Something to talk about
It's a cheap shot to start a review of a movie with such a sturdy, meat-and-potatoes title as Women Talking with some joke about "they sure do!" or "well, you can't say the movie didn't tell you what to expect", or whatnot. But it is, in fact, a movie that is to an extraordinary degree about women talking. And that's good if you like movies where people talk a lot - I generally don't. Indeed, I am specifically not a fan of that, so that's the first point where I need to make my biases clear upfront.
The second point: there was absolutely no chance of me ever going above the most strained, "well, I guess this part worked..." sort of review for a movie with this color grading, and that is in fact the review you are currently reading. Simply put, and with all due sobriety and restraint from untoward hyperbole, it is my sincere belief that Women Talking is the single ugliest motion picture released in the United States in 2022. I have, admittedly, not seen them all, but I also believe an uglier movie would immediately burn out my retinas, so I would still not actually have seen it even if I knew it existed. Director Sarah Polley, making a disappointingly unexceptional return to filmmaking twelve long years after her remarkable third feature-length project, Stories We Tell, has offered a defense of the color grading, making it absolutely clear that this was a choice she and cinematographer Luc Montpellier and colorist Mark Kueper all made together, which would have been obvious anyways: something this dreadfully misconceived wouldn't have happened if everybody was merely being lazy. Anyway, her explanation that it's desaturated because it's meant to feel trapped in the past, and that is a reason to desaturate footage, even a trite and clichéd one at this point, so that can't be the problem. It's something to do with how this was desaturated, like they took the red and green most of the way down but left the blue a little bit higher, and then also reduced the contrast, and... I can't even find the words for it, because this isn't something that's supposed to be able to happen. But it did, and the film looks like it's drowning in milky blue mud as a result.
The film is adapted from a 2018 novel by Miriam Toews that was in turn inspired by a real-world event that took place in 2011, but Women Talking very deliberately feels like it takes place in some kind of netherworld outside of time (until it doesn't, and I'm not really at all clear what the film gains by pinning itself down like that, but it doesn't, at least, suffer from the choice). One morning, almost all of the men have left an isolated Mennonite colony for the nearest city, where two of their own are in jail. Their crime is described only obliquely at first, and we eventually figure it out as much through innuendo and snippets of flashback as from being actually told what happened: long story short, not only these men, but apparently most of the men in the colony have been drugging the women of the colony with animal sedatives and raping them. Even more insidiously, they are using the physical evidence of these assaults as "proof" that the women are being tormented by demons, no doubt because of their great wickedness. This is all out in the open now; it is the backstory to what we see in the film, which is what happens when ten women from three families gather in a barn to discuss what is to be done. Three options present themselves: do nothing at all and accept that this is God's will and to do otherwise is to risk damnation; prepare to physically fight the men when they return; or leave the colony while the men are absent. Deciding between these options will require a lot of, you guessed it, women talking.
The screenplay, by Polley and Toews, allows them to talk in what I have say comes off as very precise dialogue. After the monstrous color grading, the single biggest problem with Women Talking is how extremely preordained and writerly it feels. Not to give things away, but it really does feel like only one of those three options is ever remotely on the table, not least because the two representatives of the only family willing to argue in favor of "do nothing" leave pretty much immediately, serving pretty much only to give Frances McDormand a chance to look sour and disappointed for about 60 seconds as the "do nothing" matriarch. It would have obviously been a completely different movie, and "let me tell you about the movie they didn't make" is the absolute worst form of film criticism, but still: I wish McDormand's character - Scarface Janz, which is a very weird name for any character in this movie to have - had gotten to stick around and fight for her side. That would at least give Women Talking a conflict. Despite what it positions itself as, this isn't really a "debate", it's a presentation of moral precepts, all of which guide us in a straight line to a destination that feels like it's coming from quite a long distance away. Some effort has been made to situate the various shadings of these moral precepts in the mouths of women who have been defined to be somewhat different, but for the most part it feels like the arguments precede the characters, not the other way around.
In short: this is an attempt to flesh out concepts and ideas, not a movie. That's something I find broadly unappealing - downright anti-cinematic, even - except in cases where it's brilliantly acted, and in Swedish. Women Talking can't do anything about the latter, but it at least manages to get some pretty terrific performances out of its cast. The nature of motion picture marketing means that the film is presenting itself as largely defined by the three most famous people in the cast: Rooney Mara as Ona, who is soft-spoken and diplomatic; Claire Foy as Salome, who is furious and aggressive; and Jessie Buckley as Mariche, who is stubbon and pragmatic. But it's at least a six-hander, seven if we count Ben Whishaw as the solitary adult man still in the community, whose parents were excommunicated and who has only recently come back home. As the only person who can read and write, he's been asked to take the minutes of the women's meeting, a conceit that undoubtedly played better in the book than here, where it's pretty confusing why he's here at all, and Whishaw's performance is somehow overplaying passivity. Anyway, the rest of the cast includes Judith Ivey as Agata, Ona and Salome's mother; Sheila McCarthy as Greta, Mariche's mother, and Michelle McLeod as Mejal, Greta's other daughter, and I'd actually go so far as to say that Ivey and McCarthy are, comfortably, giving my two favorite performances in the film, though McCarthy gets a kind of free pass in that she's playing the closest thing this extravagantly dour motion picture has to comic relief, so she's basically always the most fun to watch, for a sufficiently relative definition of "fun". Mara is the only one of the main six women whose performance I didn't believe, and you should ignore me on that, since I never really believe Mara in anything; Ona is also probably the most obviously and tediously "written" of the characters (Salome is a close second), which would make it unfair for any actor.
The point being, the acting in Women Talking is generally good at striking the balance between letting the highly manicured, overly lyrical, "we always speak in full and complete thoughts that have been laid out with suspiciously elaborate grammar" dialogue stand bold in it all its heavily literate complexity, and actually making these women feel like they're thinking and reacting more or less on the spot. Some actors take this farther than others - McCarthy is, I think, definitely the best in show, though again, she gets probably the easiest part to play - but mostly they all manage to end up working in the same register of erudite theatricality. I won't quite follow that line of reasoning to say that the film feels like it should have been a play; the structure of flashbacks that Polley uses to break up the space in between the big speeches is too consistent for that. And several of the cast - arguably everyone other than Foy, who gets to do the most shouting - benefits from how quiet and small they can take this, relying on the low lighting in the barn to naturally pitch everything at a subdued hush.
It's a strong film in some very important ways, then; but for every strength, there's a matched weakness. The directing is a bit stiff, I am disappointed to say; Polley has either gotten rusty, or has decided that a certain archness is the right fit for this material (given her baffling choice in regards to the color grading, I'm not willing to write off any apparent "mistake"), so the blocking tends to move the characters from tableau to tableau, pressing them into carefully-designed arrangements that give the actors very little to do with their bodies, as compared to their voices. On the other hand, it's remarkably well-paced for a story in which nothing happens and there's no clear internal markers of time passing. The intense gravity of the whole thing is entirely earned by the seriousness of its subject; but it also feels a bit monotonous and self-important. Basically, I think it's not worth avoiding, which isn't exactly the same as being worth watching; in essence, if you want your movies to have good performances chewing on Big Ideas, this is a very strong example of that. If you want your movies to be good at audio-visual storytelling, well, at least it's lit very dramatically.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
The second point: there was absolutely no chance of me ever going above the most strained, "well, I guess this part worked..." sort of review for a movie with this color grading, and that is in fact the review you are currently reading. Simply put, and with all due sobriety and restraint from untoward hyperbole, it is my sincere belief that Women Talking is the single ugliest motion picture released in the United States in 2022. I have, admittedly, not seen them all, but I also believe an uglier movie would immediately burn out my retinas, so I would still not actually have seen it even if I knew it existed. Director Sarah Polley, making a disappointingly unexceptional return to filmmaking twelve long years after her remarkable third feature-length project, Stories We Tell, has offered a defense of the color grading, making it absolutely clear that this was a choice she and cinematographer Luc Montpellier and colorist Mark Kueper all made together, which would have been obvious anyways: something this dreadfully misconceived wouldn't have happened if everybody was merely being lazy. Anyway, her explanation that it's desaturated because it's meant to feel trapped in the past, and that is a reason to desaturate footage, even a trite and clichéd one at this point, so that can't be the problem. It's something to do with how this was desaturated, like they took the red and green most of the way down but left the blue a little bit higher, and then also reduced the contrast, and... I can't even find the words for it, because this isn't something that's supposed to be able to happen. But it did, and the film looks like it's drowning in milky blue mud as a result.
The film is adapted from a 2018 novel by Miriam Toews that was in turn inspired by a real-world event that took place in 2011, but Women Talking very deliberately feels like it takes place in some kind of netherworld outside of time (until it doesn't, and I'm not really at all clear what the film gains by pinning itself down like that, but it doesn't, at least, suffer from the choice). One morning, almost all of the men have left an isolated Mennonite colony for the nearest city, where two of their own are in jail. Their crime is described only obliquely at first, and we eventually figure it out as much through innuendo and snippets of flashback as from being actually told what happened: long story short, not only these men, but apparently most of the men in the colony have been drugging the women of the colony with animal sedatives and raping them. Even more insidiously, they are using the physical evidence of these assaults as "proof" that the women are being tormented by demons, no doubt because of their great wickedness. This is all out in the open now; it is the backstory to what we see in the film, which is what happens when ten women from three families gather in a barn to discuss what is to be done. Three options present themselves: do nothing at all and accept that this is God's will and to do otherwise is to risk damnation; prepare to physically fight the men when they return; or leave the colony while the men are absent. Deciding between these options will require a lot of, you guessed it, women talking.
The screenplay, by Polley and Toews, allows them to talk in what I have say comes off as very precise dialogue. After the monstrous color grading, the single biggest problem with Women Talking is how extremely preordained and writerly it feels. Not to give things away, but it really does feel like only one of those three options is ever remotely on the table, not least because the two representatives of the only family willing to argue in favor of "do nothing" leave pretty much immediately, serving pretty much only to give Frances McDormand a chance to look sour and disappointed for about 60 seconds as the "do nothing" matriarch. It would have obviously been a completely different movie, and "let me tell you about the movie they didn't make" is the absolute worst form of film criticism, but still: I wish McDormand's character - Scarface Janz, which is a very weird name for any character in this movie to have - had gotten to stick around and fight for her side. That would at least give Women Talking a conflict. Despite what it positions itself as, this isn't really a "debate", it's a presentation of moral precepts, all of which guide us in a straight line to a destination that feels like it's coming from quite a long distance away. Some effort has been made to situate the various shadings of these moral precepts in the mouths of women who have been defined to be somewhat different, but for the most part it feels like the arguments precede the characters, not the other way around.
In short: this is an attempt to flesh out concepts and ideas, not a movie. That's something I find broadly unappealing - downright anti-cinematic, even - except in cases where it's brilliantly acted, and in Swedish. Women Talking can't do anything about the latter, but it at least manages to get some pretty terrific performances out of its cast. The nature of motion picture marketing means that the film is presenting itself as largely defined by the three most famous people in the cast: Rooney Mara as Ona, who is soft-spoken and diplomatic; Claire Foy as Salome, who is furious and aggressive; and Jessie Buckley as Mariche, who is stubbon and pragmatic. But it's at least a six-hander, seven if we count Ben Whishaw as the solitary adult man still in the community, whose parents were excommunicated and who has only recently come back home. As the only person who can read and write, he's been asked to take the minutes of the women's meeting, a conceit that undoubtedly played better in the book than here, where it's pretty confusing why he's here at all, and Whishaw's performance is somehow overplaying passivity. Anyway, the rest of the cast includes Judith Ivey as Agata, Ona and Salome's mother; Sheila McCarthy as Greta, Mariche's mother, and Michelle McLeod as Mejal, Greta's other daughter, and I'd actually go so far as to say that Ivey and McCarthy are, comfortably, giving my two favorite performances in the film, though McCarthy gets a kind of free pass in that she's playing the closest thing this extravagantly dour motion picture has to comic relief, so she's basically always the most fun to watch, for a sufficiently relative definition of "fun". Mara is the only one of the main six women whose performance I didn't believe, and you should ignore me on that, since I never really believe Mara in anything; Ona is also probably the most obviously and tediously "written" of the characters (Salome is a close second), which would make it unfair for any actor.
The point being, the acting in Women Talking is generally good at striking the balance between letting the highly manicured, overly lyrical, "we always speak in full and complete thoughts that have been laid out with suspiciously elaborate grammar" dialogue stand bold in it all its heavily literate complexity, and actually making these women feel like they're thinking and reacting more or less on the spot. Some actors take this farther than others - McCarthy is, I think, definitely the best in show, though again, she gets probably the easiest part to play - but mostly they all manage to end up working in the same register of erudite theatricality. I won't quite follow that line of reasoning to say that the film feels like it should have been a play; the structure of flashbacks that Polley uses to break up the space in between the big speeches is too consistent for that. And several of the cast - arguably everyone other than Foy, who gets to do the most shouting - benefits from how quiet and small they can take this, relying on the low lighting in the barn to naturally pitch everything at a subdued hush.
It's a strong film in some very important ways, then; but for every strength, there's a matched weakness. The directing is a bit stiff, I am disappointed to say; Polley has either gotten rusty, or has decided that a certain archness is the right fit for this material (given her baffling choice in regards to the color grading, I'm not willing to write off any apparent "mistake"), so the blocking tends to move the characters from tableau to tableau, pressing them into carefully-designed arrangements that give the actors very little to do with their bodies, as compared to their voices. On the other hand, it's remarkably well-paced for a story in which nothing happens and there's no clear internal markers of time passing. The intense gravity of the whole thing is entirely earned by the seriousness of its subject; but it also feels a bit monotonous and self-important. Basically, I think it's not worth avoiding, which isn't exactly the same as being worth watching; in essence, if you want your movies to have good performances chewing on Big Ideas, this is a very strong example of that. If you want your movies to be good at audio-visual storytelling, well, at least it's lit very dramatically.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
Categories: big ol' ensemble films, domestic dramas, message pictures, oscarbait
