Delayed Reaction: This Changes Everything

Premise: A thorough presentation about how women are underserved in Hollywood.

 

Is this a cinematic documentary? No. It comes from the school of “If I use enough clips of things people recognize, the rest can be as dry as I want”. To be fair, I don’t think the point of this is to make a compelling documentary. It’s not an exploration of women’s place in Hollywood history that organically reaches the conclusion that Hollywood has failed them. It’s more like a mission statement. It has the feeling of a short film I’d see at an exhibit in a museum or amusement part. Very polished. Very structured. It serves the same purpose as the Geena Davis Institute’s reports on representation of women in Hollywood. If someone ever questions it, they can point to this movie instead of having to explain it every time.

 

In that sense, This Changes Everything is quite good. It’s a really really thorough argument about all the ways women in Hollywood have been failed consciously and unconsciously. Statistic after statistic it covers all sides of the argument. It traces the source of the different problems and the assorted attempts to correct them. It addresses the challenges from representation in children’s programming to the complex production structure that gives everyone else a scapegoat to blame other than themselves.

 

This is more of an intro-level course than an advanced seminar. I was surprised by how much I already know just from how much I follow trades like Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. Like, I’ve heard about Mo Ryan’s study on female TV directors and John Landgraf’s response at FX so many times now that I could’ve nearly quoted it going in. I didn’t know as much about some of the history though. I’m a big fan of how much numbers are the hero of the story. I can get tired of estimations and guesses. For this topic, the numbers and baseline are easy. Half the population vs. whatever puny numbers they find. It’s immediate and striking.

 

It’s nice too that the movie ends on a pretty hopeful note. We’ve heard of all the times a movie was supposed to change everything and it doesn’t. This ends up being as much a call to action as an account of past wrongs.

 

I’m probably in a minority here, but I wish they would’ve just left Trump out. Throwing him in as a villain and the reason for change felt too clean and undermined the many efforts before him. Sure, he’s a part of the Time’s Up and Me Too movements but he’s not really the cause of the many ills the movie focuses on. He’s a symptom. It really wasn’t a large part of the movie, but it stuck out for whatever reason.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend