Promising Young Woman – Uncomfortable Yet Necessary
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When discussing societal issues, I do my very best not to speak in hyperbolic terms. As a student of history, you come to realize that most of what we proclaim to be so much worse now is equal to, or perhaps less than, what we’ve experienced in decades past.
But there are times when injustices that are etched into our ecosystems start to run free of their protection. As we’ve seen in the past few years, the #MeToo movement is shedding more light while bringing about tougher and harsher consequences on our problem with consent.
This seems like the time to note that sexual assault against young girls and women across the globe continues to happen at an alarmingly high rate. It has been historically used as a tool of war or torture in the process of genocide, and that is happening once more in our world as we speak.
Yet Americans tend to believe that sexual assault is always this brutally violent encounter. (Perhaps it has to do with our sadistic obsession with serial killers?) And since violence usually comes with an assortment of visible evidence, well, if we can’t see that she was a victim, then she had to have consented, right? Or it was somehow her fault?
“Promising Young Woman” confronts all of these questions and then some, peeling back the layers of institutional patriarchy and highlighting how so many victims are failed at many different places. Most striking is its indictment on the totality of the system. It isn’t just incompetent and insensitive police departments, though they are part of the problem. It isn’t just law firms that defend serial rapists in the name of due process and capitalism, though they function as devils pursing through details. It isn’t just colleges that continue to sweep it under the rug, even though it’s most pervasive on their campuses. There’s lots of blame to go around, and not nearly enough people willing to help clean it up.
As a film, “PYM” is far from a masterpiece. Some of the key elements of the plot far deep into the realm of implausible. But the film is carried by the fact that nothing seems impossible within the script, which in itself leaves you furious, frustrated, frightened, and full of hope. It’s an emotional rollercoaster that, unfortunately, nearly every woman you know will be able to identify with.
One would be remiss to omit mention of the exceptional performance of Carey Mulligan as Cassandra, who takes a good script and decent cinematography and catapults it into memorable status. She became one of my favorites in the Netflix limited series “Collateral” and has continued her ascent. Ryan (Bo Burnham) surprisingly reels you in with his charm and unique quirkiness. Connie Britton makes what amounts to a cameo appearance. You leave the credits wishing you had a little more of Laverne Cox as Gail, who meshed so incredibly well with Cassandra and whose presence could’ve loomed a little larger across the entire experience. Perhaps all of this was intentional.
In the end, this is Mulligan’s film from start to finish. It exposes her incredible range and forces you to appreciate the detailed, charming and nuanced character traits she brings to every project. On the merits, that’s what makes “PYM” a film that won’t fade into oblivion. It’s not a mistake that Mulligan is able to bring to life the experiences of so many women. If you look deep at the grittiness of her performance, you find in real life a woman that worked to bring to life on the big screen the complexity of women, all the while obsessed with forcing a failing system to see the independent humanity in all women. It’s an unenviable task. Mulligan did it to perfection. Her hopes of walking away with the Academy Award for Best Actress seem, well, quite promising.
