What are we to do when the private persona of a performer bleeds over into the public creative sphere? The line is so fragile that it often rends our ability to lose ourselves in the fictional world of art.
Susan Sarandon is an actor and activist now starring in Lorene Scafaria's odd, unexpectedly moving new film The Meddler, in which she speaks with a Joisey accent yet somehow manages to transcend the pitfalls of her potentially clichéd character, a widow graced with too much free time, money, and a daughter who resists her arrival in the younger woman's adopted home, Los Angeles.
Onscreen, Sarandon ends up mothering a host of unlikely strangers. Off screen she spent years being treated as a bratty child, reviled for daring to have opinions and advocate for political causes -- not unlike "Hanoi Jane" Fonda, before both women's place in popular culture shifted to approval for continuing to bare their beautiful bodies despite no longer being in their twenties. Each has also chosen to pursue comedy, as if to leaven her legacy as a complicated cultural touchstone.
Which makes it all the more baffling that Sarandon seems tone-deaf to the irony of her contempt for another woman of opinion and achievement, Hillary Clinton. Echoing the toxic dismissal that was (and is) rained down on her, Sarandon is determined to air her revulsion for the woman currently attempting to break the nation's highest glass ceiling.
In her now-infamous interview with Bill Maher, Sarandon suggested the presidency of a hate-spewing, pathologically narcissistic con man -- who persistently degrades those of us who are non-white, non-wealthy, immigrant, and female -- might have its good points in comparison with that of Clinton, possibly hastening "the revolution." (Imagine publicly declaring the upside of the ascendance of another demagogue of German extraction: Adolf Hitler, useful tool for change.)
Sarandon is not interested in the fact that Hillary has been, to quote bastion of radicalism the Daily News, a "warrior" advocating for brutalized and oppressed women the world over, a practice that doesn't garner much political cred, and one both rare and not without its dangers. Sarandon doesn't acknowledge Clinton's efforts or even intentions in such arenas.
Like so many supporters of Bernie Sanders, the actor hoists the banner of Daddy as God/Hero and Mommy as Evil Witch. Daddy may lose his temper, snarl, accuse Mommy of things he knows aren't true; he may hang out with questionable friends sometimes and do things he really doesn't want to (taking money from the NRA and then voting according to their wishes, for example), but he's Daddy! He has our best interests at heart, so we forgive him all his flaws.
Sanders has brought the 99%'s fury at economic inequality back into public discourse, a decidedly good thing -- even if he's mostly a skilled practitioner of the Ed Koch school of politicking: voicing the frustrations of the masses as if he is merely one of them and not someone being paid to actually do something to fix our problems.
But Mommy! With her scolding voice, her nagging to do the right thing, her need to sidestep black-and-white idealism for day-to-day pragmatic action, dutifully trying to make us focus on our (civic) chores! The smearing, sneering, loathing toward Mommy thrives in the Bernie camp, and the candidate has not rejected this conventional macho contempt any more than Donald J. "Trump" (né Drumpf) has rebuked the violence against female, non-white, and democratically inquisitive attendees of his rallies.
Indeed, Sanders' crew has called Hillary -- a woman whose public service has been as long-standing as the vicious personal attacks she's faced -- a whore, something one might expect from the Drumpf but surely not what the disaffected youth's Great White Hope should be putting forth.
That many of those youth are female is as disheartening as how many poor/working class voters snub representatives who advocate for them and vote instead for politicians who bolster the status quo, endorse the superiority of being rich, steering all financial and political gifts to the wealthy. Aspiration beats reality; it's as uncool not to want to be rich as it is to complain about inequities between the sexes. (Girls are always doing that!)
There should be a word for people who spit in the face of their own interests, reject what they are, the women who stomp out women who might be their alternate selves to get to the higher, hotter ground of those in power, those with testosterone. It's not self-loathing -- self-erasing, perhaps. Other-aspiring.
Sending females to the back of the bus in civil rights movements is nothing new, of course, from the days when Stokely Carmichael joked that the only position for women in the movement and his organization was "prone." Too many of Sanders' female followers, like many activists before them, seem to have swallowed the pervasive notion of women's place in the world: to be attractive and hot while fighting for groups other than themselves, to be free to attempt careers while dating cute rich guys and not be shrill or demanding or pushy or look too closely at the lessened opportunity/payment/autonomy/safety for their sex. The training that girls get to be "nice" -- risking assault rather than appear rude or bitchy, unwilling to complain about unfair treatment because that makes our voices harsh and unattractive, makes us seem "unfeminine" -- bad sports -- has not ebbed much in modern times.
Then again, it turns out Sarandon was likely being deliberately misrepresented, as Clinton so often is: Controversy is the currency of the day; why trouble with inconvenient, more complicated facts? Personally, I have to question my own willingness to take at face value the story that media outlets multiplied across the public sphere. Our media's shirking of its most basic democratic duty -- to seek the truth rather than lazily swallow and then regurgitate sound bites provided by interested parties -- is one of the scourges of our time. But who can resist the story that a female activist chose even a crude bankrupt man-bully over a strong lady? Catfight!
Meanwhile, The Meddler. Now that Susan Sarandon has revealed herself to be a better actor than many of us gave her credit for -- utterly convincing as a thoughtful person -- she presents us with a dilemma: what to do about the lovely movie in which she appears. Written and directed by the screenwriter of the delighful, unsung Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, The Meddler seems about to go off the rails at every turn, but it never does. The film has no business being as entertaining as it is.
From the moment we first hear Sarandon's chewy accent, it's hard not to fear a replay of the painful misfire Tammy, which uglied up a miscast Sarandon, trying hard to hide her light under a stereotype. But Scafaria's latest film somehow manages to skate the border of quirky and cute as it pursues a seemingly straightforward story from a skewed perspective, with a well-chosen cast of comic female and dramatic male talent, including J.K. Simmons in the Sam Elliott role.
Even while offering lesbian weddings and African-American men with shady relatives, the film keeps swerving from expected directions, leaving our preconceptions on the cutting room floor. Like the off kilter Playlist, The Meddler surprises with charm and resonant emotion. "Only connect" is Sarandon's character's goal, and she achieves it with both lightness and depth.
Female directors too rarely get chances to make films, and are even more rarely granted the several chances to fail that those male colleagues who remind producers of their younger selves are granted. As it grows more difficult to rise above the noise of our 24-7 blogosphere, that any film of quality gets made at all counts as a miracle.
I saw The Meddler on a rare outing in the midst of a medically traumatic period, and was lifted, amused and grateful to be taken out of myself. The experience may now be complicated by my reaction to its star's public utterances, but I still feel a bit of the euphoria and sweetness it provoked.
PHOTO: Sarandon acts caring with Rose Byrne. Photo by Jaimie Trueblood, Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.