Studio: Netflix
Director: Anna Kendrick
Writer: Ian McDonald
Producer: Roy Lee, Miri Yoon, J.D. Lifshitz, Raphael Margules
Stars: Anna Kendrick, Daniel Zovatto, Nicolette Robinson, Autumn Best, Pete Holmes, Kelley Jakle, Kathryn Gallagher, Tony Hale
Review Score:
Summary:
An aspiring actress has a brush with a serial killer when they both appear as contestants on "The Dating Game" in 1978.
Review:
Virginia's Radford University maintains a database containing information on approximately 5,000 serial killers. With a number so staggeringly high, the press and the public tend to only note the names whose crimes come with a memorably macabre attribute.
We remember Zodiac for essentially inventing the cinematic serial killer archetype with cryptic ciphers and threatening communications that openly taunted police. David Berkowitz gained notoriety as "Son of Sam" by claiming a demonic dog drove him to homicide. Mention John Wayne Gacy and many minds immediately conjure the unnerving image of him in his birthday clown makeup.
Like Gacy, the thing that stands out about Rodney Alcala seems even more sinister in the retrospective light of what would be learned later. It's entirely likely Alcala might have been assimilated into the mass of those thousands of other murderers who weren't uniquely despicable enough to make it onto the nightly news or into a national headline if not for one detail. In 1978, Alcala appeared as a contestant on the popular program "The Dating Game," right when he was in the midst of a rape and strangulation spree. Alcala's name could have faded into obscurity like so many other vile people history has run out of room to recognize. Instead, those few minutes he spent on television turned him into "The Dating Game Killer."
As indicated by the title, "Woman of the Hour" puts its female-forward focus on Alcala's unfortunate victims, and one person who potentially could have become one, instead of on the man who murdered them. Unconcerned with "Silence of the Lambs"-style suspense that might make it play like an "inspired by a true story" horror movie, or with dramatic theatrics that would turn it into tabloid entertainment as a procedural biopic, "Women of the Hour" chooses to be a measured rumination on how culture commonly conditions women to be vulnerable while concurrently enabling men like Rodney Alcala to literally get away with murder.
The actual "woman of the hour" who appeared on Alcala's episode of "The Dating Game" was Cheryl Bradshaw. Director Anna Kendrick does double duty by playing her in the movie, except the spelling of her name is changed to Sheryl, though it's unclear why. Legal reasons seem dubious. If Cheryl Bradshaw sued producers, it's hard to imagine an argument of "we changed one letter, therefore her fictionalized counterpart can't be confused for the real person" holding up in court. By all accounts, Bradshaw appears near impossible to track down, and may even be deceased. Maybe the filmmakers altered her name solely to symbolize how the movie takes liberties with facts to create a story better suited for the screen.
Following a prologue where Rodney assaults a woman in Wyoming, Kendrick strategically introduces Sheryl with a two-shot between a pair of inconsiderate casting directors in conversation. They talk about an auditioning actress' looks, adding casually ageist insults to already misogynistic comments. When they pause, the camera cuts to Sheryl patiently standing, script in hand, on the other side of their desk. Deliberately devoid of subtlety, the sequence highlights how she's treated as invisible even though she's standing right there in front of the same people who don't feel any need to hide their negativity behind her back.
Sheryl's ongoing fight to remain humble in the face of humiliation continues when her agent calls to tell her she finally booked a gig. Being on "The Dating Game" seems beneath her, but struggling Sheryl isn't in much of a position to say no. She is in a position to say no to her neighbor Terry, who makes an unwanted move on her over drinks when they're supposed to be commiserating. But sympathetic Sheryl prefers not to disappoint anyone. Reluctantly saying yes poses less of an awkward problem for her, so she decides she'd rather deal with regret and sleeps with Terry anyway.
Perhaps that's part of why Sheryl later reasons that Rodney doesn't appear so awful compared to many of the ego-driven men she encounters. While Sheryl sits in a makeup chair backstage at ABC Studios, show host Ed Burke tells Sheryl she comes off as too intelligent, which is a turnoff, so she'll need to dumb down her personality for the taping. Peppering remarks that undermine her taste in music with a touch of racism tossed in for good measure, Ed also calls for wardrobe to fit Sheryl into something that better showcases her attractive figure.
It's undoubtedly challenging to make a movie that's really only based on a moment, as opposed to a substantial series of events. In reality, Cheryl Bradshaw and Rodney Alcala never even went on the date they won when she selected him as the winning bachelor. Not counting the questions asked and answered through a partition between them, Bradshaw and Alcala directly interacted only at the end of the show, with Bradshaw later telling a contestant coordinator that Alcala's creepy vibe made her too uncomfortable to go out with him.
Even if the movie recreated their "Dating Game" episode in its entirety, that would only constitute about 22 minutes. To compensate for the lack in factual material for its 1978 timeline, "Woman of the Hour" bounces back and forth between different years and different U.S. states to slip in shocking scenes in the form of flashbacks where various victims discover the dangerous truth about an initially charming man who broke through their defenses with flattery.
Though the film means to illustrate how Alcala was able to take advantage of physically and emotionally exploitable women, this nonlinearity can read as a desperate attempt to create content while repeatedly stunting rhythm by breaking into Sheryl's side of her story. "Women of the Hour" also inserts a subplot where an audience member recognizes Rodney as the suspect who killed her friend the previous year, but no one believes her now any more than they did in 1977. Kendrick includes this composite to cover the essential theme of how when women aren't listened to, the consequence can be a killer going free to kill again, which is exactly what happened more than once with Alcala. However, this inclusion has a harder time making sense in the story since the woman never interacts at all with Sheryl, sometimes turning her into a redundant distraction.
When disjointed editing and sidetracked storytelling aren't trying to puncture its tires, emotionally charged performances from Kendrick and a cadre of actors with impressively expressive range make "Woman of the Hour" a consistently compelling, and occasionally unsettling, examination of violence's often overlooked victims. The fractured flow would probably benefit from even less of Alcala, as by nature of the simple monster he was, he's easily the least interesting character. "Woman of the Hour" hits its strongest strides when it instead stays thematically centered on women who become trapped by circumstances and societal conventions, and intuition and opportunity are the only differences between whether a killer's coin lands on heads or tails when they're unknowingly facing a terrible fate.
Review Score: 70
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