danielleh:

The entire presidency of (either) George Bush and Alexander Payne’s veiled misogyny have completely one-two punched my capacity to give any shits about rich white guys.

That said, if the entire movie had been about Beau Bridges’ character I would have stayed awake.

(Before I jump into this, you should know that I was deeply affected by this movie. I wouldn’t give it a Best Picture Oscar or anything, but I thought it contained an emotional intensity that transcended the screen in a way I haven’t seen in a film in a long time. I was also on my period when I saw it. All of which probably guides my argument below…)

This is fascinating to me; I almost feel like I was watching a different film to you and other people I’ve talked to about this. Specifically, I’ve had a few conversations about how this movie depicts women, and even though I understand the argument that placing a voiceless female character at the center of a family’s anger could leave some with lingering thoughts of veiled misogyny, I still believe that the wife is not the villain in this movie; the marriage is. My numbers 1, 2, and 3 arguments for this would be the characters played by Judy Greer (the realtor’s wife), Shailene Woodley (daughter 1), and Amara Miller (daughter 2): strong female characters who can see past bullshit and act without dictation from the men in their lives. Even the wife, though we never heard her voice, had acted independently, choosing to effectively call off her marriage before it was dead in the water, so to speak.

As for the wealth, I thought it was set dressing in order to show pretty houses and pools and beaches and hotel rooms (films about people with less money usually do the same thing in reverse, and usually end up offending me more; see Gummo); the emotion of loss (to me) had nothing to do with their wealth or privilege. 

But then to your point, if rich white men are the issue here, isn’t Beau Bridges’ character more offensive than George Clooney’s? The rich white man who is content in using his family fortune to maintain a slumming island lifestyle? Ugh. If anyone in the movie offended me, it was him. In fact, I thought this movie did a good job of mocking rich white men. George Clooney angrily running up the street in flip-flops, Matthew Lillard’s smug face on the real estate sign, the menfolk’s general disregard for the sanctity of the land they ended up with by the accident of their white grandfather marrying a Hawaiian princess. If anything, I came away from the movie judging the men harshly, not the women.

Then again, as I mentioned before, I wept like I was emotionally unstable when I saw this, so my emotions might be guiding this defense… I’m open to further discussion! Convince me!