Woman of the Hour review
Anna Kendrick steps behind the camera for a solid directorial debut with a title that doesn’t quite fit the material.
New movie reviews will not contain spoilers.
Woman of the Hour
Directed by Anna Kendrick
Written by Ian MacAllister McDonald
Starring Anna Kendrick, Daniel Zovatto, Nicolette Robinson, Tony Hale, Kathryn Gallagher, Kelley Jakle and Autumn Best
Woman of the Hour Review
Woman of the Hour takes its name from a line in the movie. It comes when the host of The Dating Game introduces the audience to the episode’s female prize the three male contestants will be competing for. If that sounds a bit out of date…it isn’t lost on director/star Anna Kendrick. Her character turns the show on its head…imbuing the prize with a modicum of identity to the annoyance of said host. It’s clear in these moments what Woman of the Hour wants to say. Unfortunately, that isn’t always the case.
Sheryl (Kendrick) is a struggling actress who reluctantly agrees to appear on The Dating Game. It turns out to be anything but an ordinary episode. Bachelor number 3 is a serial killer. Based on the true story of Rodney Alcala’s turn as a game show contestant amidst his crimes…Woman of the Hour takes more than a few liberties with the story. In some ways…those liberties go against the message the movie wants to send.
Sheryl is based on real life Dating Game participant Cheryl Bradshaw. Given that the name is mostly given in spoken form throughout Woman of the Hour, changing the spelling is a perfunctory choice at best. It’s also an extremely odd one. If you want to make a statement about how society and the entertainment industry treat women…stripping the identity of the woman we view that through is a weird start. It’s not the only strange choice the story makes.
Sheryl’s character is built up with a fictional backstory. That’s not an issue…this isn’t a documentary. What makes it strange is how Woman of the Hour slowly becomes less and less her story at all. In reality, Cheryl Bradshaw picked Alcala but refused the date because he came off as “creepy”. He resumed his murders…Cheryl having unwittingly escaped peril due to a good bit of intuition. Woman of the Hour’s Sheryl eventually refuses the date as well. After having drinks with the killer. And being warned by another of the male contestants. While an audience member attempts to alert authorities to his presence. Three things that never happened which undercut the real Cheryl Bradshaw’s story.
This is where the messaging of Woman of the Hour becomes difficult to understand. Adding fictional stories to a real event is standard practice. Those stories counteracting the point of the movie is not. It posits that Sheryl is surrounded by misogyny and efforts to turn her into a beautiful prop…void of personality. This is, undoubtedly, true. But the movie itself does the same thing to the character without recognizing it. After Sheryl turns down date…the story continues without her. It follows Alcala. She isn’t given flashbacks and character depth intercut with the game show…Alcala is.
Woman of the Hour can’t decide if it is Sheryl’s story or Alcala’s. Which would be a brilliant stroke…a masterful way to show how little has really changed…if it did it with any purpose. It doesn’t. The movie feels like it took a script about The Dating Game Killer and forced a perspective change…then quickly ran out of things to say from that perspective. As if it wanted to take the power back in the story and executed it in a way that just…handed it right back.
What we end up with is a story that isn’t enough about anything. We know more about Alcala than we do Sheryl…but she is the main character. It shows us his murders and what happens to him after the show. Kendrick gets to deliver the meat of the intended message during the taping of the show…upsetting the established order and taking the game in her own direction. Which is an interesting, and entertaining, piece of business. And then it rips the story away from her. Not in a clever way. Not in a way that is commenting on the treatment of women. It just…isn’t interested in her part of the story anymore.
An immediately notable change made by Woman of the Hour is the renaming of the host of The Dating Game. Tony Hale plays Ed Burke. No such man ever hosted the show. Jim Lange hosted the infamous real-world episode. They don’t change the name of the show…so this is all easily accessible information. Not as lazy as changing Cheryl to Sheryl…but nearly as ineffective. So, why do it? This becomes clear when Sheryl takes an active role in the show. He’s portrayed as a two-faced misogynistic dick. Attributes they were clearly uncomfortable attaching to the real man.
Which begs a more important question. Is this made up too? In an effort to showcase a story about the way women are treated…did they just…invent an antagonist where there wasn’t one? They sure do that with one of the film’s subplots. An audience member recognizes Alcala attempts to speak to someone in charge about it. She is ignored, of course. Had someone listened…lives could have been saved. Of course…it’s all made up. No one in the audience saw Alcala and tried to stop him. They just taped a game show with a creepy guy who was seen through by the woman who picked him. A story that Woman of the Hour doesn’t think is interesting enough to tell.
If you want to tell a story of society and the industry failing women…tell the story of how a convicted child molester accused of rape and murder passed the screening process for a dating game show. That’s never touched on. Instead, liberties are taken to the point of renaming characters and inventing situations. Stripping the truth from the story. Changing the identity of its protagonist. Sacrificing reality for a message that the story is going to choose to place on the backburner anyway.
Woman of the Hour doesn’t turn out to be the story of Cheryl Bradshaw. Or Sheryl. Or, even, Rodney Alcala. For most of its runtime it’s a strange amalgamation of all three. None are the lasting image that the movie wants to leave you with, however. As the story bounces around between Sheryl’s game and Alcala’s crimes…we are introduced to a young drifter who will inevitably find the cunning and strength to outwit her would be murderer and lead to his arrest. This, despite another name change and some story fudging, was true.
Narratively, this works fine as an ending to the story. While Sheryl takes back her power in the face of a system that wants her to smile and act stupid for the camera…the drifter does so while in a life-or-death situation. It’s a beautiful performance in a terrifying situation. The movie doesn’t tie any of this together in a satisfying way, mind you, but it’s still a great scene. Like everything else in Woman of the Hour, however…it comes with an asterisk. Despite being the final message that the story wants to send…it wasn’t the end of Alcala’s crimes. He posted bail and continued to murder.
As a movie, Woman of the Hour is entertaining enough to warrant a watch. Kendrick is great…and shows some talent behind the camera in her directorial debut. The problems come from the script’s inability to mix fact with its desired fiction. It ends up doing to Sheryl what it posits the system did to Cheryl. Making her a prop for a different story. If only it had done so for a reason.
Scare Value
Woman of the Hour doesn’t have much to say about its lead female character. It shows the difficulties a woman has being treated equally in society and in entertainment…and then sidelines her to focus on a man instead. It doesn’t do that in a way that is clever or has anything to say about it. The serial killer’s story is simply more interesting. Which feels counterproductive given the film’s title and messaging. Still, it’s a fine watch with a standout scene of suspense and some solid performances. As long as you don’t think about it too hard.
2.5/5
Woman of the Hour Link
Streaming on Netflix
