Women Talking

Sarah Polley (Away from Her, Take This Waltz, Stories We Tell) makes bold choices across the board in adapting Miriam Toews’s acclaimed novel Women Talking (2018). The book is based on an actual occurrence in Bolivia in the 1960s: a group of women living in an isolated Mennonite community discovered that many men from their sect had been drugging and raping them—more than a hundred women and young girls—over a period of years, claiming it was the work of demons. The novel and film reimagine this event as taking place in a contemporary secluded religious colony, though that is not made clear upfront. The titular action centers on a group of eight women selected to decide what all the women of the order should do, while the men of their village travel to the city in order to secure bail for those accused of the crimes by secular outside authorities. The majority of this story consists of the debates its characters have in a quiet hayloft under the time constraint of the men's return. The novel is conceived as the translated minutes of the meetings conducted by these eight women, taken by the colony's male schoolteacher on their behalf since, by religious tradition, females are not permitted to learn to read or write.

The film does not have the luxury of this novelistic technique. Polley's screenplay requires her characters to articulate their views in a dramatic fashion, designed as much to speak directly to contemporary audiences as to persuade each other. As these women grapple with their strict religious beliefs and practices in the face of the ungodly revelations they have recently become aware of, the cast of this film is forced to put forth persuasive, learned arguments that are completely antithetical to their uneducated characters.

The picture is intended as a parable, in which the circumspection these women express is a metaphor for wisdom acquired through generations of child-rearing, manual labor, and spiritual reflection. Still, you can't escape the fact that movies must create their own internal reality in ways a novel, which unfolds within a reader's imagination rather than in front of a viewer's eyes, does not. Thus most every aspect of Women Talking comes across as erroneous in the context of its setting. The dialogue sounds like what a college debate team might argue if they were faced with the hypothetical choice that these women must make for real. Polley and cinematographer Luc Montpellier (Take This Waltz, The Cry of the Owl, Away from Her) color-correct their digital images to the point of near monochrome, which makes the agrarian landscape look like some dystopian futuristic space frontier. 

The performances by the likes of Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Judith Ivey, Frances McDormand, and others are reliably and unquestionably compelling and will no doubt garner many awards. One can accurately state this cast is the best ensemble of the year. But it's just as true to say the casting is the worst of the year because it doubles down on the divergence between who these cloistered characters are stated to be and the modern way Polley depicts them. Watching these contemporary actors speak this eloquent dialogue is like watching a version of Twelve Angry Men in which every character is Henry Fonda.

Twitter Capsule: