Why "Wonder Woman" Is Such a Tearjerker
Walking into the theater to see Wonder Woman this week, I expected to feel many things: disappointment, despair, rage, and maybe if I was lucky, happiness. What I did not expect to feel was joy so real I teared up multiple times, in parts of the movie that were not at all related to the things that usually make me cry (dying pets, handsome men being nice to children, and Frodo volunteering to take the ring to Mordor). After the movie, my two coworkers reported the same phenomenon and we spent the entire walk to the subway listing all of the scenes where we were in danger of busting out the waterworks.
It’s possible that we got so weepy because we were all just super emotional this week or something, but I want to believe it was because Wonder Woman, though not flawless, was not only fun and well-made, but inspiring. Watching it felt like breathing out a sigh of relief. Finally, someone - a female director, to be specific - made a female superhero movie that’s actually good, and maybe a lot of people will go see it, so we don’t have to wait so long for the next one.
Wonder Woman is not the first female-led superhero movie, but it still feels like a landmark. The last time DC tried a female title character was in 2004 with Catwoman, an unmitigated disaster that won four Razzies and holds a 9 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Marvel hasn’t tried it since 2005’s Elektra (10 percent on Rotten Tomatoes) and won’t be trying it again till 2019’s Captain Marvel, the release date of which has already been pushed back twice. You don’t have to be a comics obsessive to be upset by this, though fans of She-Hulk, Batgirl, Ms. Marvel, and the like would truly love to know why those characters can’t get their own movies when the last 10 years alone have produced three each for Iron Man, Thor, Batman, Spider-Man, Wolverine, and Captain America. (And yes, I’m aware that DC is making a Batgirl movie, but I’ll never get over the fact that they hired a man to direct it, even if it is Joss Whedon.) To say that there’s a lot riding on Wonder Woman is an understatement - Johnny Depp will get to make as many mediocre Pirates of the Caribbean movies as he wants to until he dies, but if this one female-directed Wonder Woman fails, you know it’ll be another 15 years before anyone lets a female superhero have her own movie, and probably 75 till they hand the reigns of another blockbuster to a woman.
The fact that a woman got to direct this movie feels like a victory too, even if Patty Jenkins doesn’t seem to think it is. Women barely get to direct anything at Hollywood’s biggest studios, let alone major summer tentpoles like this one. To know that a woman, even one that I do not know and likely will never even meet, got to do it and do it so well made me proud, and hopeful that Jenkins won’t end up an outlier. It’s not that men aren’t capable of directing action movies with lead female characters - see George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road or Ridley Scott’s Alien for proof - but even the best ones have moments that remind you you’re seeing everything from a male perspective. Think of those lingering shots of Ellen Ripley in her underwear or the scene where Immortan Joe’s wives hose off next to the war rig. As powerful as those women are, they still end up looking objectified. That kind of stuff never happens in Wonder Woman, even as Diana and her Amazonian compatriots somersault across the screen in skimpy leather outfits - they just look strong. I don’t know if that’s Jenkins’s work or not, but it's hard not to hope that it is.
Politics of Hollywood aside, it’s really Wonder Woman herself who causes all the spontaneous outpourings of tears. Unlike so many other superheroes, she’s not emotionally damaged; above all, she believes in the power of love and the innate goodness of mankind. It’s a naïve way to live in 2017, but damn if it doesn’t feel good to wish for 2 1/2 hours that her way was the best way. Sitting in the theater, I actually started to get jealous of the little girls around me who were getting to watch it. How lucky they are to have a big-screen hero like this, who’s capable of saving the world without sacrificing her kind soul to darkness.
Her big action moments - storming through a field of bullets, climbing a rock wall with her bare hands - got me the hardest, I think because it had been so long since I’d seen a woman executing such feats in a movie. I love The Hunger Games, but Katniss is a teenager, played by a 21-year-old, and she was, after all, just human. It felt damn good to see an adult woman, played by a 32-year-old adult woman, doing the kind of stuff that Ben Affleck (44) and Robert Downey Jr. (52) get to do all the time. Maybe it does get better! Maybe I too can learn to deflect bullets with my cool bracelets!
It also felt great to watch Diana interact with other women, a thing that I don’t have to tell anyone does not happen very often in blockbusters, and especially superhero franchises. Has the Lois Lane of Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice ever even met another woman? I don’t know because I fell asleep during that movie, but my guess is no. Wonder Woman, by contrast, lives on an island populated entirely by women, one of whom is her super-badass mother, Queen Hippolyta, and another who’s her super-badass aunt, Antiope. No spoilers, but Antiope gets one of the coolest action sequences in the entire movie and I would pay literally all of my money to see a spin-off just about her.
Wonder Woman isn’t perfect, of course. I could have done without the big CGI battle at the end, as well as the decision to add wedge heels to Diana’s sandals. As much as I loved Chris Pine as Steve Trevor, he did get a lot more screen time than a female love interest ever has in a male hero’s movie. Etta Candy (Diana’s BFF in the comics) was sorely underused, especially because she was the only non-villainous female character present after the action left Themyscira.
But all of these are minor quibbles, that I could only even think about after I’d come down from the high of watching Diana destroy her enemies with honor and finesse. When I think about the movie in the future, I’ll only remember the good parts - the joy, the action, and that deep exhalation of “finally.”
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