My Katherine Hepburn mini-season has come to this, a spectacular personal fail. It shouldn't be true, as this is the movie that paired Hepburn with her long-time love Spencer Tracy for the first time, but it just doesn't work when compared to the other three movies I've been considering: 'Bringing Up Baby', 'Holiday' and 'The Philadelphia Story'. All of those play with the Hepburn persona and contradiction well, but this is a heavy-handed mess, and one which is just too scared of the problem it's trying to address. Also, It's too far to the dramatic end of the comedy drama spectrum to really fit into the movies I find interesting and to make its point lightly and effectively.
Digging into the story: 'Woman of the Year' is about the high flying and influential journalist Tess Harding, as played by Hepburn, and the rougher-hewn sports reporter and biographer Sam Craig, as personified by Tracy, and their rapidly matured relationship and marriage. That marriage is quickly threatened by the inability of Tess to give up her fast-living and important lifestyle to be a wife, and Sam's similar inability to understand how to deal with such a woman who spends her life dealing with ambassadors, refugees and statesmen galore. It's a frustrating story, as it almost brings Tess to the point of abandoning everything to be a housewife or to lose her marriage, before Sam brings her to an understanding of the existence of some half-way compromise in the last half-minute of the film. The problem is that it's not clear that Sam himself is compromising at all, or that he would have helped her in any way, or even left her in a confused and crippled state of mind for the rest of her life if they hadn't reconciled. No number of comedic popping toasters or interesting characters can fix that, and for that reason, I just can't like 'Woman of the Year', although there are some interesting aspects.
One of the great things about the movie is the radiant love affair between the two leads. If there has ever been screen chemistry then these two had it. It's easy to believe they would spend the rest of their paired lifetime together, even under the burden of Tracy's alcoholism! As a consequence their rapid courting, engagement, and marriage works perfectly, as it would in a light romantic comedy. That marriage is the point, however, at which the drama kicks in and it all becomes tricky. In this contemporary world of equality and feminism it seems strange, and then if you put yourself back into their time period it seems particularly ham-fisted, with only a few brief seconds at the end where you wonder that maybe the film had the best interests of Tess at heart the whole time but had no intention of showing it for even a moment longer than was absolutely necessary. Could those two actually function together at all? Could Tess go through with it and not be stifled to the point of heartbreak?
Is it possible that I have missed some incredibly obvious point, or that a tonal shift eluded me? When a movie is in the company of 'The Philadelphia Story' it has to be incredibly good or die in the comparison, and this one doesn't do well. At least Hepburn and Tracy were both good, and the supporting cast solid. The direction can be mixed in with the confused motivation of the movie but was good in at least the execution of the story. Was it perhaps a landmark at the time? It made it into the American Film Registry so it must have broken some ground. Hence the value of 'Woman of the Year' may not have been in being a great movie itself, but in breaking enough ground for other movies to go further and do more interesting and less contradictory things. That's probably enough.
Next, and finally: 'The Philadelphia Story'!
O.
No comments:
Post a Comment