Running With Perseverance

While my husband went to visit his father after Christmas, I took advantage of my “bachelorette” time to see some movies I knew he wasn’t interested in.

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The setting is Denmark in the 1760s. The basic story line: A young British woman (Caroline Mathilde) is married off to her cousin King Christian VII of Denmark, who is mildly (?) insane. She eventually falls in love with his personal physician, Johann Friedrich Struensee, and together they try to influence the King to bring the Enlightenment to Denmark.

This was a lovely movie. All of the characters were well-developed, earning your sympathy despite their flaws. The story also brought to life the early days of the Enlightenment and made me want to brush up on my European history.

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Fast-forward 100 years to Anna Karenina. The story is well-known. I found this review by “DarkVictoria” on IMDB to be quite fitting:

Joe Wright’s “Anna Karenina” – like Olivier’s “Henry V” – opens as a staged performance, but instead of melting into reality, we are in for the long haul in this dilapidated doll’s-house theatre, we find ourselves in. Amid ropes and pulleys, footlights and curtains, the story begins – characters meander down staircases and traipse across the stage. There is a sense of the overtly theatrical – the characters swirl into the action and introduce themselves (in a manner, somewhat reminiscent of Baz Luhrmann’s “Moulin Rouge!” – but without the musical numbers), before the set revolves and turns upon itself – like a children’s pop-up book. ….

I found the cinematic devices distracting, and felt no empathy whatsoever for Anna Karenina–but maybe that’s the point? Interestingly, the actress who played Caroline Mathilde in A Royal Affair (Alicia Vikander) also was in this movie.

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Fast forward (almost) another 100 years, and you arrive at Hyde Park On Hudson.  This movie tells the story of the relationship between President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his cousin (“5th or 6th removed”) Daisy, and focuses on the weekend in 1939 when FDR hosted the King and Queen of England at his (mother’s) home, Hyde Park.

Taking the story at face-value, it is an interesting “behind-the-scenes” look at a President and a weekend in our nation’s history, but I also found it a bit discouraging. In the back of my mind was an editorial by Stacy Wolf that I’d read in The December 28, 2012 Washington Post. Writing about the female characters in Les Miserables, she says:

They exist not to drive the plot but to sacrifice for the men, the real stars of the show.

Answering her title question (“Why we love ‘Les Miserables,’ despite its miserable gender stereotypes”), she writes:

The female stereotypes in “Les Miz” are deeply embedded in our culture — the mother who sacrifices herself to the death, the two women who love the same man, and the woman who desires a man in a different class. These characters are readily available, always recognizable and appealing in their familiarity.

Almost the same could be said for the female characters in Hyde Park On Hudson. I hope our acceptance of these characters in literature and movies doesn’t mean that we accept these roles for women in real life. Bring back Katniss Everdeen!

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And that brings me back (in time) to Les Miserables. I wasn’t sure I wanted to see this movie, but I found a willing friend to accompany me to a New Year’s Day matinee. I’m so glad we went–I really enjoyed it. The singing was seamless–not distracting like the effects in Anna Karenina–and it’s such a good story! It wasn’t as depressing as I expected–maybe the characters’ stubborn perseverance lends a bit of optimism to the dire circumstances.