Just watched Promising Young Woman, starring Carey Mulligan, a movie I have been aware of for about half a year, waiting for it to become available without having to risk my life to see it in a theater. It finally released on VOD this weekend.
The visual appeal of the movie is obvious--Carey Mulligan as "Halloween costume sexy nurse," and Carey Mulligan as "Lolita, but definitely of age" pairs a bright and attractive production design to tell the story of a bright and attractive woman...whose life went off the rails. It's not unlike the design of Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, which also tells the tragic story of a doomed young woman.
Mulligan is excellent, her Cassie Thomas a is bitter, hard edged, and uncompromising. She disarms the people around her with her bright wardrobe and soft styling (her blonde hair is glorious!) She is compliant, non-confrontational, a stereotypical "good little girl" right up to the moment when she isn't.
Yet this is not the kind of revenge fantasy we have seen before. Writer-director Emerald Fennell has an assured way with the camera, but the script pulls some punches that for me undermine what could have been a truly powerful drama.
The Plot
In brief--Cassie Thomas was a "promising young woman" several years ago, one of about three women in an unmemorable medical school. Now, some seven years later, she does the bare minimum as a barista at a coffee shop, lives with her parents, and spends her nights pretending to be blackout drunk in order to trap "nice guys" into taking her to their homes, where they reveal their willingness to have sex with what is apparently only a warm body.
She is not drunk, she is not incapacitated, and she is doing this for revenge. She has apparently been doing this for about seven years, as a form of grief management for the loss of her best friend Nina. Because (we eventually learn) Nina was very drunk at a party and gang raped in front of many of her classmates. She dropped out of med school and eventually committed suicide. Cassie dropped out of med school to take care of her, and has not recovered from the experience.
Then a former classmate--Ryan Cooper--walks into her coffee shop, recognizes her, and asks her out. He also reveals that some of their classmates are hitting life milestones and finding success--classmates that Cassie blames for forcing her out of medical school.
At this point, she pursues two diverging paths. She continues to seek revenge, but also specifically targets people from her past. At the same time, she starts to date Ryan.
At first, of course, Ryan is just another mark--another "nice guy" who is going to try to get her drunk and take advantage, and she will add him to her little book of marks. Instead, he doesn't take her up to his apartment on their first date, causing Cassie to feel the ground shift beneath her feet a bit. Maybe #NotAllMen?
He breaks through her defenses with the kind of metaphorical "floppy-haired charm" that previously had been the sole province of Hugh Grant. Bo Burnham does not actually have floppy hair, but the kind of "aw-shucks, I ain't all that" persona he projects would be entirely at home in a movie like Notting Hill.
Cassie starts to see a future for herself, starts to ween herself from her need for revenge. Until a video from the night of Nina's rape shows up, and Ryan was there. We don't know if Ryan participated, but he did not intervene either. And Cassie cannot forgive that.
She gets Ryan to tell her where Al's bachelor party is taking place, then she goes and pretends to be a stripper. None of these former classmates recognize her, which is it's own kind of telling detail (it's also metaphorical!). She gets them drunk with spiked vodka, then takes Al to a bedroom where she uses pink fluffy handcuff to secure him to the bed.
She then reveals herself, and her plan is to carve Nina's name into his skin. He manages to break one hand free of the cuffs, and the two struggle. In a long shot, Al holds a pillow to Cassie's face, sobbing wildly, until she stops moving. He is crying for what he sees as the loss of his future, of his wedding to a bikini model, and Cassie (not his own actions) is the cause.
The next morning, the best man finds him still locked to the bed, next to Cassie's body. The best man repeats "it was an accident, you didn't do anything wrong." We know this is a lie, and so do they, because they decide to hide the crime and dispose of the body.
But Cassie gets her revenge. She has left notes and copies of the video to be distributed in the event of her death. She has scheduled messages to be delivered to Ryan. Police show up at the wedding and arrest Al for her death.
The Strengths
Ryan's (and Al's) immediate, reflexive defensiveness. Not a millisecond of compassion for what others suffered, but immediate and visceral defensive crouch. Deflect the accusation. Very telling that makes it clear they understand that what they did was indefensible, was cosmically wrong, but also so afraid of consequences that they immediately lash out. Al makes things much worse, so intent on making Cassie shut up that he smothers her to death. (This is not just "real" it is also metaphorical.)
Ryan goes immediately to demanding that Cassie feel sorry for him, that she has to soothe and placate him and forgive him. Not once does either man consider the pain they have caused, as they are too busy trying to protect themselves.
It is this selfishness of the privileged that suffuses this movie. These men--when confronted--are clearly aware that what they are doing is wrong. But they are also unwilling/unable/unused to ever facing consequences, and so their only reaction is to do whatever it takes to escape any consequences. It is unutterably selfish, it is the sign of adult aged men who are still coddled children, who have been protected from every experiencing any consequences of their own bad acts. It doesn't stop them from behaving badly: they aren't willing to be sorry for what they did, only for getting caught.
The Weaknesses
And here is where the screenplay pulls its punches. Going into the movie, based on the trailers, I assumed that Cassie was herself raped (or "date-raped" or "roofie-raped"--the common denominator of all of that is "raped") while in medical school. Her years of seeking revenge on "nice guys" was obviously driven by her rage at what had happened to her.
But--that's not what happened. It was Cassie's friend Nina who was raped. Which displaces the motive from Cassie's pain to a reflected pain. Why is Cassie so fixated on this revenge.
Also--Cassie dropped out of med school to "take care of Nina." But--Nina has a mother. Nina didn't require Cassie to be her caretaker.
Obviously, Cassie dropped out she didn't want what med school was offering. Was that because of what happened to Nina, and she couldn't face her classmates after that, having lost all respect and sense of safety? Did she have any regrets about giving up that career track? Was Nina's rape the straw that broke the camel's back?
Then--Cassie doesn't actually enact revenge on men, she just forces them to confront their bad behavior. But what good does that do? The men don't actually learn from it--one guy she is allowing to take her home finds out about her ruse and lashes out. "You're that crazy chick that Jerry took home!" No evidence that Jerry learned from the experience, just evidence that he's spreading the news of a "crazy chick" to watch out for.
What does Cassie get out of this futile exercise? She doesn't actually seem to get any catharsis. She gets confirmation that men suck. She doesn't get any therapy to help her deal with her grief, and she doesn't actually protect other women from the same fate. She doesn't actually seem to feel like she's making any sort of permanent change in the men she confronts. And there is a stunning lack of other young women in the story that she could be saving. So it's not like she's the person walking the beach after a storm, throwing starfish back into the ocean, because while she can't save them all, she can save one.
It's a pointless, futile, throwing of herself against the implacable walls of male privilege.
A Few Days Later
This movie continues to haunt my thoughts, and I believe I have come around to a different position on it. This is--just maybe--not a rape revenge movie. Although it does wear those clothes. Perhaps, just as Cassie wears the costume of a drunken, vulnerable woman, to lure men closer so she can confront them, so this movie wears the costume of a rape revenge movie, luring me into what I think is a version of "girls seizing power" flick, when it is really something different.
Just maybe, it is a movie about the intractability of grief and guilt. It is a character study of a doomed young woman who's fate is sealed by her character. She is who she is, and her inability to move on is her tragic flaw.
Because when you strip away the cleverness of the screenplay construction, and reveal the plain chronology of events, what happened? Nina and Cassie had been friends for their lives. They both went to medical school, and one night there was a party. (According to Madison, played by Alison Brie, there were these kind of parties regularly. Every few nights, with blackout drinking. Pretty unhealthy culture if you ask me.) Nina went, Cassie didn't.
Cassie's guilt was already oversized--when Nina dropped out of medical school, Cassie did too "to take care of her." Eventually, Nina killed herself. Cassie has apparently fashioned her life for the intervening years in response to Nina's tragedy. The movie starts its story some 7 or so years after that fateful party.
And--isn't that weird? Hasn't Cassie really over-invested in this project of hers? Because what she is doing is also entirely nuts. She repeatedly throws herself into potentially dangerous situations, over and over again, with no weapon, no back-up, only her wits and her righteous fury. She goes home with strangers, men who all she actually knows about them is that they are willing to force themselves on a nearly unconscious woman. And what does she do? She scares them by sobering up and forcing them to acknowledge the reality of what they are doing. Of who they are. That they are predators--wolves in sheep's clothing, really.
The could be a superhero origin story--you could imagine a Jessica Jones taking her pain and using it to clean out criminals. But that would require that the hero actually make a difference. Cassie's M.O. scares these guys in the moment, but does it change their behavior? Does it make a difference?
Arguably, it doesn't. When her plan is prematurely thwarted as she is leaving with one guy and they encounter Ryan on the way--the mark reveals that he has heard about her. "You're that chick Jerry told me about! You are crazy!" Which is depressingly predictable. There is a crazy woman you need to watch out for--not that Jerry's behavior needs to change.
The ineffectiveness is brought home with Ryan--nice Ryan, kind Ryan, the Ryan who let's Cassie set the pace of their relationship. Ryan who comes home to meet the parents, is deprecating about his accomplishments, who seems to be awed by his good luck in being in a relationship with Cassie. But when it comes to evidence of his complicity in Nina's rape? He immediately stonewalls, he denies, he demands forgiveness, he lashes out. Even later, when a cop comes around to ask about Cassie's disappearance, he denies having any involvement at all.
Women don't matter to these men. Cassie isn't making a difference at all.
And she has to know it. It's not making her feel any better, it's not actually avenging Nina's rape or death. People around her try to talk her out of this vendetta--her parents, Nina's mother, her boss at the coffee shop. Cassie has gone missing in her own life.
This is not revenge. This is not justice. This is self-flagellation. This is Cassie throwing herself in harms way again and again, because she doesn't believe that she can move beyond this event.
And it isn't even her event, is it? It's Nina's rape, and Nina's exile from the med school community. Cassie obviously has her own trauma, which might even be similar to Nina's. I would much more readily believe that she had shaped her life around this quixotic hobby if she too had been raped, and if she was trying to extirpate her own failure to believe Nina.
But the movie doesn't tell us that. We don't actually understand why Cassie seems to need to put herself in danger so often, for so long, while giving up her own life to live in atonement to Nina.
Of course, there is a lovely section when it seems it might be possible. That she is falling in love with Ryan, that she might give up this quest for vengeance in favor of living her own life. It's perhaps in part because she meets the lawyer who defended Nina's rapist and is genuinely miserable about it. Perhaps Cassie sees #NotAllMen means that #NotRyan.
Until Madison gives her the video that incriminates Ryan, and he fails that test.
Apparently there is an interview with Emerald Fennell where she describes Cassie's pursuit of quasi-justice as "an addiction." That the moment of righteous vindication gives her an endorphin high that gradually wears off and she has to go chase it again.
Which is sort of an inverted version of how I read the work. It's not that Cassie is chasing the high so much as it allows her some relief from her sense of guilt. It releases her from the low.
In the end, this is a movie that is living with me, forcing me to consider what it is doing, what is Cassie doing. What is my complicity in this story--that I was disappointed that she wasn't killing these men? I'm not generally in favor of vigilantism, so why does dressing it up in cotton candy pastels make me cheer for it. And what do I do with the recognition that I am disappointed that she isn't more violent?
Shall We Talk About The Ending?
Sure, it's viscerally satisfying that Cassie gets the rapists at the end. But to feel that "victory" you have to overlook that Cassie was murdered. That Cassie went to that bachelor party with evidence already in the mail to the lawyer, with the posthumous text messages already programmed to Ryan. She went, knowing that things could go bad--or even that they would go that bad. She went planning to die.
That's some dark stuff.
That's a story about a woman carrying so much pain that she basically commits suicide by frat boy. So you have to wonder--did she deliberately make the handcuffs flimsy enough to let him escape? She was sufficiently prepared that she already an elaborate plan in process for her disappearance--do you think that a woman with that level of foresight wouldn't have had some kind of plan for not getting killed?
You start to think--she wanted to die. She could totally have drugged Al so that he was unconscious before she started carving Nina's name in his skin. That would have been safer for her--but she preferred to do it with him conscious. Why? Possibly for the thrill of the risk--with the stakes as high as her death.
I have seen objections to the ultimearsate image--a pink winky emoji of a text message delivered to Ryan's phone as the police are arresting the wedding party for Cassie's murder. The messages, as far as I can remember them, are
It's not over.
Now.
;)
In the headlong rush of the finale, it felt kind of empowering--Cassie managed to engineer consequences on some douchebros who had ruined and ended two lives--Nina's and Cassie's. It also felt vaguely threatening to Ryan, as though Cassie had more plans in motion that were going to ensnare him in the same way the bachelor party boys were caught. Which is a false victory, because, as we have to remember, Cassie is dead.
She is not empowered. She is not actually gloating. She has not actually won anything at all, because she has sacrificed her life--figuratively for years, and literally at the end.
I am also jaded enough to spin out the subsequent criminal proceedings, and I am sorry to say that I don't think there is going to be a lot of consequences for those boys. They are obviously wealthy enough to get excellent legal representation. There will be evidence that Cassie wasn't a hired stripper, but is basically a stalker. That she sought out this party, inserted herself onto the premises, assaulted the groomsmen by drugging them into unconsciousness. That she restrained Al in order to assault him with a knife, and he reacted in self-defense.
What are the penalties for burning the body, trying to cover up the evidence? Less severe than a murder rap. Probably a hefty fine. Sure, it's going to be a terribly couple of years for him, and may destroy his marriage to the bikini model. It might affect his career trajectory. But there is too much evidence that serial sexual predation doesn't disqualify a man from being President. Why should we think that Al is going to actually pay for this crime?
And that's the bleakest read of all. Because Cassie went down fighting, but it was never a fight she was ever going to win. And perhaps she knew it all along. Eventually, even she couldn't keep fighting. So she went out with as much of a blaze of vengeance as it was possible to get. Ephemeral and transitory. All those men will live on for decades, wiping their memories of what happened, using their privilege to escape consequences, using their entitlement to avoid feeling bad about it.
So much tragedy, damage, and despair, wrapped up in some gorgeous candy colored, Insta-worthy production design. Like eating a poisoned macaron that you don't realize is going to kill you.
Well done, Emerald Fennell!
