardless of sex, race or body type.
MovieStyle on 06/19/2015