Never Underestimate the Power of a Woman

The Witcher

Freya Allan and Anya Chalotra provide most of the magic in The Witcher.

The female stars of Netflix’s adaptation of The Witcher are so much more interesting than the male lead, the series should really be called The Sorceress, the Princess and That Guy with the Cheekbones. While monster hunter Henry Cavill broods his way through the show’s impressive European locations, Anya Chalotra and Freya Allan are acting up a storm around him. They’re not the only ones strong women on hand. The recurring cast includes powerhouse performances from MyAnna Buring as Chalotra’s magical mentor, Mimi Ndiweni as an enemy sorceress, Emma Appleton as a female bandit and the wonderful Jodhi May as Allan’s grandmother. With her great, dark eyes, May seems way too young to be anybody’s grandmother (she’s only in her 40s). She’s also like the second coming of Kay Francis, one of the most unjustly neglected stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age.

Cavill’s lack of primacy in a series named for his character can’t be blamed entirely on him. He’s saddled with some of the most turgid dialogue since the original Dynasty and a character who, though he’s destined to connect with Allan at some point, seems determined to avoid all human relationships. The script even has him spend most of the final climactic battle stuck in a flashback. For the most part his character is all about fighting. He has some limited magical powers, being a half witch (hence, “witcher”), but none of it is really defined, and he doesn’t rely on his magic all that much.

By contrast, Chalotra’s Yennifer is all magic, and the actress brings impressive levels of anger and wit to the performance. She’s a fascinating if somewhat maddening character, a half-elf (if this is starting to sound like an RPG, it’s no surprise: Andrzej Sapkowski’s novels have inspired two) born with physical disabilities. After a childhood of torment in the series’ pseudo-medieval world, whose inhabitants are anything but woke, she’s threatened with rape and magically teleports to another location. That leads to her being recruited for the local sorcery school, where she learns she has a powerful, dangerous and sometimes unpredictable connection with chaos magic. The physical transformation that makes her a full-fledged sorceress means she can no longer bear children. That eventually leads her to rebel against the society of sorcerers and go freelance while trying to cure her sterility because this whole thing is based on a series of novels by a man. I know I’m somewhat prejudiced by my status as a SINK (single income no kids), but every time a fictional character complains about not being complete because he/she can’t produce offspring, I wonder if they’ve ever heard of adoption. Surely in the near anarchy of The Witchers’ feudal society that doesn’t entail all the hoops people have to jump through here, or does their world have its own pseudo-Christian president out to deprive sorcerers of adoption rights?

Allan’s character is loaded with some mysterious power, too, apparently inherited from her mother (so at least for some women in this world power doesn’t necessarily entail sacrifice). When her kingdom is overrun with invaders, and May tells her she has to leave, she shouts, “No” and shatters a glass. Later she’s attacked by some peasant refugees she thought were her friends. After blacking out, she revives to the sight of their mangled bodies hanging from tree branches. That’s a rather satisfying moment in the current socio-political climate, and you can’t help wondering what she’d do to a Harvey Weinstein or Donald Trump. The actress does a good job at playing wide-eyed innocence convincingly, which is an accomplishment for any professional actor who’s survived the business long enough to land the lead in an international production like this.

While these two very gifted actors are exercising power, Cavill wanders the countryside taking out the occasional monster but never really getting anywhere. I’ve enjoyed his work in other pieces. He’s perfectly competent as a young partygoer done in by Cenobites in the direct-to-video Hellraiser:Hellworld (2005), which could be subtitled “Superman Gets a Blow Job From a Demon.” In the two films I’ve seen in which he plays Superman (I missed the first), he does fine in the one-on-one scenes. If the action scenes don’t work, it’s not his fault. They’re a hot mess even in Batman vs. Superman (2016), which didn’t have to be cobbled together from the work of two directors. In The Witcher he does his best work when he can just look someone in the eye and tell them the truth. Unfortunately, the series keeps saddling him with lines where he has to look off into the distance (or maybe at a vision of this world’s version of Jesus) and deliver something deep and sodden with meaning, and he looks lost. There’s also a problem with his physicality. Where other actors like the three Chrises (Evans, Hemsworth and Pratt) bulked up for superhero roles while maintaining a sense of ease and even grace in their physical work, Cavill just lumbers. At times it’s as if his muscles were wearing him.

Although the men clearly take a backseat to the women in The Witcher, they’re not totally lost. The sorcerers at least register. The strongest male supporting role is Jaskier (Joey Batey), a troubadour who attaches himself to Cavill for four adventures. Batey has all of the lighter moments in Cavill’s storylines, and they’re really needed. He has two main drives, sex and his art, and it’s a kick watching him come up with songs about their adventures. When he performs them, he uses some modern rock-star moves that are very funny.

There’s also something a little queer about the character. Although he speaks a great deal of his success with the ladies, when Batey and Cavill have a run-in with elves, he wishes their male leader were just a little more attractive. Were the writers with it, they might have followed up on that. Giving him a crush on Cavill would help explain some of the character’s choices a little better. As it is, when he finally exits the series, ostensibly because Cavill has hit him with one too many insults, you can’t help wondering if the actor simply wasn’t available for any other episodes, the motivation is that weak.

There are some satisfying moments in the series, particularly when the sorcerers get to fighting, but at other places it just doesn’t feel thought out. There are fights shot in such murky darkness it’s hard to tell what’s going on. One episode introduces a shape-shifter who takes on a mage’s appearance in an attempt to lure Allan into the enemy camp (the sorcerer, Mousesack, is her family’s house mage). That plays well, with a satisfying if predictable pay-off. But then he takes on the appearance of the enemy commander who hired him (Eamon Farren), and their fight scene is almost impossible to follow.

The series’ structure is a bit of a challenge, too. The story jumps around in time with little explanation. Complicating that is the fact that several of the episodes follow three different plot strands — one each for Cavill, Chalotra and Allan — that are all taking place in different decades. Picking up the context cues is challenging, and they don’t really become clear until halfway through the first season. This would seem to mirror the way in which the Witcher books were written. The first series is drawn mostly from the two volumes of short stories that precede Sapkowski’s five novels, which suggests season two will pick up with the first novel, making it somewhat easier to follow (unless they keep staging fight scenes in the dark). Why the series’ creators didn’t just follow a chronological approach is an issue. Perhaps they wanted to introduce Allan’s character earlier than she would have fallen in a more straightforward narrative. That doesn’t seem a good enough reason to justify all the confusion, however. In the first episode, she’s told to find Cavill, but you don’t learn why until the end of the fourth. By then, her failure to find him seems a rather clumsy delaying tactic.

I’ll probably give the second series a chance, assuming we’re all still alive when it drops in 2021. Chalotra’s Yennifer alone is a sufficiently compelling character to justify further watching. And there’s always the chance series creator Lauren Schmidt Hissrich will listen to the gay fans. Jaskier doesn’t turn up in the novels, but there are some queer characters in the games that could provide reason for more than hate watching. Lord knows, the series needs it.

Gloria Bell

Julianne Moore and John Turturro have beautifully rounded characters in Gloria Bell.

Julianne Moore’s acting is so effortless it’s easy to take her body of work for granted. That may be why she’s only got one Oscar. Her performances are never obvious enough to catch the eyes of the people voting for awards. It took a showy role as a woman succumbing to dementia in Still Alice (2014) to finally bring home Oscar gold, and even that was a bit of a surprise. Still Alice is hardly a disease-of-the-week movie but rather a very subtle exploration of the dynamics of a marriage. She isn’t the whole show, either, as she gets wonderful support from Alec Baldwin as her husband and Kate Bosworth, Hunter Parrish and Kristen Stewart (yes, that Kristen Stewart) as her children. I’m just so used to seeing her work wonders with any script she’s given my first response on seeing her in last year’s Gloria Bell was, “She’s incandescent…as usual.”

Adapted from the Chilean Gloria (2013), the film follows a divorcee (Moore) dealing with a delayed case of empty nest syndrome. She’s been single for about a decade, and her children (Caren Pistorius and Michael Cera) are grown. All she has is a job as an insurance claims representative, and she knows that won’t last forever. In one touching scene, she bids goodbye to a retiring co-worker (Barbara Sukowa) with promises to reconnect that neither knows they’ll keep. Her only outlet is the dance clubs of Los Angeles, where she goes to release her energy and look for some connection. That’s where she meets Arnold (John Turturro), a recent divorcé looking for his own form of connection.

Under the direction of Sebastian Lelio, who also directed the original Gloria, the film gently explores the title character’s plight as a single woman. She’s got a lot to give. You can hear it in the way she speaks to clients over the phone. And you realize her children are drifting further from her, and her other major relationship, with her mother (Holland Taylor), is cordial but a little distant. Her future before she meets Arnold seems to revolve around a stray cat that keeps getting into her apartment.

Moore plays all this simply and truthfully. She never asks the audience to love her. She just presents Gloria with all her little quirks — the way she sneaks cigarettes when her disapproving children aren’t around, the uncertain way she offers to help her son with the infant child his wandering wife neglects, the distant look in her eyes as she dances. She’s a fully formed human being, and it’s hard not to get caught up in her story.

At times she seems almost the only fully realized character in the film. The rest of the cast is perfectly solid, but Alice Johnson Boher’s adaptation of the original screenplay by Lelio and Gonzolo Maza doesn’t give them a lot to do. That’s a problem when you have actors as good as Taylor and Sukowa. They don’t do anything to draw attention to themselves, but the mere knowledge of what they could do given half a chance becomes a little distracting. You keep wondering what’s going on when they’re not on screen. At a family birthday, we meet Gloria’s ex-husband (Brad Garrett). There are a few nice moments as they share memories. Then he breaks down with guilt over having failed to be there as a father, but the connections are missing. It’s not Garrett’s fault. The script doesn’t give him a way to get from nostalgia to regret.

The only other fully realized character in the film is Turturro’s Arnold. The actor has played so many demented roles, you almost expect his courtship of Moore to turn the film into a thriller, but he quickly dispels that. Turturro has a lighter side that’s rarely exploited. You have to see him in Allison Anders’ Grace of My Heart (1996) to realize he can be charmingly silly without losing any of the realism he brings to a role. The Anders films is ultimately a misfire. The veiled attempt to make a biography of Carole King sinks under too many soap opera twists and some new songs that aren’t good enough for a character inspired by King. But if you’ve seen it, you’ll remember the goofy grin on his face as he dances to cheer up the leading lady. You almost wish he were the one pursuing a recording career instead of her.

It’s easy to see how quickly Gloria is charmed by Arnold. Turturro really connects to Moore in their early scenes together, and the two actors create a powerful rapport. His role is so lived in that it’s hardly a surprise when problems crop up. He’s such a rounded individual, you’re not surprised to see he has a negative side. Arnold has baggage from his previous marriage, and you can tell the first time a call from one of his daughter’s interrupts a date that this isn’t going to be a rom com.

Moore and Turturro are so good, you keep wishing the other actors had the same opportunities to shine. It would be nice, in particular, to get some sense of what being women alone means to Sukowa and Taylor’s characters. That’s not to say that Moore can’t carry the film on her own. She’s so at ease in the role that moments where she’s overcome with emotion to the point you can’t tell whether she’s laughing or crying are like little gifts from the gods. It’s just that, given the wealth of talent at the film’s disposal, she shouldn’t have to.