Women Talking

Film (2022)
Directed by Sarah Polley

Screenplay by Sarah Polley and Miriam Toews
Based on the book Women Talking (2018) by Miriam Toews

With Rooney Mara (Ona), Judith Ivey (Agata), Emily Mitchell (Miep), Kate Hallett (Autje), Liv McNeil (Neitje), Claire Foy (Salome), Sheila McCarthy (Greta), Jessie Buckley (Mariche), Frances McDormand (Scarface Janz), Ben Whishaw (August)

It helps to know a little background of this drama beforehand, since not much preliminary info is given to the audience. If one looks into the 2018 novel by Canadian writer Miriam Toews on which the film is based, one learns it is inspired by events set between 2005 and 2009 in a Mennonite community in Bolivia and that the language they actually spoke was Plautdietsch, a variant of German spoken by Mennonites. One gets no more information about where these people come from, though, in the film, they sound like Americans. It would have helped a good deal if writer-director Sarah Polley had given better background for the story. The film jumps right into its setting without much preparation at all and one is forced to wonder who these people are, where they are, and where they come from. They speak American English in the film, including actress Irish actress Jessie Buckley, which is a bit confusing, especially when one gathers they are in the Southern Hemisphere.

A horror has occurred, though it is not clear exactly when nor for how long it has been going on: some men in the community have drugged and attacked the women indiscriminately, raping and brutalizing them, and some of the women are pregnant as a result. When we encounter the women, this has already happened and a number of them meet in a barn to discuss a strategy for responding to the awful attack, which forms the main setting and substance of the film. Should they fight back? Should they leave? Should they just stay and learn to adapt to it as best they can? The women are on a timetable of a few days to decide since the men of the community are away posting bail for the rapists and they must decide before the men return. So ensues a long discussion which takes up the entire film and which involves the participation of one former, decent, male member of the community whose family had been excommunicated years before for asking too many questions about how things in the community were done.

The issue raised by this film – how should women respond to male brutality – is obviously a very important one and writer-director Sarah Polley and her producers, including Brad Pitt, and Frances McDormand who appears briefly in the film as one of the women in the community, are to be credited with taking it on. Indeed, it is an issue requiring serious and constant attention and it is important to recognize attempts to cultivate concern about it.

As well, this film features several wonderful actresses, and it is a real treat to see them onscreen together.

That said, this is a bizarrely written and not very compellingly executed script. Its setting is dark and haunting, with very little explanation given about the context or history of the abuse that represents the fulcrum of the story. Instead, there is endless talk and argument that goes around and around, not making terribly much sense and not leading much of anywhere. Some of the characters get extremely worked up over things. Mariche (Jessie Buckley) is always in a state and screaming, but it appears that she has had to live with a horribly abusive husband. Salome (Claire Foy) is, in the beginning, forcefully irate and persuasively so, but the film drops her raging contributions early on and we are not quite sure why it does that. Scarface Janz (Frances McDormand) shows up a little bit in the beginning and the end with a horrible facial scar and an even worse scowl, but, apart from her determination to stick around in the community despite the inflicted violence, she does not have much say.

The most compelling role among the women portrayed is that of Ona (Rooney Mara), a luminous, gentle, interesting character who is pregnant from rape. She is, understandably, loved by the one male adult character who shows up – August is his name – and has been loved by him since childhood. One understands why, especially given Mara’s penetrating performance. This is the best thing about the film by far, though, in the end, the narrative does not adequately support either her character or their romance. When Mara is onscreen, you can’t take your eyes off of her; she has always been an excellent and captivating actress, but here, in this bizarre role and peculiar script, there is something about the opportunity for her to radiate her silent charm that enables her character to glisten.

Ben Whishaw does a weirdly fine turn as August, the fellow who is brought in to take notes on the women’s meeting since they have grown up in a community in which they have been kept uneducated and do not know how to read or write. The portrayal is intended to be strange but Whishaw carries it off quite well in a way that makes this character both gentle and a passionate – though Platonic – romantic counterpart to Rooney Mara’s Ona.

Apart from the story being strange, with plenty of unanswered questions, the script is repetitious and illogical; why the women decide to do what they do never becomes clear. The direction is uneven, with performances that vary between the expected constraints of a severely isolated religious community and an explosiveness that seems bizarrely out of place.

Perhaps the strangest thing in the film – which from a few clues, we determine is set sometime after 2010 – is the appearance of a truck blaring Daydream Believer by The Monkees as it charges by the barn seeking to take a census. Why it is doing that, what the relevance is to the story, and how it fits in with all of these Americans being somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere, is not clear at all. And it’s replayed, at great volume, during the closing credits, which is a strange and inadvertent way to end a film about domestic brutality in a warped religious community.

– BADMan (aka Charles Munitz)