Bechdel-Wallace test: fails, of course
I was talked into seeing this. A truly dreadful movie. Sure, artily shot, good performances, nice attention paid to interiors, actual Spanish-speaking Latino actors, etc etc, and I went because Ed Norton was in it. But didn't realise till I got to the theatre that it was one of these Irish-cop-family-New-York-corruption-in-the-police-force-will-our-hero-choose-family-or-justice crapfests, I mean, let's just phone the plot in from here shall we?
Oh, and there were a couple of women in it. One was Jennifer Ehle, head shaved, playing the Madonna Wife and Mother Dying of Cancer. Does she matter at all? Of course not; her function is solely to put extra pressure on one of the good guys (protagonist's brother, her husband).
And then there's the pretty-wife-with-corrupt-husband-who-loves-her so we're supposed to believe he's actually a not entirely bad guy. He's doing it all For Her And The Kids, you see. Not that he's asked them if they WANT him to be, you know, dealing drugs and killing people For Them. Still, we're supposed to believe that anyone who loves his family can't be an all bad guy. To which one might well respond "don't even evil men love their children?" It's not a sign of virtue. It doesn't make him likeable or even interesting.
As a rule of thumb: movies about Irish cops in corrupt New York police departments are not going to be about women. Women will be used only to bolster the pretense that the male protagonists have ever had a relationship that mattered with anyone but other men. In this film, there are no relationships that matter, except relations between, and with, men. A typical Hollywood cop movie, in short.
Is there a single scene where two women talk to each other about something other than a man?
Yeah right. That is to say, of course not.
IMDB entry:
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