“Promising Young Woman” Shows Plenty of Promise…
…But Doesn’t Deliver The Total Package
Spoilers ahead for “Promising Young Woman”
Promising Young Woman’s cold open — set to passable house music in a lukewarm, cramped room populated by losers in suits who buy into the establishment’s attempt to masquerade as a shitty nightclub — is one of the definitive scenes of 2020. After getting a lay of the land and introducing a trio of these corporate squares by name, writer-director Emerald Fennell’s camera settles on Cassie, our titular hero played by Carey Mulligan. She looks far too drunk for her own good, presumably abandoned by any friends with whom she arrived at this bar; she can’t help but draw these creeps’ attention. Jerry, played by Adam Brody (one of several perpetual nice-guy actors going against type here), is the only member of the three who attempts at all to disguise his interest in taking advantage of her and meanders over to offer assistance and a ride back home for this mysterious girl who’s missing her phone.
Jerry and Cassie, magically, end up at Jerry’s apartment, where Jerry begins kissing a still-intoxicated Cassie; he wants to keep going and she has no hope of protesting. If she’s as wasted as she looks, that is. Which she’s not.
Jerry’s yet another “nice guy” whom Cassie exposes as not-so-nice behind closed doors. She does the same thing to a few other guys in the first hour of Promising Young Woman, none of whom are as skilled as Jerry at pretending to be a good guy. Cassie will happily receive any and all takers; the journal she keeps evinces she’s been doing this for years.
The second man Cassie confronts during the movie’s exposition is one we do not see — audio of his attempts to pick Cassie up is laid over a montage of silhouettes dancing and Cassie ultimately marking down another conquest in her diary.
Promising Young Woman is nothing if not unsubtle, and while its acid-dipped flamboyance accentuates Fennell’s elucidation of rape culture and the double standard society propagates in its presence, it goes for broke in its examination of how Cassie herself gains fulfillment from her revenge fantasies on unsuspecting men. This isn’t to say Cassie’s willingness to expose these men is unjustifiable or dishonorable, but it’s sometimes difficult to see how she’s still telling herself that this is done solely in honor of her friend Nina, her best friend whose rape in medical school, and subsequent dropout and suicide, lends itself both to the film’s title and to Cassie’s motivations for doing the only thing that injects any purpose into her life. There’s even the implication that Cassie’s repeated skewering of these disingenuous men is not borne of a want to stick it to the system as much as it comes from a need to somehow maintain Nina’s presence in her otherwise friendless life. It begs the audience to ask if Cassie still thinks Nina is a friend or just an idea in her head whom she uses as an excuse to justifiably take her own anger out on someone else.
The thread that runs down the movie’s core is its most electric element: Cassie, finally removed enough from the trauma of medical school, systematically confronts everyone culpable for the miscarriage of justice that ruined her life and ended Nina’s: Madison (Alison Brie in an excellent supporting performance), a member of Cassie’s graduating class who didn’t believe Nina; the dean of the medical school (Connie Britton), who decided against investigating the rape or disciplining the student in question; the rapist’s lawyer (Alfred Molina), racked with guilt for harassing and threatening not only Nina but also plenty of other women with similar allegations, and finally Nina’s rapist Al Monroe (Chris Lowell) and his buddies that encouraged him on that fateful night many years ago.
Cassie terrifies both Madison and the dean in respective attempts to put them into Nina’s and Cassie’s shoes: she gets Madison blackout drunk at a lunch date and hires a man to take Madison back to a hotel room under the pretense that he took advantage of her, later ignoring Madison’s distressed calls. Madison used the classic “if you have so much sex with plenty of different guys, you should expect this to happen once or twice” bullshit, so Cassie gives her a taste of her own medicine. This feels like the first moment where Cassie is truly avenging Nina; what she’s been filling her journal with is something altogether different. She next tricks the dean into believing she’s kidnapped the dean’s daughter and left her with all the guys who hooted like coked-up gorillas as they watched and emboldened Al as he continually assaulted Nina on the night which the dean can’t seem to remember.
I found these two scenes to be among the best in the film because Fennell is creating ostensibly real consequences for the parties complicit in the failure of justice for Nina, as opposed to letting Cassie get off on her own forms of retaliation. Cassie’s repeated nights out are meaningful in their own way — but only to Cassie. Through the camera’s lens they end up feeling instead slightly ostentatious — hence why it would have been a more beguiling tactic had Fennell refrained from showing what Cassie actually does with the guys and instead choose to only show us her diary entries. She doesn’t report the guys in her diary to the police, opting to let them just live with their guilt of knowing she knows who they really are behind closed doors. It’s more interesting if we don’t even get to see the face of the last guy Cassie jots down in her diary before embarking on One Last Job to get real, tangible revenge in Nina’s name. In that sense, her decision to dispose of the diary at her on-and-off boyfriend Ryan’s (Bo Burnham) request is a transformative decision that comes too late in the plot. It doesn’t matter who the men at the bars are or what they look like. The hardest time I had watching Promising Young Woman was believing that Cassie really derives any satisfaction from the diary because instances of singular vengeance, no matter how many, can’t bring down a systemic failure to hold rapists accountable. The only way to get people to understand what that feels like is to try to put them in your shoes.
The ultimate hollowness of the film emanates not from this lack of fulfillment for Cassie but rather from how Fennell chooses to end the film. Cassie, with nothing left to live for, embarks on a suicide mission that leaves her dead by the same hand as the one that led Nina to eventually kill herself. Ryan was among the boys who cheered Al on, as was Joe (Max Greenfield of New Girl fame), the only of Al’s groomsmen with any meaningful screen time; he’s insipid to the point where knowing one feels like you know them all. And guess what? Cassie scheduled texts to go out that would explain her entire plan to investigators and implicate everyone who let Al get off the hook the first time. None of them are getting away this time! Huzzah!
Like the diary, the issue is not that Cassie’s grounds for avenging Nina are misguided — and this time, her actions actually result in material consequences for everyone who led to Cassie (and Nina) being essentially cast adrift by society. And yet…Al and his friends end up in the custody of the same justice system which let them off easy the first time? Fennell does not approach her oafish detective character (or the institution of police) with any of the clever satire of upper-crust white America that she weaved in and out of the first hundred minutes (thinking about Cassie’s first meeting with Madison or Joe’s reaction to discovering that, yes, Al really did kill Cassie), and she’s killed two women to get the police to take one rape seriously.
That is, I suppose, the cost of being moral in America, but in any case, Fennell places too much faith in a failed justice system for any of her critiques to really land. Promising Young Woman is by no means an empty film, and I believe it to be necessary viewing for all Americans, but its inability to fully adhere to its pessimistic outlook won’t sit well with many viewers looking for a full-blown takedown of rape deniers and a justice system that fails more victims than it helps.
Recommended Reading on Promising Young Woman:
https://www.rogerebert.com/features/on-the-disempowerment-of-promising-young-woman
