BEFORE: I saved this one for Labor Day, because it seems to be some kind of anthology of women's stories, and the characters have a variety of professions - doctor, bank manager, police detective - I don't want to read too much of the plot before watching the film, obviously. This may be a tenuous link to the spirit of the holiday, but I can't be certain until I watch it. Anyway, it was enough for me to insert two skip days into last week, which ultimately is going to make it easier for me to spread my films out across the month, as I'd prefer to not have a full week at the end of the month where I'm not watching any movies, and thus feel like I'm not making progress. I also can't block out October yet, even though New York Comic Con got cancelled, I still don't know if we'll be able to go on any kind of vacation, like we have in October for the last several years. The immediate goal is to just stay focused, spread out my movies and try to get through September as best as I can.
Either way, good or bad, this film's been taking up space on my DVR since June of last year, so it will be a relief to watch it and clear a little bit of room. Glenn Close carries over from "The Wilde Wedding" for the last time in this chain, and I think for the year.
THE PLOT: Five California women struggle with personal problems as their own paths unwind in unexpected ways.
AFTER: As an anthology of sorts, this could be viewed as five short films that are linked together, they're set in the same storytelling universe, and I believe there are five or so characters that appear in two segments each, so in theory I should be all over this, in a way it's reminiscent of my movie chains, where every day one actor or actress carries over from the last film, and then a different one may carry over to the next. Something like five days of movie-viewing for me, compressed into under two hours! So I should support this storytelling style - but then since the five shorts are being presented together, the question then becomes - do the five stories flow together well, is there a point to telling these five stories in a row, does the total equal something greater than the sum of its parts?
There must be other movies that follow this format, but I haven't encountered very many - the only one that leaps to mind is "Pulp Fiction", which is kind of in its own league, and is one of the few films that I'll allow to bend time and space for the purposes of crafting a tale. Somehow that film circles back on itself, it ends in a place and time shortly after where it started, and the real final scene is somewhere in the middle, if you're really interested enough to parse out the correct chronology through the actions of, and the things that happen to, John Travolta's character. A pretzel-shaped timeline that managed to present the information in the most satisfying way, it seems, and somewhere around your 7th or 8th viewing of the film I found I could see the way it all is supposed to come together.
I suspect that it might also take 7 or 8 viewings of "Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her" in order to fully unlock all of its secrets and put every little thing properly in its place. The clues are all there, it seems, and I managed to miss quite a few of them. The film opens with the discovery of a suicide victim, and the detective later discusses some aspects of the case with her blind sister, and the sister's insights send her back to look for more clues at the crime scene, and then those clues spark more theories about this woman, whose name is Carmen. Normally I'm against spoilers, but if you haven't seen this film, what I'm about to tell you will be helpful the first time you watch this. Carmen appears in each of the five segments, somewhere in the background. If you know to look for her, this might make things easier - and this tells us something about the timeline, if you're interested in putting the segments into chronological order. The first part of the film, when Carmen's body is discovered, is therefore next-to-last, and a later segment where her autopsy is performed would then be the last one to occur. It's possible that her appearances in the film, viewed as a whole, could confirm the theories put forth over why came to L.A. and why she killed herself - but since I wasn't looking for this evidence, I didn't notice it. But maybe it's something of an "Easter Egg Hunt" that you could look for during your 4th or 5th viewing of the film - I don't have that kind of time, and honestly I'd rather watch "Pulp Fiction" again.
SPOILER ALERT for the rest of this post, because it's impossible to discuss the film further without giving away key elements of the plot. If you haven't seen this film, but intend to in the future, please turn back now.
The first main segment concerns a female doctor who is caring for her elderly mother, while also dealing with her own relationship problems resulting from dating other doctors. She passes the time in various ways, which include getting a tarot card reading from a psychic that makes house calls, and from what we're told (which, honestly, isn't much) the reading appears to be spot-on. Well, I guess it is, since we're not given much information to contradict it. The second segment concerns a bank manager, who is dating a married man and then learns she has become pregnant, after scheduling abortion for the next day, she happens upon a co-worker from the bank in a bar and has a one-night stand with him. She also interacts with a homeless woman in the bank parking lot while on her smoke breaks, and the homeless woman sort of fulfills the same function as the psychic did in the first segment, namely accidentally giving insight into her character and mental state. The doctor from the first segment re-appears as the bank manager's abortionist, the first crossover between the stories, but certainly not the last.
In the third segment, a divorced mother writes children's books and is focused on her 15-year old son, when a little person (they say "dwarf" in the film, but this was made in 2000 and I'm not sure the term is still acceptable) moves in across the street. She sees him at the grocery store and offers him a ride home, and after learning his back-story, she seems to be considering him as a potential love interest. The fourth segment brings back the psychic from the first segment, and details her home life, caring for her terminally ill girlfriend. The final segment sort of wraps things up, picking up the thread of the detective with the blind sister investigating Carmen's suicide. In doing her case-work, she interviews someone at a hospital, who turns out to be the L.P. from the third segment - and the blind sister goes on some dates with the bank employee who had a fling with the bank manager in the second segment. Finally a theory is proposed over the timeline of the deceased woman, and a short montage gives us a little update on all of the central characters, like a little capper or a coda for each one.
In the wrong hands, this anthology could have been even more confusing. If somebody like Paul Thomas Anderson or Robert Altman had turned this into a "Magnolia" or "Short Cuts"-like film, the temptation was probably there to cross-cut between all five segments, and that would have been a mistake. The Tarantino approach of bending time to give each segment room to breathe was, I believe, the correct choice. But it's an interesting topic for debate - were different editing techniques tried for this and rejected, or was this the only framing method that was considered? What, if anything, was the common theme across all the segments - loneliness? A desire to connect with others? Sacrifice? The fact that women are complex, complicated creatures that resist all efforts to figure them out? (OK, maybe I'm projecting on that last one.) Or are female lives so complicated that we shouldn't even try to quantify these stories in such basic, commonplace terms?
There was a time, not that long ago, when there were no female doctors, no female police detectives, no female bank managers. I know that we still haven't reached a point of equality in the workplace, not even with how much women are paid when compared to men, but progress has been made. Once upon a time women could become nurses, but not doctors, it's hard to believe. I rewatched that "RBG" documentary while taping it last week and editing out the ads, and Justice Bader-Ginsburg made a whole career out of striking down the laws that were keeping women from applying for the same jobs as men, the same college courses, and receiving the same benefits along the way. Even when I was working at a movie theater in the early 1990's, the managers would only hire males as ushers and females to work at the concession stand. I personally didn't feel like suing the theater over this point, but I could have.
Perhaps I'm overthinking things. The film's title comes from something that's said about the suicide victim - what the detective and the coroner have to do is tell something about the woman just by looking at her (and, umm, maybe also there's the toxicology report) and it's also what we in the audience have to do, we have to determine some things just by looking at these characters. Maybe that's all that's required here, and maybe in the end that should be enough. But is it? I'm not sure.
Oddly, this was made as a theatrical film that was eligible for the Emmys - Holly Hunter was nominated for an Emmy for this back in 2000. Did it not have a theatrical release in the U.S.? After playing at the Sundance Festival in 1999, it appears to have gone straight to Showtime, thus qualifying it for the Emmys, and not the Oscars. I'm thinking there's a story there, perhaps it's just as simple as some male film executives not thinking there was an audience for a female-centric film. It made some money in theatrical release overseas, but there's zero U.S. box office. Well, if you don't put a film in the theaters, then the audiences can't go out and see it, and this then becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, doesn't it?
Also starring Cameron Diaz (last seen in "The Box"), Calista Flockhart (last seen in "A Midsummer Night's Dream"), Kathy Baker (last seen in "The Ballad of Lefty Brown"), Amy Brenneman (last seen in "City of Angels"), Valeria Golino (last seen in "Frida"), Holly Hunter (last seen in "Trespassing Bergman"), Matt Craven (last seen in "Dragonfly"), Gregory Hines (last seen in "The Muppets Take Manhattan"), Miguel Sandoval (last seen in "Sid and Nancy"), Noah Fleiss (last seen in "Brick"), Danny Woodburn (last seen in "The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas"), Penelope Allen (last seen in "The Thin Red Line"), Roma Maffia (last seen in "Holes"), Mika Boorem (last seen in "Riding in Cars with Boys"), Irma St. Paule, Juanita Jennings, Jacob Avnet, Elpidia Carrillo.
RATING: 5 out of 10 parking meters
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