The Case for Patty Jenkins to Direct Star Wars: Episode IX
Note: This essay contains some spoilers for both The Book of Henry and Wonder Woman.
Don’t let anyone tell you that in “the age of television,” movies don’t matter: even though there may be too many franchise films, the best of them still allow us to experience a collective energy with an audience that can literally send us soaring. In the wake of the last two films I’ve seen in theaters, Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman and Colin Trevorrow’s The Book of Henry, I feel compelled to write this essay in the hope that Star Wars, the Holy Grail of Hollywood franchises, rethinks the direction it’s heading in as Trevorrow’s Episode IX is slated for release in a little less than two years.
Jenkins and Trevorrow have had vastly different career arcs, much of it because of their difference in gender — but I’m not writing this solely as an expose on the systemic inequalities women face in Hollywood as opposed to men — blaming any one person for such a problem is unfair to both the problem and the person in question. However, it’s telling that Patty Jenkins took a long path to get to Wonder Woman. When she wrote and directed her first movie in 2003, Monster, film critics heralded the arrival of a major talent behind of and in front of the camera, as Charlize Theron’s unforgettable performance as serial killer Aileen Wournos won every award in sight, including the Oscar. Since then, Jenkins labored behind the scenes for more than a decade, receiving DGA and Emmy nominations for the pilot of AMC’s The Killing and directing one of my favorite episodes of Arrested Development (season 2’s “The One Where They Build a House”), but not directing another film: she was fired from Marvel’s Thor: The Dark World, and came on to Wonder Woman as a replacement for Michelle McLaren, who was dropped from the project in the spring of 2015.
Trevorrow, on the other hand, had one of the most auspicious jumps to the big leagues of any director in recent years. After directing the charming and inventive sci-fi indie Safety Not Guaranteed in 2012, he found himself in the directors’ chair for 2015's Jurassic World, the re-launch of the Jurassic Park franchise, budgeted at over $100 million. While to my mind the film was bland and forgettable, it became the fourth highest-grossing movie of all time. Trevorrow had a hit, but he skipped the intermediate phase most directors experience of handling films with slightly bigger budgets, inching their way up the ladder. Mark Harris, one of our finest entertainment journalists, had this to say about it:
“Trevorrow certainly does not seem to have lacked for confidence. But experience counts, too…from how you elicit performances from actors to how you manage storytelling to how shrewd you are about picking your battles. Midrange movies give directors who have studio aspirations a chance to discover who they are…if Hollywood insists that we no longer need any intermediate steps between Sundance and blockbuster, there are going to be casualties.”
The first major casualty of this new rank-and-filing method was Episode IX’s original director, Josh Trank. His found-footage superhero film Chronicle was a box office hit in 2012, and landed him the reboot of Marvel’s Fantastic Four (aka Fant4stic.) The film was an artistic and commercial disaster, and Trank’s unprofessional behavior during its press tour was enough to cost him the Star Wars job. Fresh off the success of Jurassic World that same summer, Trevorrow came on as his replacement, but decided to make one smaller film in between franchises. Now that this film, The Book of Henry, has been released to a critical drubbing, I worry that the Star Wars franchise must find a new director once more. But back to Patty Jenkins.
That she has blasted through layers of Hollywood sexist bullshit to make Wonder Woman is a remarkable feat in and of itself, but without the happy ending of the film’s success, this victory would not feel as fulfilling. Wonder Woman is one of the finest superhero movies ever made. Its performances are all great, its cinematography free of the manufactured teal-and-orange look that plagues the Marvel films (and also Jurassic World), and it has the best action sequences of any major studio film since Mad Max: Fury Road. And while I think the opening scenes on the island are a little worn down by the exposition-laden dialogue, it is an incredible feeling to watch a movie for fifteen minutes and realize that it’s passed the Bechdel Test in every scene so far.
But what makes Wonder Woman a great movie is that it transcends its genre (superhero) by embracing other various genres and subgenres swirling within its main storyline. As an antiwar film it stands with All Quiet on the Western Front and Paths of Glory, and the scene where Diana Prince saves a small French village from destruction, only to find it destroyed later, is a great comment on the needless slaughter of the First World War. It features the best love story, between Diana and Chris Pine’s Steve Trevor, of any superhero film since Spider-Man 2. It’s a “bunch of guys (and girls) on a mission film” in the tradition of The Dirty Dozen, particularly when they get into the castle. It’s an education film, in which the protagonist moves to a higher plateau of self-knowledge by learning the rules of another world. And of course, it is an extraordinary story of female empowerment, one that is being embraced all throughout the world as young girls can finally see a hero who looks like them.
Compared to Wonder Woman’s genre balancing act, The Book of Henry is tonal disaster which jumps the shark with reckless abandon. I saw the film last night after reading the reviews, and, while watching the first act of the film unfold, thought it couldn’t be as bad as I’d read. The first twenty-five minutes of Trevorrow’s film depict Henry, an eleven-year-old genius, solving a mystery concerning the girl next door, who suffers from physical abuse from her father, the police chief. Not your typical subject matter for a kids’ film, and the dialogue and style were pretty arch, but I was with it — that is, until Henry gets brain cancer, dies, and then directs his mom in a plot from beyond the grave to kill the father of the girl next door (the movie insists this is the only way to solve the problem, for reasons we’re never told.)
Any film that simultaneously tries to emulate (as one Twitter writer put it), PS I Love You, Simon Birch and Rear Window is going to be troubled from the word “go,” but The Book of Henry is a very special kind of bad, in much the same way last year’s Collateral Beauty was. They both claim to be stories about the grieving process, but do so with such ham-fisted manipulation and cynical naiveté that the characters’ actions cease to make sense. Like Collateral Beauty, Henry’s plot is absurdly convoluted, and ends on a total cop-out rending all of his beyond-the-grave directions to his mother completely useless as all the characters walk away from their actions free of any consequences.
Critics are already discussing the film’s badness in the context of Trevorrow’s news assignment, as indicated by these reviews here:
This leads me to my main point, why the producers Star Wars should ditch Trevorrow and hire Patty Jenkins to direct the final film of this new trilogy.
First of all, Jenkins is a more capable director of action than Trevorrow. It’s not just that the action scenes in Wonder Woman beat the ones in Jurassic World black and blue (cough teal and orange cough), it’s that she understands how to create suspense. My favorite moment in Monster comes when Aileen has a middle-aged man at gunpoint, and he offers to help her. Too far gone to embrace his offer, she shoots him. The scene, in the tradition of Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” portrays both the killer and the victim with empathy, allowing us to understand their mindsets while we dread the eventual pulling of the trigger. I haven’t seen Monster since it came out — honestly, it’s a hard film to watch more than once — but it’s scenes like that which have kept it fresh in my mind since I first saw it.
Secondly, although Jenkins’ filmography is sadly limited, she has gone through the trenches in the way that Harris advocates by directing for television, the new equivalent to mid-budget cinema. Although Bret Easton Ellis railed on his podcast this week about why TV directing is always inferior to movie directing, I’d be loathe to deny that some of the best directing now happens in television, whether it’s the action scenes in the pilot of Noah Hawley’s Legion, Aziz Ansari’s romantic depictions of Manhattan in Master of None, and Episode VIII director Rian Johnson’s episodes of Breaking Bad, regarded by critics as some of the finest hours of of TV produced in this country. Jenkins’ TV work in between films, as well as the time she spent preparing for Thor: The Dark World, went on to serve her on Wonder Woman.
But most importantly, to give Jenkins Star Wars is a strike against Hollywood’s long tradition of denying women the chance to ascend the ranks, and a chance for the franchise to right its wrongs last year, when producer Kathleen Kennedy said she had a hard time finding women to direct future entries in the franchise because “they’re gigantic films, and you can’t come into them with essentially no experience.” While she clarified her remarks in a second interview, she still dug herself into a hole, making it seem that to pass the “experience” threshold, other people have to give women the chance to get said “experience” before they’re able to consider them. Granted, not every woman can, or should, be an action director — but what does that make the experience of Kimberly Peirce? Or Michelle McLaren? Or Lesli Linka Glatter?
And let’s face it: apart from Princess Leia, the Star Wars universe does not have a huge roster of female characters. Women were rightly pissed when a photo of the first reading for The Force Awakens came out depicting mostly white dudes plus Daisy Ridley and Carrie Fisher. Fortunately, JJ Abrams and company brought in Lupita Nyong’o and Gwendolyn Christie — a small step, to be sure, but a step in the right direction, given that Ridley’s Rey is now the face of the franchise. Having Jenkins craft the climax to her story would be an appropriate way to end this trilogy and a symbol of things to come as the story’s universe expands and more new characters get included.
Trevorrow’s still slated to take the reins, and while he’s written movingly about how Wonder Woman empowered his daughter and inspired him in creating Episode IX, this is not a man who does female characters justice, except for Aubrey Plaza’s lead in Safety Not Guaranteed. Bryce Dallas Howard’s heartless, corporate bureaucrat in Jurassic World deserved all the pushback she got, and Naomi Watts’ grieving, cartoonish, clad-in-leather-and-holding-a-sniper-rifle mother in The Book of Henry is an insult to anyone who has ever had to grieve for a lost child. I’m not saying he can’t write for women, or that he won’t write well for them again, but who do you trust more to finish Rey’s story? The woman who gave you Diana Prince, or the guy who put Bryce Dallas Howard in heels while she ran away from raptors?
Star Wars isn’t just a movie franchise — it’s a cornerstone of American cultural mythology in the same ways as The Iliad, The Odyssey, and the Knights of the Round Table have been to their respective cultures. We learn these stories as children because they give us characters to admire and want to emulate when we grow up, regardless of what they look like or what their gender is. They also stand for the values we hold dear and, whether we’re aware of it or not, shape our sense of right and wrong.
When I attended the Women’s March in Los Angeles last January, I saw a sign with Princess Leia that said, “A woman’s place is in the resistance.” What stayed with me about that was not just the sign, but a small boy sitting on his Dad’s shoulders who asked, “Daddy, who is that?” He said, “She was a leader in the Rebellion and she helped bring down the Empire.” Here was a new generation learning from her the way that I had twenty years ago when I saw the film for the first time.
We’re already seeing this happen with Wonder Woman, and I challenge you not to look at the above article (and this one) and think about how the art we make, and the people who make it, matters, especially in this fraught political climate where women are leading us out of the darkness and encouraging us to resist. Replacing Trevorrow with Jenkins will not rectify Hollywood’s sexism problem, but it will send a message to young girls everywhere that they can get ahead, and the biggest opportunities do not need to be reserved for men only.
