They say that behind every great man is a great woman. But this has been a year of biopics in which wives have emerged from the great men’s shadows to challenge their menfolk for equal billing. Being yoked to a male “genius” is tough, and the female characters in Oppenheimer, Napoleon, Maestro, Ferrari and Priscilla let them know it. When Leonard Bernstein (Bradley Cooper) gets sloppy about hiding his homosexual affairs from his family, Felicia Montealegre Bernstein (Carey Mulligan) lets rip with: “Your truth is a fucking lie. It sucks up all the energy in every room.”
Maestro raises the question of whether the infidelity is a vital part of creativity, or if artistic achievement is just a convenient excuse for selfish behaviour as a wife finds herself increasingly marginalised in her spouse’s life. Felicia was an actor in her own right who put her career on hold to have their children, and, as incarnated by Mulligan, a fascinating study in how she has to do all the heavy emotional lifting if the marriage is to endure. Ironically, following A Star Is Born, this makes the second film in which Cooper, as director, co-writer and star, has allowed himself to be comprehensively upstaged by his leading lady.
The title character in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) isn’t exactly a paragon of fidelity either. Nolan has called Kitty Oppenheimer (Emily Blunt) “one of the most interesting characters in the film” though a full 20 minutes pass before a woman even speaks, and for the next two hours, Blunt’s role seems limited to that of a housewife drowning her sorrows in liquor while hemmed in by screaming babies. It’s not much of an advance on Mrs Garrison’s “Never mind the truth, Jim, what about me and the kids?” from Oliver Stone’s JFK, but Kitty, mercifully, turns on the feisty in the home stretch, reminding us she still has a brain, and gumption.
Elsewhere, Oppenheimer shows Nolan overcompensating for the sexlessness of his previous films by awkwardly injecting scenes of the father of the atomic bomb engaged in naked rumpy-pumpy with his communist girlfriend Jean (Florence Pugh). And a Nolan joint wouldn’t be a Nolan joint without at least one dead woman, a motif so recurrent in his work you wonder if he finds it easier to create female characters who exist more as memories than flesh and blood. Oppenheimer does not disappoint in this department.
It’s the casting of Vanessa Kirby that makes Joséphine interesting in Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, since Kirby radiates an air of having been there, done that: an earlier marriage and children, prison, plus sex with Paul Barras, executive leader of the Directory of the first French Republic, who as played by Tahar Rahim is a hundred times hotter than poor Boney will ever be. While the highlights of Scott’s film are the battle scenes, in the boudoir it’s the more experienced Joséphine in control, flashing her private parts at Napoleon (Joaquin Phoenix) like Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. “You are just a brute who is nothing without me,” she tells him, and it’s hard to disagree; the film never hammers it home, but it’s only after their divorce (the Napster needs to marry a fertile archduchess to give France an heir) things start going horribly wrong for him on the battlefield. As the portrait of a marriage, however, Napoleon is markedly less femme-centric than Scott’s last two films, The Last Duel and House of Gucci. Brownie points for trying though.
Like Scott, Michael Mann has made laudable attempts throughout his career to build his female characters into more than mere cyphers. (See The Last of the Mohicans, Heat, Blackhat and so forth.) If he doesn’t always succeed, at least he tries, and in films that could never be described as “women’s pictures”. In Ferrari, Penélope Cruz is on dynamite form as Enzo Ferrari’s grieving, embittered wife Laura, who still holds the strings in a car manufacturing business teetering on the brink of collapse, while her husband (Adam Driver) seeks solace for the death of their son in the arms of his mistress. Cruz is truly a force of nature here, such a passionate bundle of hurt and anger she almost hoodwinks you into thinking the film is more about her as about her cold fish of a husband.
Still, the titles of these films are not Mr and Mrs Oppenheimer, The Bernsteins, Napoleon and Joséphine, or Enzo v Laura, making it clear where the film-makers’ loyalties ultimately lie. Obviously this is not the case with Priscilla, the only film in this subset to have been written and directed by a woman, Sofia Coppola, and the only one to depict the marriage at its centre wholly from the point of view of the wife, Mrs Elvis Presley (Cailee Spaeny). “It said so much to me about women of her generation, my mom’s generation, and how much has changed, and then things that haven’t changed,” Coppola said of her source material, Priscilla Presley’s Elvis and Me, in an interview in Vogue.
One thing that definitely hasn’t changed is the way male film-makers are routinely trusted with more money and bigger productions. “I just see all these men getting hundreds of millions of dollars and then I’m fighting for a tiny fraction of that,” Coppola says. Indeed, the budgets of Oppenheimer, Maestro, Napoleon and Ferrari average out at northwards of US$118m, while she and Priscilla had to make do with a measly $20m.
