A recent Twitter hashtag invited viewers to watch – and by implication celebrate – fifty-two films directed by women over a twelve month period. Those accepting the challenge should watch one per week. I accepted, having recently seen three films from metteuses-en-scene – The Second Mother, Palio and The Intern by Anna Muylaert, Cosima Spender and Nancy Meyers – in preceding weeks.
Comparatively few mainstream movies are directed by women. A rare example in American cinema is Miss Meadows, a black comedy from writer-director Karen Leigh Hopkins, with Katie Holmes in the title role.
Mary Meadows is a pistol-packing school teacher willing to shoot down any man who points a gun at her. In the small town where she teaches elementary school kids, there is a lot of anti-social behaviour, guys riding in trucks wanting to pick women and greeting indifference with a barrel, psychos who shoot people in diners, priests who abuse young boys and a serial child abuser who wants to teach Miss Meadows a lesson. You may wonder if this small American town is twinned with Midsomer in the UK.
Holmes plays Mary as a cartoonish figure, skipping in tap shoes. Her standard farewell is a too-doo-loo. She has long phone calls with Mom (Jean Smart) and they sound eerily alike. She also elicits the ire of a colleague and the interest of one pupil upset by the death (through cancer) of her predecessor.Mary also attracts the attention of a local sheriff (James Badge Dale) investigating some local vigilante action. He’s not a great cop, but twigs from a detailed sketch that Mary might be ‘Mary Poppins meets Pulp Fiction’. I would have dubbed her, PL Travers Bickle.
Hopkins’ plotting doesn’t withstand scrutiny – characters don’t behave logically – but it isn’t supposed to. You are brought back to the world of the late Adrienne Shelly’s Waitress – characters dealing with abusive men respond by immersing themselves in their own little world.
The one surprise is that when Mary’s unprotected house is broken into – she won’t put bars on the windows – the intruder is someone we don’t expect. The film is partly about secrets shared between women, a parallel discourse as a coping mechanism.
So the anti-patriarchal view perpetuated in the film is a code of silence: Mary only attacks those who she warns first. An ex-convict (Callan Mulvey) looks at Mary when she comes to tea and gives her the ‘you and me, we’re just the same’ speech. Actually Mary is more like her law enforcer-lover who impregnates her and asks for her hand.
Viewers unused to feminist cartoons will find Miss Meadows highly irritating, mostly because it takes abuse for granted. Abusers will always follow their impulse and need to be punished. That doesn’t take an understanding of mental health very far. But it proposes a status quo that involves marriage and the indulgence of a secret whim – Mary and the cop have an accord(ion).
Watched on Sky Movies, Sunday 11 October 2015
