Geoff:
Have studios just given up on telling a good story? Do screenwriters see all the CGI and whiz-bang going across the screen and just no longer care? I wish I could be there for the conversations studio execs and filmmakers had about Sucker Punch and other effects-driven films like it because for the life of me I can’t conceive what sort of narrative merit they might attribute to them. It creates films that are neither distinctive in story nor even distinctive in the way they tell a familiar story, which I could also have fun with and enjoy.
Sucker Punch itself is structured less with a plot and more with a bulleted list, but here’s the rundown: The film starts out with a confusingly shot/edited/acted scene in which (apparently) the female lead (Emily Browning) shoots her younger sister while trying to take out her abusive stepfather (I think? None of this is confirmed through dialogue because the whole scene’s cut to music–in fact, probably nine-tenths of the film are cut to music) who was waiting for the mother of the main character and her sister to die so that he could inherit her money. Enraged over the attempted murder and after being left out of the mother’s will, the stepfather sends the main character to an all-female mental asylum, where the guy who at first seems to be the caretaker (Oscar Isaac) finally at least gives the main character a moniker: Baby Doll (an appropriately and creepily infantile name because bleached, pig-tailed Emily Browning really pretty much does look and sound like a borderline minor made of porcelain). Just as she’s about to be lobotomized, Baby Doll lapses into some kind of fantasy version of the asylum in which it’s actually a gentleman’s club where the confined women are now confined dancers (as if this would somehow be preferable to anyone but someone looking to be titillated by the situation), and here we meet the other women: sisters Rocket (Jena Malone) and Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), the ironically brown-haired Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens), and Amber (Jamie Chung), who for some reason gets a regular name. Within this fantasy, the seeming caretaker is the vicious club manager, and the asylum’s psychologist (Carla Gugino, whom I normally love, but who here gets shit to do) is a kindly but obedient trainer for the dancers, so the girl’s scheme to make an escape, which plan they come to thanks to Babydoll’s steampunk battle fantasies that she goes into while dancing some sort of amazing trance-dance (that we never see, probably because it would only look lame by comparison to the reactions from other characters). In these fantasies within the main fantasy, some guy who’s supposed to seem wise tells Babydoll she’ll need a map, fire, a knife, a key, and … wait for it … a mystery item to escape. The wise man actually just says, “It’s a mystery.” The writers don’t even try to be coy or offer any intrigue by having him say something like, “You’ll know it when you see it.” The dancers thus set about getting these items one by one while defeating monsters and defusing bombs in the steampunk fantasy scenes that really have pretty much no dramatic tension except ever so slightly for the procurement of the knife.
Do you know some of the dancers will die? Yes. Does it feel perfunctory when they do? Yes. Will the mystery item be found? Yes. Will it feel perfunctory and lame when it is? Dear God, yes. I know we’re trying to not give away the endings here so much these days, but it, too, feels perfunctory despite a surprise cameo by Jon Hamm. The film is just an autopilot protostory with neat effects and lots of scantily clad women. It’s clearly catering to a specific audience but I feel like even the 14-to-34-year-old male crowd might lose interest with this one.
Susan:
THIS IS FASCINATING. I actually found myself leaving the theater COMPLETELY AMBIVALENT. I assumed you would love the thing, since you suggested we watch it, and I could talk about how terrible it was. BUT YOU THOUGHT IT WAS TERRIBLE!! Now I don’t know what to do, because I’m way too ambivalent to argue that is was unequivocally good.
In the spirit of the film, let’s do some moral algebra via bulleted lists.
Pros:
–The action sequences were pretty good, except for when the CGI was bad.
–The layered plot was actually more interesting than the plot I expected going into it. True, none of the layers really made sense, and the reasons for there being layers were never really explained, but the movie also didn’t seem to want me to care. I feel like the movie intended to be a live-action video game, and so I can’t really fault it for being just that.
–Jon Hamm. I mean, not to abuse the sandwich-eating thing, but seriously, give the man a sandwich and I will buy my ticket.
Cons:
–It is exhausting as a real live woman living in the world to watch any film where the female characters are under the constant threat of sexual violence. The movie kept doing this thing where the club boss dude would say threatening things, and you would think maybe they were about murder, but then you would realize they were about rape or sexual assault or something. And then at the end you find out that duder’s been raping the girls at the nuthouse the whole time or something. And also at the beginning Baby Doll gets almost raped and then her sister gets almost raped (or maybe raped? It’s unclear), and at some point you just think, Jesus. This is walking a fine line between sad story about oppressed girls and rape-porn. I mean, if there is even a line between those two things.
–The movie said that BabyDoll was 20 but she’s wearing little girl pajamas and her sister is like 6 so…what? Let’s stop blurring the line between women and girls, what say.
–ALL THE GIRLS WERE CRYING ALL THE FUCKING TIME. It was like Country Strong, where we are asked to believe that we are looking at really powerful, strong female characters, but they are just crying every time anything happens. Sometimes when it’s appropriate, but sometimes just like…because. I don’t know. Yes, strong women can cry, as can men, but I didn’t like the oscillation between kicking everyone’s ass all over the place in dream world and crying their eyes out backstage in the OTHER dream world. Also Vanessa Hudgens: Go away.
So I mean, I thought it was a fun movie to watch, but I also couldn’t decide whether I should hate it or not. I think overall I probably should have. But it’s a movie, and I want to give it a little extra space anyway.
Geoff:
I guess a central question I have for you that maybe gets to some of the differences between how we watch movies is this: why is it we can’t fault it for being a live-action video game? It’s a movie, so give it some space? Is it wrong to ask a movie to try harder even if all it’s trying to do is entertain? Maybe I’m just a cruel king who’s executing jester after jester for not quite living up to my expectations. Only the best jesters in the kingdom shall do, I say!
I agree with you on the discomfort that comes with rape threats and sexualized girlishness as motifs. I feel like Zack Snyder might want to believe he’s making a movie about empowered women, but the constant crying jags and the infantilization and the fact that, outside the fantasies, Baby Doll never really wins or bests a goddamn thing … well, it all kinda sets the attempt back. A lot. You could maybe say something gets put over on the seeming caretaker at the end of the film, when he’s being dragged away screaming, but it’s nothing really that Baby Doll did. Carla Gugino’s pyschologist just figured out what was going on a wee bit too late.
I can get on board with movies depicting layered fantasies. I can get on board with hyper-stylized genre films. I can get on board with action sequences. I can even get on board with women kicking ass while scantily clad. But this movie fucks all those things up and does them in the laziest way possible.
This is Snyder’s first movie not based on a comic book, and it’s clear to me he needs to spend some more time touching up his dialogue and narrative-storytelling skills. You can’t just play a dramatic cover of Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?” over a brief montage of Baby Doll doing hard labor and staring off into space and expect that to stand in as effective character development (in fact, I would like to issue a moratorium to all filmmakers that “Where Is My Mind?” or any covers of said song are never to be used again in any film even tangentially related to psychology—quit taking the easy road, people). The movie feels like it was never developed beyond the most basic of outlines.
Susan:
I agree with your points, Geoff, but I still can’t help but be ambivalent. Why can’t we fault it for being a live-action video game? Because that’s all it was trying to do. The point I was making was that the movie was trying to be just exactly what it was. So I’m not going to say it fell short of anything. If you didn’t like the movie, you didn’t like the effect the director was going for, but it wasn’t like the director failed. That’s all. I suppose you can fault it for being a shit story, but you can’t fault it for trying to be something it wasn’t. That’s all I’m saying.
But we are definitely on the same team re: the movie’s treatment of ladies. I mean, distilled to its essence the moral of the story is that Baby Doll wins by allowing herself to be lobotomized and thereby never giving herself to the creepy caretaker guy who wants to bone her. It’s like a sacrificial virgin story but more fucked up, because it’s like it’s okay for her body to be “defiled” as long as her mind is not in it. To which I say, “WHAT?? What does that even MEAN?” And the likelihood is that it means nothing because Zack Synder is clearly not that smart (remember the thing he said about The Watchmen and how he took the easy road because he’s stupid? I do), but if I think about it too hard, it’s probably going to make me angry anyway.
There are more political things I could attack this film for (the fact that the cadre of ass-kickers were white, Asian, and Latina but not black; the fact that at the end of the film the person who REALLY saves the girl is an old white dude, not another woman) but I don’t want to beat a dead horse. I left the theater ambivalent about this movie because it’s probably not actually saying anything except, “Look! A thing!” And the thing I was to look at was indeed fun to see. So I dunno. It’s probably going to be better on the big screen, but we also need to stop supporting Zack Snyder projects. So whatever. Go see it if you want, but don’t say we didn’t warn you.
