A Few True Things

At the end of “Living Out Loud,” a quirky movie starring Holly Hunter and Danny DeVito, Hunter’s character glides down a dark street in New York City, a street we’ve seen her walk down before. This time, though, she is alive to the sights and sounds around her. She sings along with an unseen radio. And the look on her face speaks of serenity, even grace.

Writer-director Richard LaGravenese modeled the scene on the final shots of Federico Fellini’s 1957 masterpiece “Nights of Cabiria”: Giulietta Masina, having suffered a series of disappointments--a lifetime of blows, really--gets up off the ground after being robbed by a man who she had thought cared about her. Refusing to be defeated, she walks away down a street alive with people, her face aglow with an unconquerable, if at first wobbly, smile.

That “Living Out Loud” should quote from “Cabiria” is fitting not only because its portrayal of an indomitable spirit echoes that movie’s theme but also for another, unintended reason: LaGravenese, like Fellini in his decades-long collaboration with his wife, Masina, has chosen to explore issues dear to his heart through a character who is female.

Once such a thing was more common. When there were few female filmmakers to interpret their own reality--and there still are too few--Fellini and Ingmar Bergman plumbed the female psyche in film after film. They worked with female partners whose contributions were inseparable from our appreciation of the movies they appeared in. The same may be said of the films John Cassavetes made with his wife, Gina Rowlands. And Woody Allen has had long, fruitful creative partnerships with a number of women. Perhaps most notable is the series of movies he made with Mia Farrow, including “The Purple Rose of Cairo,” “Alice,” “Hannah and Her Sisters” and “Another Woman.”

Few Hollywood pairings have been so memorable, but strong female characters were central in a flood of studio melodramas from the 1930s to the ‘50s.

“Bette Davis was the box-office star of the period from about 1938 to 1941,” said LaGravenese, referring to the era--before television usurped the role--when stories about human relationships were a Hollywood staple.

In today’s movie climate, however--despite a number of recent and upcoming high-profile exceptions--independent films are the place to look for strong and honest portrayals of women. (“Living Out Loud,” a New Line release, was produced by the independent Jersey Films.)

A few years ago, the ascendancy of the strong female was a trend extolled in Hollywood. The 1993 Academy Awards chose “The Year of the Woman” as their theme. By early 1996--in the wake of a slew of feminized box-office hits such as “Waiting to Exhale” and “Sense and Sensibility”--the people whose job it is to remark upon such things murmured in assent that women finally were having their day.

But as far as mainstream films are concerned, the long-awaited resurgence of movies that feature strong women didn’t happen.

A small number of actresses have always been able to find great parts or to make nothing roles look great because of their talent, said Hunter, naming Jessica Lange, Meryl Streep, Susan Sarandon and Laura Dern, among others. But for most actresses, getting cast in a part with the complexity and depth of Judith, the role she plays in “Living Out Loud,” is “like finding a $100 bill in the street,” she said. “It just rarely happens.”

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“Living Out Loud” comes on the heels of another film in which female issues are central and dealt with realistically. In “One True Thing,” a young professional woman who’d single-mindedly pursued her career comes to see the honor in her mother’s homebound life. Women also are more than peripheral in a number of other movies released this year, including “How Stella Got Her Groove Back,” “Beloved,” “Ever After,” “High Art” and “Slums of Beverly Hills,” as well as the upcoming “Stepmom” and “Hilary and Jackie.”

“Stepmom” screenwriter Gigi Levangie noted, though, that the few recent studio movies that have dealt with grown-up women’s issues--such as “One True Thing” and “Beloved”--were commercial disappointments.

“Things are starting to change,” but in a limited way, said Joan Hyler, who manages a number of actresses and is chairwoman of the Morning Star Commission, a year-old group of 30 professional women that looks at how women are represented in Hollywood.

“The trend this year--and this is a trend that’s only 6 months old and hasn’t paid off yet--is films like ‘Disturbing Behavior,’ ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer,’ ‘Urban Legends’ and ‘Scream II’ that try to capitalize on the youth market” by relying on actresses that come from television, she said.

“But by and large, if you canvass the major studio releases for the next year, you’re not going to find many substantial roles for women,” she said.

Even more rare is a female central character written by a man where gender is immaterial to the story’s underlying concerns.

The original impetus for “Living Out Loud,” LaGravenese said, was his desire to examine the issue of loneliness “and the need to be seen, the need to connect.” He could have explored these themes with a character named Jake. Instead, he added a different dimension to the story by crafting a film around a woman in a story that grows organically out of the character’s femaleness.

Since writing “The Fisher King” in 1991, LaGravenese has specialized in high-profile adaptations of other people’s books, such as “The Bridges of Madison County,” “The Horse Whisperer” and “Beloved.” With this film, his first directorial effort, he wasn’t bound by someone else’s vision. “Living Out Loud” ended up being the most personal work of his career, in ways he did not plan.

“I look at the movie and see a lot of what I’ve been trying for in my own life, which really is to get out of my head and live now in my spirit, my body, my instincts, my heart,” he said. “I felt so naked with this film. When I showed the script, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, I feel like my pants are down around my ankles.’ ”

Hunter, too, felt personally connected. The character was complex enough that she could bring aspects of herself to the part that usually go untapped. “I did this movie because of Judith,” she said of her character.

The movie explores its protagonist’s inner life--her fantasies, memories and aspirations--as she pulls herself together after a devastating divorce. She feels victimized and abandoned at first, but she comes to realize that she had submerged her own identity during the 16-year marriage.

LaGravenese based the character partly on his sister, who endured a difficult divorce and then went back to school to become a nurse. There also are traces of Judith Regan, the book publisher, who lives two floors above LaGravenese in his New York apartment building and whose daughter is his daughter’s best friend. The rest, he said, was “the work of my imagination,” influenced by his reading of Chekhov and Jungian psychology.

Interestingly, while “Living Out Loud” differs greatly from “One True Thing” in style and approach, the movies share an almost identical piece of dialogue that perhaps has particular resonance at this moment in the nation’s consciousness. In “One True Thing,” Meryl Streep, the good wife and mother, reveals to her daughter that she’s long known her husband (William Hurt) was unfaithful, and she speaks of the accommodations she’s made for the marriage.

The corresponding moment in “Living Out Loud” takes place in the restroom of a jazz club. Sitting drunkenly on the floor, her back against the wall, Hunter’s character finally stops deluding herself and acknowledges her shell of a marriage. “He can do whatever he wants as long as he stays,” she says, putting her old feelings into words. “There are all kinds of marriages. At least I’m married. At least I’m safe. It’s amazing, isn’t it, the things you find yourself agreeing to.”

Eventually, Judith rediscovers her extinguished spirit. The event is externalized in a nightclub scene in which this woman who had been imprisoned inside her head reconnects with her own physicality and then embraces a vision of her younger self on the dance floor.

The lyrics of every song in the film serve as commentary on the scene they accompany. And, just as Fellini foreshadows the first scene of “Cabiria” as well as the overall arc of the film in the opening movement of the Nino Rota score, LaGravenese telegraphs his entire movie in a song (sung by Queen Latifah) early in “Living Out Loud.”

“Life is lonely again, and only last year everything seemed so sure,” she sings in the song “Lush Life,” “ . . . all I care is to smile in spite of it.”

These are the words Hunter mouths at the beginning of the movie, alone in her dark apartment. But her tune changes. “It ends,” LaGravenese said, “with her walking down the street, singing out loud, in the world, in life again.”

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Some people deride movies that deal with feelings and relationships as sentimental “women’s pictures,” “soapers” of little consequence, but the Hollywood melodramas of old have been championed in recent years by modernist, feminist and Marxist critics who see subversiveness beneath the surface of the best of them, including those directed by Douglas Sirk, Vincente Minnelli and Nicholas Ray.

Film historian Thomas Schatz has written of the subtle questioning of the social order and conventions that may be found in these movies and contended that they are “among the most socially self-conscious and covertly ‘anti-American’ films ever produced by the Hollywood studios.” And Allison Anders, a feminist writer-director who is critical of the way male filmmakers usually portray women, praises Sirk melodramas as “some of the greatest women-centered stories” ever.

Her beef with the movie business isn’t limited to its failure to portray women realistically but also extends to the lack of economic, social and ethnic diversity on the screen. “I very seldom see people that I relate to in the movies--men or women, or children,” said Anders, who wrote and directed “Mi Vida Loca” and “Gas Food Lodging.” I never see children who look like real children to me. . . . Is it better if a women is at the center of the story that I can’t relate to?”

Screenwriter Levangie, whose “Stepmom” opens Dec. 25, said she doesn’t like categorizing movies by gender. Her film is a fictionalized account of what happened when she married divorced film producer Brian Grazer. Julia Roberts plays a woman who encounters problems when she marries a man who has children and a resentful ex-wife, played by Susan Sarandon.

Levangie said she didn’t set out to write a woman-centered script, and her future work will vary widely in approach. “I wrote ‘Stepmom’ because it dealt with something I was going through,” she said.

Some would argue that that sort of film, addressing real-life situations in a woman’s life, is precisely what has been too rare.

Anders accuses production executives of cowardice. For years she’s tried to get a script produced, “Paul Is Dead,” about a young girl with a horrible home life who believes she has been impregnated by a dead Paul McCartney. It takes place in 1969, in the middle of the Paul-is-dead hysteria.

“They are afraid of the fantasy stuff,” she said. “People really don’t want to know what is inside of a woman’s head. Then I see a movie like ‘Pleasantville,’ and I’m like, ‘Tell me why ‘Paul Is Dead’ is such a scary thing and ‘Pleasantville’ is not?’ ”

Another of her films, which finally is about to get made but on a very low budget, is about “the karmic cost of rape for men.” One central character in “Things Behind the Sun” is a man who feels guilt and remorse long after he participates in a gang assault.

“I see guys making movies all the time about all kinds of stuff that is very dark,” she said. “It comes down to this: How much do men really want to know about women? I don’t know if Hollywood is going to ever show us what’s true about ourselves.”