Woman of the Hour (2024)
dir. Anna Kendrick
Rated: R
image: ©2024 Netflix
If ever there were a movie that exemplifies the recent viral social media phenomenon known as “Man or Bear,” in which women are asked if they would prefer to be alone in the woods with a man or a bear, it’s Anna Kendrick’s directorial debut, Woman of the Hour. If you’re unfamiliar, an overwhelming majority of women, when given the opportunity, would take their chances hanging out with a grizzly rather than risk possible violence at the hands of an unknown man. Stranger danger, indeed.
Kendrick, with the help of Ian McDonald’s focused screenplay, imagines the world in a way that I would assume looks very familiar to many, if not most, women. It’s a world in which women are subject to men’s relentless quest to get sex out of them. Female utility begins and ends with their bodies, and if a woman insists on using her own agency to upset the status quo, she risks incurring the anger, or worse, of a man.
Woman of the Hour dramatizes the real-life story of Cheryl Bradshaw and Rodney Alcala and their chance 1978 encounter on the game show The Dating Game. In the film, Bradshaw is an aspiring actor – on the actual episode of The Dating Game, the real Bradshaw introduced herself as a drama teacher; Kendrick has related in interviews that not much is actually known about Bradshaw, and she died before Kendrick started working on the project.
In the movie, Cheryl’s career is going nowhere. “I’m working very hard and accomplishing very little,” she tells her agent, on the cusp of walking away from her dream of acting. But her agent has exciting news. She has booked Cheryl for an appearance on The Dating Game. In addition to some frivolous exchanges loaded with double entendre as a way to make a match on the program, The Dating Game was also used as a way for entertainment industry hopefuls to gain some much-needed exposure. (Farrah Fawcett, Tom Selleck, and Steve Martin are among several celebrities who appeared on the show before launching successful careers.)
Meanwhile, we learn the dark truth about Rodney Alcala, one of Cheryl’s eventual suitors on the show. Alcala was a prolific serial killer who employed the ruse of being a professional photographer to lure his victims to remote locations in order to rape and murder them. (This isn’t a spoiler, as the very first scene of the movie shows us Alcala murdering one of his victims. The movie doesn’t linger on this detail, but in this opening sequence, we see Alcala’s predilection for choking his victims to unconsciousness, then allowing them to revive before repeating the process all over again, which was particularly chilling to see.)
Ian McDonald’s script, which was featured on The Black List, an annual survey of the most-liked unproduced screenplays circulating in Hollywood in any given year, feels slightly scattered at times. The movie jumps back and forth in time, between 1971 and 1979, to show us Rodney preying upon young women. This is McDonald’s second feature screenplay after his 2016 debut, which he also directed, titled Some Freaks.
Kendrick has expressed her desire to focus more on Cheryl Bradshaw and Alcala’s victims than the killer himself, saying in one interview that, “I’m really not interested in why he is the way he is. I don’t find him interesting or worthy of exploration.” That’s why we get the emphasis on one woman’s desperate attempt to survive her encounter with Alcala by placating him in any way possible and asking that he not tell anyone about his rape of her because people are judgmental about that sort of thing. It’s a harrowing sequence that centers her at the expense of his experience.
The first-time director increased the degree of difficulty of her project by casting herself in the lead role of Cheryl Bradshaw. Kendrick is as self-assured behind the camera as I’ve come to find her in front of it. She employs several slow zooms throughout the picture that pay homage to a style that was de rigueur for the films made during the time period of Woman of the Hour’s setting. The recreation of the ‘70s period by her production design team feels authentic throughout, and Kendrick conjures and sustains an unsettling mood for the entirety of the film’s 94 minutes.
The most unsettling moment in the entire movie comes in one brilliantly staged shot that tracks Cheryl walking quickly to her car in a dark, empty parking lot as Alcala slowly follows her. The intensity only ratchets up when we lose sight of the killer as the dolly shot continues to track Cheryl.
Kendrick dials back her bubbly on-screen persona – which she’s honed over the course of two decades in movies like Pitch Perfect, its two sequels, and A Simple Favor – only slightly in order to increase her character’s exasperation at living in a man’s world, like when her next-door neighbor makes it clear that he isn’t interested in a friendship, but rather in an easy lay. Daniel Zovatto is, by turns, charming and utterly terrifying as Rodney Alcala. Kendrick might have wanted to de-emphasize Alcala’s centrality to the story, and rightly so, but Zovatto is hypnotic as Alcala any time he’s on screen.
Tony Hale adds to the atmosphere of shitty men behaving shittily as the host of The Dating Game. The real-life host of the show at the time was Jim Lange, but the movie changed the character’s name to Ed Burke, probably to avoid any lawsuits in the wake of Hale’s portrayal. Burke is all smiles as long as Cheryl is compliant and sticks to the script. As soon as she decides to own her agency by quickly coming up with some new questions for her bachelor suitors that are substantially more biting, Cheryl becomes a “cunt” who Burke wants out of his sight as soon as the episode wraps.
The bit about Cheryl changing those questions – she pointedly asks her suitors at one moment during the taping to tell her what they think “girls are for” – feels like an invention of the screenplay in service of making a larger point about the gender dynamics of 40+ years ago that are sadly still relevant today. The same goes for a subplot involving an audience member of the show named Laura recognizing Alcala as the perpetrator of a rape and murder of one of her friends. It feels too neat to be anything other than McDonald’s invention.
Still, those incidents, and Laura being blown off by not only an ABC Studios security guard but also her own boyfriend when she tries to raise the alarm, is indicative of something German filmmaker Werner Herzog calls “ecstatic truth.” The fifth point in Herzog’s Minnesota Declaration, issued to Roger Ebert in 1999, states: “There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.”
Herzog’s declaration was specifically meant to apply to his particular style of documentary filmmaking, but it can easily apply to a fictional film that depicts real-life events. Sometimes you have to lie to get to a larger truth. (I feel I need to point out that in that last sentence, I am NOT condoning something like the odious lie that JD Vance and his ilk are spreading about immigrants eating their neighbor’s pets. That’s a fascistic tactic being used to demonize already marginalized people, which bears absolutely no resemblance to what Kendrick is doing here.)
Woman of the Hour unearths a truth about how women must feel moving through the world intuiting that it would be safer to hang out with a wild, deadly animal than with a random man they don’t know. To my fellow men: we need to learn something from that ecstatic truth in order to change our behavior for the better.
Why it got 3.5 stars:
- A few structural issues aside, Woman of the Hour is taut storytelling with plenty of stakes. It’s also gorgeous to look at. I’m excited to see what Kendrick does next behind the camera.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- It’s telling how insecure most men are because they feel a need to denigrate women’s intelligence. Watching this movie convinced me that every woman on the planet has to be at least a little smarter than men. That’s because you have to be smart (via the necessity of being cynical) when you are bombarded constantly by men who want something out of you.
- That exact point is exemplified when a flight attendant knowingly tells Cheryl about being groped by an endless number of business men while on the job.
- Cheryl’s answer to being asked if she felt seen during the Dating Game taping, “I felt looked at,” pretty much sums up what it must feel like to move through the world as a woman.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- I watched this on the couch with Rae and Cooper. Woman of the Hour is currently streaming exclusively on Netflix.
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The FFC’s political soapbox
Trump is now having people speak at his rallies (in this case, the odious white supremacist and misogynist Tucker Carlson) who talk about how liberals are like a bad little girl, and how Trump will give this bad little girl “a vigorous spanking” when he wins. This was greeted at the rally with wild cheers, and the chant, when Trump walked on stage, of “Daddy’s home!” This, at the same time as a woman has come forward to say that Trump’s buddy, Jeffrey Epstein, arranged for Trump to sexually assault her in front of him. Epstein was dating the woman at the time. You can read about the sick rally speech from Carlson, and the new Epstein-linked accusation, here.
This. Is. Not. Normal.
Early voting has started in virtually every state in the country. Have you voted to stop this vile insanity yet?