Terrified of standing outside of the groupthink and dreading the Hollywood equivalent of being burnt alive in a Florentine piazza, they line up behind one another and genuflect on a piece of substandard filmmaking such as Spielberg’s outrageously overrated “The Fabelmans” and now, Sarah Polley’s “Women Talking.”
- Why do professional movie critics give bad movies complimentary reviews?
- My best guess is that they are haunted by the fate of the infamous fifteenth-century Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola and his bonfires of the vanities.
- Terrified of standing outside the groupthink and dreading the Hollywood equivalent of being burnt alive in a Florentine piazza, they line up behind one another and genuflect on a piece of substandard filmmaking such as Spielberg’s outrageously overrated “The Fabelmans.”
- Reading these reviews, I felt that many of this country’s finest critics disliked that movie but were tying themselves up in knots to give a hugely different impression.
- The same applies to Sarah Polley’s massively disappointing, obscenely overlong, and preternaturally boring “Women Talking.”
- An evident and lazy piece of #MeToo propaganda, it is a woefully inept platform for some of today’s most gifted actresses, from Claire Foy to Jesse Buckley to Rooney Mara.
- Adapted from Miriam Toews’s 2018 novel, the film chronicles a very extended argument among eight women in a Mennonite colony as they decide whether to stay and carry on as subjugates of their menfolk, stay but as equals in the territory, or leave. The fact that, as women, they have been deprived of an education and do not know how to read and write makes the latter choice a potential path of immense challenge and danger.
- Danger, because in what had been called “wild female imagination,” nine men in the community had, for years, repeatedly drugged and raped the women and girls. As the meeting comes to order, these men are released from prison on bail.
- Unfortunately, there are no characters here, just #MeToo Mouthpieces. This includes the only male character (one minor character does identify as non-binary) played by Ben Wishaw – he takes the minutes, poor lad.
- For Polley (screenwriter and director), “Women Talking” is a significant career setback.
