The guy is not just one of the best movie reviewers in modern history, he'd just a hella great guy. Love his books. His interviews. His blog posts. I love the guy.
Which is why his review of the new Pixar movie Brave is extra head desky in the final paragraph.
But Merida is far from being a typical fairy-tale princess. Having flatly rejected the three suitors proposed by her family, she is apparently prepared to go through life quite happily without a husband, and we can imagine her in later years, a weathered and indomitable Amazon queen, sort of a Boudica for the Scots. "Brave" seems at a loss to deal with her as a girl and makes her a sort of honorary boy.
To which I say... huh?
Let me break down the logic here, LSAT style. Merida rejects her suitors. She seems to be happy without a husband. Therefore- Brave is not dealing with her femaleness.
See, that can't be right. Because for that to be true he would be saying that femaleness is defined by wanting a husband. That's just silly. There are plenty of women who don't want a husband who don't give up their gender in doing so. There are also lots of men who do want a husband who don't suddenly become women when they acquire this desire. I'm not saying that a woman needs a husband like a fish needs a bicycle. The early feminist ideas of defining modern womanhood as a rejection of marriage is just as limiting as a world where womanhood is defined by wanting marriage. A woman can want to get married or not want to get married without it needing to take on some symbolic meaning about her relationship to her gender.
I really am hoping that the Brave review is just some type of editing error. That there is a whole other paragraph that got cut out of it that clarifies how the fact that a pre-teen character doesn't want to get married is related to the movie making her male. I commented on the related facebook post to the review and there is some good discussion going on about it. For the moment I'm going to give Ebert the benefit of the doubt and hope that there is a clarification coming soon.
Because, I am curious about how Pixar is going to deal with its first female lead character. Pixar has a troubling relationship with women in their previous films. Toy Story was a great movie, but it was a film about male friendships. Toy Story 2 got better with Jessie, but the audio commentary for the film has the writers admitting that the original script featured Jessie as being little more than a damsel in distress until Joan Cusack suggested letting her save the day. They hadn't even considered that option when they were writing. I don't think it is that they were sexists, but they were more invested in Buzz and Woody. They hadn't even considered that Jessie could be the hero.
Monster's Inc. is another film that does great with male friendship but places women either as girlfriend, crone, or semi-silent pet. Look. I LOVE Boo. I sometimes just scream "Mike Wazowski" imitating her little voice. But it isn't like a little girl could watch Monster's Inc. and say "yes, I want to be like her." While Sully or Mike have traits to be admired, what did the women really do.
The original opening scene of The Incredibles featured Mrs. Incredible getting into a fight with her new neighbors at a picnic when one of them was dismissive of the fact she was a stay at home Mom. The scene was later cut and the film moved to focus more on the mid-life crisis of Mr. Incredible than on the work/life balance issues of the Mrs. Which makes sense in a narrative sense even though I wish I could have seen the film with a bigger focus on the women. This is just more of Pixar's problematic relationship with women. It isn't that I think the studio is sexist or that they hate women. It's just that they tend to place the focus of the story on men. Maybe it's because that's what most modern films do and you just pick it up as a storytelling device. But it doesn't make it any less upsetting.
Their best treatment of female characters are often when they are barely seen. The opening scene in Up that followed a fearless little girl as she went on an adventure, fell in love, got married, lost a baby, and never gave up on her dreams of the world might have featured Pixar's most fully formed female character. Then she died. (Ask yourself for a moment if the film would have been made any different by having the boy scout who ended up on the adventure be a girl scout. The story would have been as good with the bonus of giving little girls a character they could see themselves in). Eve from Wall-E is also a great female character who just happens to never talk. Cars, for being a film that seems made just for boys who like toys, had its heart in the female character voiced by Bonnie Hunt, a big city gal who gave everything up to live in the place she loved. The female chef in Ratatoulle showed how hard it is to be a woman in a man's world, but still got upstaged by a rat.
Until Brave, Pixar's biggest female character would probably be Dory from Finding Nemo. She's more memorable than Nemo's Dad (I literally can't remember his character's name...never a good sign). She's a good loyal friend who does her best even with a handicap which makes her unable to remember things. She starts off seeming like just a joke, but by the end of the film I didn't really care if Nemo and Albert Brooks were reunited as long as Dory was with people who accepted how awesome she was.
I am worried about what type of female Brave will give us. Will we have a complex character like Dory, Eve, or Mrs. Lou Grant from Up? I wish I could look to the Ebert review for help, but instead he just makes me even more concerned about what the media thinks of my gender.
