Everyone's Misreading *Poms*

On the surface, Poms is a romp: a light-hearted film about older women, a rare instance of taking advantage of the amazing talent and depth that good actresses can bring to the table long after Hollywood usually casts them aside. I love it when movies that are supposed to be silly are actually brilliant. And when it's feminist brilliance, I’m particularly happy. Therefore, I have no qualms whatsoever about telling you that Poms is a solid, smart, and important movie. Yep, I said that. Take your kids to this one.

Anjelica Huston obviously never read this script: this is not at all about a band of cheerleaders getting back together for one last hurrah. My guess is that a warranted bitterness about the intersection of ageism and sexism underlay her snark, but she - along with a host of critics - got this one very wrong.

I’ll warn you when spoilers are imminent. (And my definition of “spoilers” is old-school, not what folks these days call spoilers. I like to go into movies knowing absolutely nothing other than who’s in it.)

Forget what Poms seems like it’s “about.” Forget that it sounds sweet and cutesy. Underneath, this is a film about male entitlement, the body, gender and ageism, about sexuality and about whiteness. It’s a bit heavy-handed at times, though several things I dreaded didn’t happen. All in all, it’s a sociologist’s delight.

This is a woman-centered plot, no holds barred: not woman-centered in that they’re all concerned with their men, just woman-centered. It’s also unapologetically pro-woman, which is not at all the same thing. And seeing it at the same moment that the assault on Roe v. Wade is national news, I’ll confess that I was moved: sad, angry, happy, bitter, celebratory. All of it.

And it is so clever that I can’t help wondering whether Amy Schumer had something to do with it. Don’t get me wrong, there are excellent feminist comedy writers out there (Lena Dunham and Tina Fey come to mind), but so far only Schumer makes me think that she's read de Beauvoir, Firestone, Greer and Dworkin. Maybe she hasn't, but then that’s even more impressive. Schumer’s work rarely feels like it’s reinventing the wheel, merely cashing in on cultural anger about double standards and glass ceilings.

Poms is that kind of clever, though its heavy-handedness detracts a bit from it.

Here’s why. (Spoiler alert: plot summary to follow, though I won’t give away the ending just yet.)

The film opens with Keaton’s character selling off her stuff at an “estate sale,” with her voiceover telling us, matter-of-factly, that she never had kids on whom to dump all her stuff. She says this with neither rebellion nor regret, and offers no explanation. We don’t know whether she never wanted them, couldn’t have them, never met the right person or didn’t want to do it alone. It doesn’t matter; it doesn’t define her and it’s not at all relevant. The film stays true to this; only one piece of her past comes up throughout the movie, and it’s central to the plot.

Keaton’s character, Martha (and I’m thinking this parallel to The Handmaid’s Tale is not a coincidence) has terminal cancer and has decided to skip treatment. She’s selling off her stuff and moving into a retirement community, “just to die,” she tells the welcoming committee when they ask why she’s there. Again, she’s deadpan; no self-pity, nor is she cold-hearted and damaged. She’s not depressed, not weak, not lonely, she never cries. But she’s not in denial either; shortly after her relocation, the site of a corpse at a wake sends her running out of the event and into a multi-day reclusive funk. Still, she’s understandable, not merely sad. The film never pities her. She’s just dealing with her situation, which is where she shines; real but not too vulnerable or crazy – inspiring but relatable.

The movie, of course, is a comedy, so all this needs to get lighter in a hurry. Enter cheerleading, a dream Martha had as a teen that never panned out. She worked hard for it, of a generation for whom this was the epitome of teen femininity and social status (I say this with some optimism that this has changed?), but when she was finally worthy, she had to relinquish it.

As a resident of Sun Springs, Martha needs to either join a club or start one herself. She decides (rather abruptly, I must admit) to start a cheerleading club. Let the groans begin.

But for the most part, the movie manages to sidestep the nonsense. Even more importantly, I forgive the nonsense it has because of all the great things it’s doing. Cheerleading itself becomes distanced, if only slightly, from its stereotype as shallow, sexual and white. Bordering a bit on tokenism, the film’s “mean girls” young cheerleaders competitors are almost all white, with only two girls of color that really show up anywhere. (Minor spoiler alert: Alisha Boe’s character, Chloe - the lighter-skinned girl, it should be noted – is the leader, who quickly reveals herself to be a decent person, abandons her squad to help Martha’s cheerleaders, and becomes the “girl” for Sheryl’s kind-hearted, dorky grandson. Yeah, I could’ve done without all that.)

There are three men of notable roles in the film. Two are villainous, but not caricatures. Because they don’t need to be. These are not unusual situations, which is exactly the point.

Playing against type, Perlman’s character (Alice) is meek, hesitant and obedient to her never-seen-out-of-the-shadows, dangerously controlling husband – until she (we suspect) kills her husband. It’s conveyed through whispers, which Alice all but confirms with a wink at his funeral. (He had told her she could join the club over his dead body.)

Helen’s (Phyllis Somerville) son is similarly patriarchal. We never see Alice’s husband on-camera, but Tom is immediately dislikeable: well-played by David Maldonado as a seething, entitled middle-class thug. The control he exerts over his mother’s money and life is painful to watch. Ultimately he and his wife move in, so he can control Helen better. One telling scene features him on the couch, facing the football game on the television, with the wife curled up sideways on the couch, facing him. In the meantime, Helen is in her room, sitting in bed, doing nothing.

At one point in the film, Tom tells Chloe to “Shut up, you little slut.” The word comes up one or two other times in the film, but it’s not casual; it’s clear that it’s a horrible thing to say. This moment is the last, for Sheryl gets (literally) in his face over it. (“What did you just call her? I DARE you to say it again,” she says, looking up at a much larger and younger man, but Weaver’s fierceness works and the moment feels intense and not farcical.) While this is very much not an attempt to reclaim the word and does not explicitly embrace the right of girls and women to be sexually free without social sanction, I’m not sure I’ve seen a more severe chastisement of the casual deployment of the word in film or television. I would have much preferred it if Chloe had had several sexual partners just yesterday, because as it is, one read is that she’s innocent of the charge and therefore it’s terrible. The film doesn’t say that, though, or showcase that, and in fact Sheryl herself had earlier said to Chloe, “Isn’t there a quarterback somewhere that you need to be giving a hand job to?” And, being that Sheryl has no qualms about her own sexual voracity, the objection here is to the word itself. In the context of the film, it’s another mechanism for controlling women, and Sheryl’s intervention is another refusal to accept men’s control of women’s lives.[1]

These are not accidents, and they are not cheap laughs. In fact, they don't come cheap at all. They are statements about the extent to which women are, often routinely and acceptably, blocked from controlling their own lives. It’s a commentary on the infantilization of older women in particular, which increases as we begin to see them even more in need of caretaking. The film is careful not to make these men comical, because what they’re doing isn’t funny. Instead, it punishes them: one ends up dead and the other loses control as the women drive away with the rescued Helen for the cheerleading tournament.

The third man is the Sun Springs security chief, played with warmth by Bruce McGill. He’s mostly a non-entity, except to be always a potential tool for (feminist) good or evil, and increasingly ending up on the side of the former.

And then there’s sex. Sheryl, brilliantly played by Jacki Weaver, shows up when Martha moves in, and is right on the brink of the comedy cliché The Sexual Senior Woman. Sheryl’s heat chills Martha out, and as that happens, her man-crazy-ness gets dialed back a bit, but sexuality doesn’t disappear. Martha’s sexuality is a mystery - we have no idea about her orientation, history or desires, which is perfect, because her sexuality is completely irrelevant to the plot. Nonetheless, there are several sex-positive moments peppered throughout the movie, including the happy surprise when Martha, rallying the club during rehearsal shouts, “Cunnilingus!”

This is a movie about older women, yes. But it’s about the powerlessness of all women. It’s about the default position of male entitlement and masculine power, about the consequences of thinking about sexuality and sexual attractiveness as sources of women’s power: what that does and what it costs women as they age.

Spoiler alert – now I'm giving away the ending:

I'm grateful for several things about this film, and at the top of the list is this: the film lets Martha die, on her own terms and in her own way. No one melted her cold hard walls that formed because she had never had children (and therefore didn’t know from love) and convinced her to get chemo and live happily ever after for her next decade or so. [2] Nor did the retirement village administration insist that she get treatment or move out. Instead she lived out the rest of her life on her terms – which, okay, included cheerleading – but she did it her way, with dignity. She never fell in love (we never did find out whether she was straight or gay or pan or asexual or what - because it just didn’t matter). She had a good time, and then she died. On her way out, she made some new friends, inspired some women to get out from under the thumbs of some men, and successfully made a conformist moral-crusader woman fuck off. Huzzah!

The movie isn’t about cheerleading, or cheerleaders, or about cheerleading seniors. It (almost) could have been anything, if not for the fact that the film is tackling femininity. Still, the cheerleading thing is just a vehicle for the rest of it – it’s just whatever you’ve got on hand to dip into the really good hummus.

The message of this movie is not “look, even old ladies can be cheerleaders.” Their cheerleading is unimpressive; thankfully, they do not pull together to accomplish impossible physical feats. Nor do they become suddenly-sex-objects, charming men young and old with their cool moves. Even when they encounter the athleticism of their competitors for the first time, the only comment is, “Look how young they are!!” They're just doing this for men (to feel attractive), or to feel like the popular girls. They’re doing it, all throughout the movie, because Martha had to join a club, so why not this? They’re doing it because it’s something to do, because it builds community and because it provides a challenge and it’s fun. No one romanticizes cheerleading, not even Martha. And although the film definitely tries to cash in on the “mean girls” stereotype, it’s at least refreshing that the crossover role, the one who goes very quickly from mean girl to girl of smarts and substance, is Chloe.

Lessons from the film? Besides that "slut” is a bad word, not because it’s a bad thing to be, but a bad thing to say, the takeaway is this: Women are fully formed people, at any age, and their lives should be their own to live. (And, you know, if anyone’s actively trying to prevent you from living it...you can kill him. ;))

As Sheryl tells Martha after the cancer gets the better of her for a bit, “You were dying yesterday, and you’ll be dying next week; all you can do is dance."

[1] While I’m sympathetic to the “Yeah, I’m a slut, what’s it to you, that’s not a bad thing" argument, and while I disagree with Lenora Tannenbaum on a good many things, I can get behind mass intolerance of the word slut. It’s a word with historical weight and ugly intent, and despite reclamation attempts, it continues to reflect and reproduce women’s lower status.

[2] I admit that the film does come a bit too close to a problematic (and soooo tired) sexist trope: girl/young woman loses parents early in life and is therefore emotionally stunted, which explains her independence/power/toughenss/criminality/child-free-ness/coldness/insert whatever-else-women-aren't-supposed-to-be. (I’m looking at you Mr. & Mrs. Smith, The Proposal, and a slew of much more recent examples, so many that I can’t even bring myself to watch them anymore.) Martha can't join the cheerleading squad when she finally makes it because she has to care for her "very sick" mother. The implication is that she died during that time, and the subtext of that - if only because it's a common narrative in Hollywood - is that the loss left Martha emotionally damaged. Boo!

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