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In Murder by Numbers--written by Tony Gayton and directed by Barbet Schroeder, and the best by far of the new bunch--Bullock's Cassie Mayweather is a tenacious sleuth whose strategies reflect a trauma in her own life. With men she's the sexual aggressor, jumping on her new partner and, when the party's over, literally pushing him out of bed. When she builds a case against two boys for a vicious killing, she wants to destroy the slick one (Ryan Gosling) who reminds her of her brutal ex-husband, and save the sensitive one (Michael Pitt) who reminds her of herself. Bullock powerfully blends and isolates these aspects of Cassie to show that her strengths and her frailties have a single source.
This makes Cassie an unusual heroine in these reductive days. "Some female leads are really male leads," says Murder by Numbers producer Susan Hoffman. "For a while in action scripts, it was as if they just changed the name from Robert to Roberta. The question is: Can there be scripts that have all the dynamics, the strengths and insecurities, of a woman?...There's still a way to go in the writing of these characters. What we're really missing is more female writers."
Or are we missing a more complex idea of what women, and movies, can be? "Years ago, in the '50s and film noir," says Irwin Winkler, a producer of Enough, "women were tough and often very bad. Nowadays, the women are very good and have to become tough to defend themselves." Their goodness is usually defined by the bad things done to them.
In the '30s and '40s, movie women had little need for revenge; they weren't imperiled; they were liberated. They and their men talked, fought and loved as equals, and audiences flocked to see these battles of wits and wills. Often women dominated the most popular movies. Until 1965, Hollywood's top-grossing film was Gone With the Wind, which was succeeded by The Sound of Music--two films of women in peril (Yankees! Nazis!). Among today's heroines in jeopardy, there's no room for Vivien Leigh's classy spoiledness or Julie Andrews' sassy sweetness.
"The problem with current women-in-peril films is they've got the peril but not the deep emotional resonance," observes Camille Paglia, the post-feminist author and agitator. "They're driven by gimmicky, high-concept plots. But the center of great women's pictures is the long close-up of a woman's soulful, suffering face as her eyes brim with tears. Today's actresses are too buff and brittle to take that kind of scrutiny...Too many know how to do everything but play real women. If the women-in-jeopardy motif can make filmmakers start to think in deep emotional terms again, then I'm all for it."
The fact is, the women-in-peril films are like most other recent U.S. movies, from Pearl Harbor to In the Bedroom: they are revenge fantasies, playing on the understandable but infantile belief that every atrocity can be overcome by a righteously violent response. But life doesn't work that way, and neither did most of the best old movies. Casablanca and Gone With the Wind did not end happily for their heroines; the frustrations of duty and destiny intervened. In the end, the new women-in-peril films betray a simultaneous naivete (that the heroine will triumph) and cynicism (that moviegoers won't believe justice is done unless they see the bad guy blown away).