Grab your girls, grab your popcorn, grab your tickets, and grab your girlfriends! We’re gonna go watch Olivia Coleman get hot, woke, and nasty in Wicker!
Warnings and Writing
I’m friends with the lady who checks tickets at my local theater, and she told me that my buddy and I were the first dudes who had checked in for that showing. She asked me to report in if the women started getting naked. I thought that was a funny thing to say. Then I saw a bottle of Josh being passed around while the lights were still on, and realized that I was in danger.
Wicker is a beautiful, emotional, and well-written story about the dangers of patriarchy, what good men can be like, wish fulfillment, and how sometimes older women are discarded by society if they’re deemed useless or unattractive.
I could relay the plot and details and themes and metaphors, but I’d much rather gleefully tell you about all the stuff I liked about this movie. For one, the writing was tight, pointed, and an absolute delight to behold. The writing extends to the pacing of the film, giving us a truly delightful 105 minutes. The runtime is punctuated by five prosy subtitle cards, a reminder that Wicker is based on a short story by Ursula Wills. This reminder allows us to submerge in the absolute whimsy of the film. From glossing over the fact that wicker was made into man, to the absurdity of the societal norms, to the sharp wit of the Fisherwoman.
Then, the film socks us in the belly with a crushing emotional blow. The town’s small-mindedness, the pain of patriarchy felt by the men and the women, the curses and insults muttered under their breaths, and the threats of violence all come together at the climax of the film. And for a film that was drawing whoops and whistles and giggles and applause, there was only silence. Tight, tight, intelligent writing.
The writer-director wife-husband team of Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer have done a magnificent job of crafting this world, its inhabitants, their relationships and histories, and indulging our emotions with so much depth and feeling.
Women in Wicker
If you’re worried about the woke, let me tell you, so was I (I mean not really. You know I’m libtard at heart). The first act was very overt in its imagery and language, in a very clever effort to prime us for the rest of the film. Then, the sexism and patriarchal humor fades into subtlety and we sit through the rest of the movie with the lingering scent of “when women are married in this village, their husbands literally shackle a metal collar on their wives’ necks”.
That all said, let’s return to the women, and the bottle of wine I saw them passing around in the row in front of me. I alluded to their elated engagement with the film, but the most shocking and amusing thing I saw occurred after the movie ended. In the lobby of my theater, and perhaps yours, there is a life-sized cardboard cutout of the Wicker Man. If you watch this cutout for long enough, I suspect you’ll find poor Wicker being groped, touched, caressed, and perhaps even picked up by a gaggle of giggling women. This is not a bad thing. In fact, it makes me really happy to know that there are people engaging with films like this, and that they found an opportunity to come together as a group and share this truly excellent film, listen to its story, hopefully take home its lessons, but more than anything, agree to be entertained by Wicker.
In fact, the last time I’ve seen an American audience that engaged with a movie was probably Spider-Man: No Way Home. Not the new one, not Brand New Day, but the one before it. And before No Way Home, the Infinity War and Endgame. And I think that that’s a really beautiful thing. A really, really wonderful and pure thing to witness the collective and shared joy of a room full of people being so attached and engaged and emotional about a story. So this reaction, which I acknowledge is likely only going to come from the women, says a fuckton about the impact that this movie has had.
Even though I wasn’t necessarily the intended audience, I rate Wicker
GOOD
I urge you to watch Wicker in theaters with your friends. Bring wine.
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