I sometimes dread reading interviews with actors. You know what I mean – you’re taken with that rare strong, intelligent female lead on a TV show or movie, and then you hear her interviewed on Letterman. She simpers. Or she voted for Bush, both times. And watching her act is never quite the same again. But this is never the case with Ellen Page, lately of Juno fame. (If you missed it, you can, in fact, see her smart interview with Letterman here.) Page gave an interview over the weekend with WashingtonPost.com, and the only person who made me cringe was the interviewer, who couldn’t resist a Canadian joke or obvious question. One subject was the critical “backlash” against Juno that began its multi-pronged attack after the film picked up four Oscar nods. Nobody around here is guilty of that crime, but some critics have been trash-talking the film.
For one, Vanity Fair‘s S.T. VanAirsdale, complains about the movie’s placement next to There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men in the Oscar lineup:
“Frankly, I don’t want to see Juno within a thousand feet of the Kodak Theater. I want her and her twee champions stopped at the metal detector. I want her turned away for being underdressed.”Hmm, no sexist undertones in this conversation at all. Then there’s also the abortion debate, complete with politicized readings of the film’s basic plot.
Page’s response? “People are obviously going to take a movie about teenage pregnancy and figure out something to talk about. So they can have something to talk about. That’s what people do.” Well. True. And this talk is sort of inevitable in a country where any subject dealing with teenagers and sex morphs into a political debate about abstinence and abortion. As for the argument that Juno is a pro-life film (or one of a number of insidious pregnancy comedies from 2007), Page dismisses that completely:
“It happens to be a film about a girl who has a baby and gives it to a yuppie couple. That’s what the movie’s about. Like, I’m really sorry to everyone that she doesn’t have an abortion, but that’s not what the film is about. She goes to an abortion clinic and she completely examines all the opportunities and all the choices allowed her and that’s obviously the most crucial thing. It’s as simple as that.”
Of course Page is right about having the baby being necessary to the film, which is a comedy. I suspect comedy featuring the issue of abortion is something only Sarah Silverman would touch.
After all of this, it’s no surprise that Page lays out her views on feminism with a straightforward assessment:
“I call myself a feminist when people ask me if I am, and of course I am ’cause it’s about equality, so I hope everyone is. You know you’re working in a patriarchal society when the word feminist has a weird connotation.”I really couldn’t agree more.
