Girls Just Wanna Have Guns

By RICHARD CORLISS

The recipe is simple: put a woman in a room with a psycho, and let us watch. If the woman has an ailing daughter for the baddies to terrorize, good. If the man she loves has a dark past and maybe a homicidal kink, better. If she must confront two mad-genius kids, best. Just put our heroine in dire peril before she emerges victorious. It's a lesson in female resiliency. Also, these days, big box office.

This month gave a beam of hope to those desperate for gender equality on screen. The two top films for the April 5-7 weekend were thrillers starring women: David Fincher's Panic Room, with Jodie Foster besieged by three burglars, and Carl Franklin's High Crimes, in which lawyer Ashley Judd defends her enigmatic husband in a high-stakes court-martial. This week in Murder by Numbers, Sandra Bullock plays a cop on a homicide investigation that points to two brilliant teenagers. And on Memorial Day weekend, Jennifer Lopez provides a Star Wars alternative with the spousal revenge drama Enough.

These thrillers won't be chosen for the National Film Registry of great movies; as Enough director Michael Apted says, "This ain't Chekhov." They may not always pass the plausibility test. But these films do let audiences see top actresses playing strong characters. "People want to root for their favorite female stars," Foster says. "Audiences don't want a woman just to be the sister-of, daughter-of, wife-of. This proves they're not only open to, but absolutely behind, the idea of a woman going through some terrible danger and finding the gumption and the brawn to fight against it...It's just that it's been happening to men for centuries, and now it's happening to women."

Women are always in danger in modern movies--in danger of being left out of them. In teen-boy farces, women are usually just a priapic prop. In adult action pictures they may be no more than a trophy, a pawn or a poignant memory. So the very notion that women are not on the margins but at the center of medium-budget, mass-appeal films is refreshing.

And appropriate too. From the beginning, storytellers and listeners have rooted for the underdog. Women, typically smaller than men and less schooled in the art of physical revenge, are the ultimate little guys. David Koepp kept this in mind when writing his Panic Room script: "The story is about physical survival, so you want the odds to be stacked high against your lead. By having the lead be a woman, it makes for more interesting drama, because there's further to go."

The characters in the current thriller trio get where they're going by tapping into who they've been. Foster's Meg Altman is a mom; her mission is to defend her diabetic child. Judd's Claire Kubik in High Crimes is a lawyer; she needs all her skills of persuasion and stubbornness to fight what looks like a military conspiracy.

In Murder by Numbers--written by Tony Gayton and directed by Barbet Schroeder, and the best by far of the new bunch--Bullock's Cassie Mayweather is a tenacious sleuth whose strategies reflect a trauma in her own life. With men she's the sexual aggressor, jumping on her new partner and, when the party's over, literally pushing him out of bed. When she builds a case against two boys for a vicious killing, she wants to destroy the slick one (Ryan Gosling) who reminds her of her brutal ex-husband, and save the sensitive one (Michael Pitt) who reminds her of herself. Bullock powerfully blends and isolates these aspects of Cassie to show that her strengths and her frailties have a single source.

This makes Cassie an unusual heroine in these reductive days. "Some female leads are really male leads," says Murder by Numbers producer Susan Hoffman. "For a while in action scripts, it was as if they just changed the name from Robert to Roberta. The question is: Can there be scripts that have all the dynamics, the strengths and insecurities, of a woman?...There's still a way to go in the writing of these characters. What we're really missing is more female writers."

Or are we missing a more complex idea of what women, and movies, can be? "Years ago, in the '50s and film noir," says Irwin Winkler, a producer of Enough, "women were tough and often very bad. Nowadays, the women are very good and have to become tough to defend themselves." Their goodness is usually defined by the bad things done to them.

In the '30s and '40s, movie women had little need for revenge; they weren't imperiled; they were liberated. They and their men talked, fought and loved as equals, and audiences flocked to see these battles of wits and wills. Often women dominated the most popular movies. Until 1965, Hollywood's top-grossing film was Gone With the Wind, which was succeeded by The Sound of Music--two films of women in peril (Yankees! Nazis!). Among today's heroines in jeopardy, there's no room for Vivien Leigh's classy spoiledness or Julie Andrews' sassy sweetness.

"The problem with current women-in-peril films is they've got the peril but not the deep emotional resonance," observes Camille Paglia, the post-feminist author and agitator. "They're driven by gimmicky, high-concept plots. But the center of great women's pictures is the long close-up of a woman's soulful, suffering face as her eyes brim with tears. Today's actresses are too buff and brittle to take that kind of scrutiny...Too many know how to do everything but play real women. If the women-in-jeopardy motif can make filmmakers start to think in deep emotional terms again, then I'm all for it."

The fact is, the women-in-peril films are like most other recent U.S. movies, from Pearl Harbor to In the Bedroom: they are revenge fantasies, playing on the understandable but infantile belief that every atrocity can be overcome by a righteously violent response. But life doesn't work that way, and neither did most of the best old movies. Casablanca and Gone With the Wind did not end happily for their heroines; the frustrations of duty and destiny intervened. In the end, the new women-in-peril films betray a simultaneous naivete (that the heroine will triumph) and cynicism (that moviegoers won't believe justice is done unless they see the bad guy blown away).

That tone may suit an America itching for quick solutions to thorny global issues. But it doesn't make for a truly adult cinema about complex men and women. And for that, there's no simple recipe.

--Reported by Benjamin Nugent/New York and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles

With reporting by Benjamin Nugent/New York and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles