Woman of the Hour – first-look review

Any num­ber of fac­tors can com­pel an actor to make the jump to direct­ing — inspi­ra­tion, hubris, a des­per­ate need to be tak­en seri­ous­ly as an artiste — but the case of Anna Kendrick doesn’t demand much guess­work. Woman of the Hour, a behind-the-cam­era debut that often plays like a cin­e­mat­ic equiv­a­lent of the aggra­vat­ed roar that one char­ac­ter unleash­es in the final act, gives her an out­let to expel her frus­tra­tion with all the belit­tling misog­y­ny she’s had to grin and bear over a career that began when she was an undoubt­ed­ly leered-at teenager. 

In Ian McAl­lis­ter McDonald’s script sweati­ly vamp­ing a cock­tail par­ty fac­toid to fea­ture length, a rework­ing over­drawn even at 89 min­utes, Kendrick saw an oppor­tu­ni­ty to spin a true-crime file into a con­dem­na­tion of less direct forms of vio­lence with­stood by women in her line of work as a fact of life. She intro­duces her­self in front of the lens as strug­gling actress Cheryl mid-audi­tion, seat­ed across from as a pair of cast­ing creeps apprais­ing her with the with­er­ing eval­u­a­tive frank­ness one might use to hag­gle for a used car. But hey, at least they’re not try­ing to kill her.

Long sto­ry short — well, short sto­ry short­er — Cheryl appeared on an episode of The Dat­ing Game in which Bach­e­lor Num­ber Three also hap­pened to be a ser­i­al mur­der­er. The cold-blood­ed exploits of Rod­ney Alcala (Daniel Zovat­to, look­ing like a young Vin­cent D’Onofrio) punc­tu­ate the con­vey­or belt of mis­treat­ment pulling Cheryl through the evening’s stu­dio shoot, and form an unsub­tle link between his years-long spree of homi­cides and the enter­tain­ment industry’s ongo­ing cam­paign of objec­ti­fi­ca­tion epit­o­mised in the bum-pinch­ing chau­vin­ism of ​’70s game shows.

With a cam­era slung around his neck and rangy hair down to his shoul­ders, Rod­ney sweet-talks a hand­ful of seem­ing­ly-sen­si­ble women into dri­ving out to the desert with a hand­some yet unset­tling stranger, where he then stran­gles them in a drably repet­i­tive visu­al pat­tern. (Take a shot every time Kendrick cuts from a close-up to a pseu­do-art­ful extreme wide shot with some obscur­ing ele­ment in the fore­ground, then back to a close-up.)

Back in the present of 1978, a time when lapels were wide and hosts could mouth-kiss oth­er men’s wives on nation­al tele­vi­sion, Cheryl runs a gamut of on-set micro-aggres­sions start­ing as the mas­ter of cer­e­monies (Tony Hale) nix­es the dress she’s worn in favour of some­thing with a swoop­i­er neck­line. As in the like-mind­ed yet far supe­ri­or Toron­to Inter­na­tion­al Film Fes­ti­val selec­tion The Roy­al Hotel, all men are out to get women, the only ques­tion being their modus operan­di. Cheryl’s nice-guy neigh­bour (Pete Holmes) makes a move on her, then gets pis­sy when she rebuffs him; the emcee instructs her to smile and be pret­ty, and busts out the C‑word (in the seri­ous, Amer­i­can way) after she goes rogue and flex­es her intellect. 

A sub­plot fur­ther padding the plush­ly-cush­ioned run time sounds out a call to Believe Women all but ver­ba­tim, real­ly ham­mer­ing home the points Kendrick has already made a half-dozen times over. She’s not wrong, of course; the author­i­ties respon­si­ble for pro­tect­ing the pub­lic reg­u­lar­ly dis­re­gard female con­cerns, but she’s lung­ing at low-hang­ing fruit in terms of gen­dered media critiques. 

It’s more than a lit­tle telling that an actress-turned-direc­tor would con­clude her debut with one woman’s choice to turn her back on the craft and improve her life far away from the meat grinder of Los Ange­les. And it’s cer­tain­ly under­stand­able, con­sid­er­ing the film we’ve just seen. The cru­el irony is that that expe­ri­ence also sug­gests she should not quit her cor­ro­sive, con­sump­tive day job.