The recipe is simple: put a woman in a room with a psycho, and let us watch. If the woman has an ailing daughter for the baddies to terrorize, good. If the man she loves has a dark past and maybe a homicidal kink, better. If she must confront two mad-genius kids, best. Just put our heroine in dire peril before she emerges victorious. It's a lesson in female resiliency. Also, these days, big box office.
This month gave a beam of hope to those desperate for gender equality on screen. The two top films for the April 5-7 weekend were thrillers starring women: David Fincher's Panic Room, with Jodie Foster besieged by three burglars, and Carl Franklin's High Crimes, in which lawyer Ashley Judd defends her enigmatic husband in a high-stakes court-martial. This week in Murder by Numbers, Sandra Bullock plays a cop on a homicide investigation that points to two brilliant teenagers. And on Memorial Day weekend, Jennifer Lopez provides a Star Wars alternative with the spousal revenge drama Enough.
These thrillers won't be chosen for the National Film Registry of great movies; as Enough director Michael Apted says, "This ain't Chekhov." They may not always pass the plausibility test. But these films do let audiences see top actresses playing strong characters. "People want to root for their favorite female stars," Foster says. "Audiences don't want a woman just to be the sister-of, daughter-of, wife-of. This proves they're not only open to, but absolutely behind, the idea of a woman going through some terrible danger and finding the gumption and the brawn to fight against it...It's just that it's been happening to men for centuries, and now it's happening to women."
Women are always in danger in modern movies--in danger of being left out of them. In teen-boy farces, women are usually just a priapic prop. In adult action pictures they may be no more than a trophy, a pawn or a poignant memory. So the very notion that women are not on the margins but at the center of medium-budget, mass-appeal films is refreshing.
And appropriate too. From the beginning, storytellers and listeners have rooted for the underdog. Women, typically smaller than men and less schooled in the art of physical revenge, are the ultimate little guys. David Koepp kept this in mind when writing his Panic Room script: "The story is about physical survival, so you want the odds to be stacked high against your lead. By having the lead be a woman, it makes for more interesting drama, because there's further to go."
The characters in the current thriller trio get where they're going by tapping into who they've been. Foster's Meg Altman is a mom; her mission is to defend her diabetic child. Judd's Claire Kubik in High Crimes is a lawyer; she needs all her skills of persuasion and stubbornness to fight what looks like a military conspiracy.