The Homecoming football game and all its associated festivities over the weekend got me thinking, strangely, about America’s Heartland and the cinema that portrays it (often patronizingly, I might add). I don't know — something about alumni “coming home” to see old friends and watch a football game just brings up in my mind a movie (and TV series) like “Friday Night Lights” (2004). It is worth mentioning that after the book and film came out, the citizens of Odessa, Texas -- the town that the film is based on -- turned against it, calling it inaccurate and opportunistic.Also interestingly, Connie Britton’s role as the football coach’s wife carries over from the movie, where she portrays Sharon Gaines, the wife of Billy Bob Thornton’s Coach Gary, to the TV series, where Britton portrays the wife of Kyle Chandler’s Coach Taylor.
That’s a tangent that interests me especially, as I had an interesting conversation in Tisch the other day (while I was supposed to be working, oops) about how women in film (and television, but especially film) are often treated as an afterthought. I’m having a little fun imagining the all-male Hollywood execs in a boardroom having that conversation: “Won’t it be a little confusing that we have the same actress from the movie but a different actor to play the husband?” one would ask. “Nonsense! This is a show about football! There are no women on a football field!”
On that same note, when I saw the movie “Sully” (2016) recently, the wife of Tom Hanks’ title character, portrayed by the amazing Laura Linney, literally only appears in the movie in phone conversations with Hanks’ character. Mind you, this is not some Jane Doe; this is Emmy-winner and Oscar-and-Tony-Award-nominee Laura frickin’ Linney, and she appears exclusively in her kitchen, on the phone with her husband. I almost laughed out loud in the theater, then got a little sad.
The “wife on the phone” trope has, thankfully, been expertly skewered by the supremely funny Amy Schumer. On a recent episode of her show “Inside Amy Schumer” (2013-present), she did a sketch in which the Academy Award for Best Actress is renamed “Academy Award for Best Talking on the Phone” because no actresses are ever given anything else to do. Schumer’s no-nonsense style of comedy, in my opinion, perfectly suits college students. We’re too sleep deprived and overworked to wait through the entire Ministry of Silly Walks; we’re instead here for comedians like Schumer eho take the convoluted nonsense of society and hilariously expose it. And, to avoid offending the entire campus, I would like to clarify that I in no way meant to insult the comedy of Monty Python.
