The Ides of March Has A Woman Problem
I went in to The Ides of March wanting to like it. I really wanted to! It has West Wing-esque political drama, following a candidate and his campaign for the Democratic nomination for President. It boasts a stellar cast including George Clooney and (feminist!) Ryan Gosling. It has already garnered significant Oscar buzz and is seen as a potential Best Picture contender. But five minutes in, it became glaringly obvious that even the combined star power of Clooney and Gosling couldn’t save this film from its major problem: the women.
In a cast full of all-star talent, there are two women in this movie and both characters are vapid, one-dimensional, and function only to prop up the male characters. As the film opens, the first female character (Evan Rachel Wood) is bringing coffee to a team entirely of men – she’s an intern. From what I can see in the film she is the only woman working on the entire campaign – was it really necessary to make her an intern?
Later it is revealed (spoiler alert!) that she has slept with multiple men on the campaign staff and repeatedly calls herself a slut. Altogether, her character in Ides exists for two reasons: 1) to sleep with the men and 2) to bring coffee for the men.
The other female character is a reporter played by Marisa Tomei who hounds Ryan Gosling and Philip Seymour Hoffman for scoops. Her character gets probably no more than 15 minutes of screen time and is more an archetype than a complex character. She functions largely as a pawn in the male characters’ twisted schemes and betrayals, with no real storyline of her own. This is the role given to Marisa Tomei, an actress who has won an Oscar – and been nominated three times. It’s a terrific waste of talent to relegate her to a role of such little significance.
Towards the end of the movie, suddenly, we’re introduced to another woman. Maybe there’s hope, I thought briefly! Nope, turns out she is just a new intern, still fetching coffee for the men.
Tomei and Wood are both talented actresses and both give strong performances even within the vast limitations of the roles they are handed. But I left the theater with the persistent nagging feeling that the women in this movie are so one-dimensional they’re one step away from being props. Much like The Social Network, this is another critically praised film where women are portrayed as ballbusters, sluts, coffee-fetchers, or helpless damsels whose men cheat on them (that’s Clooney’s character’s wife, who appears on screen only a minute and barely speaks). In the world according to The Ides of March, it is men who make all decisions, men who run for office, men who work on and run campaigns – politics is still entirely a man’s world and the women are just messing it up for them.
And while American politics is still largely dominated by men – it has come a long way in the last several years, farther than the all-dude environment in Ides would lead you to believe. There have been dozens of prominent women running for office and even more working on campaigns in the last few election cycles: there have been Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Sarah Palin, and countless others. Patti Solis Doyle ran the Clinton campaign in 2007 and Donna Brazile ran the Gore campaign in 2000, to name just a couple. Yet nowhere in do the writers even consider the possibility that women may have had something worthwhile to contribute to politics.
Someone suggested to me that perhaps the absence of any meaningful female characters in Ides was deliberate – meant to be a reflection of the current reality of our political system and a nuanced commentary on the low numbers of women in American politics today. Oh, I wish Hollywood were that progressive! But women are regularly marginalized on screen, and Ides is not the first film to do so nor will it be the last.
The Bechdel test for women in movies tests whether women have a meaningful presence in a film by looking at three basic criteria:
- It has at least two women
- Who talk to each other
- About something other than a man
Seems so simple, but in The Ides of March, Tomei and Wood never cross paths – both are on screen so briefly and they never speak to each other at all.
Flip that around and ask yourself, not just about Ides but any movie: are there at least two men? Are they talking to each other? About something other than a woman?
I can’t name a single movie in Hollywood that fails that test.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
