Film Review: All About Nina Confronts How We Ask Women To Grow Up
When you are a woman, like any member of an oppressed group, you carry double consciousness. There is the “you” in front of men, and the you in front of the mirror. In All About Nina, Mary Elizabeth Winstead brings the mirror to men, and you are ready to see it BREAK!
Nina is blunt, brash, and boiling in a quiet rage that leads to both hilarious and oddly tragic outbursts. Playing a stand-up comedienne in search of her “big break,” while her relationships break down, Winstead makes Nina feel like a filmed permission for women to say, “Yeah, I have no idea how to live a better life, but I know that I should not be living this oppressed one!” Comedians are known as those who have chosen to laugh at life’s tragedies, but as you watch Nina struggle to grow up, as a person, in a “funny world” stuck in its patriarchal tendencies, writer/ director Eva Vives asks, “When do you stop laughing?”
No one can take away that laughter is medicine, but as you watch Nina’s anxieties, self-deprecations, and even self- harms take darker twists, you find yourself asking when it is time to go from “medicine to surgery.” Winstead makes Nina vivacious, charming, and “pull your hair out” annoying. Through Vives’ writing and portrait-esque shots, she becomes “that friend” we all have that, though we love them, is draining to watch them not love themselves. The problem is that, in moving from New York to LA, Nina does not know enough people to help her pick herself up, which is why her inability to do so leads her to a stand-up routine/ breakdown that is electrically riveting.
Through humor, Nina is able to express how smart, angry, and emotionally torn she is to be living in a world that that has men asking her, “Why are you so angry?” with a genuine “no idea.” It is such moments that help audiences to realize the pressure we put on women/ members of oppressed communities to grow up in compensation for men that are never asked to do so. Of course, we should all want to grow up, but Nina’s character proves that such a feat is a process not a “light switch” you can turn on and off.
The whole point of systemic oppression is to, literally, disrupt the individual lives of a community, and to assure that their ambitions become ash. You see this through Nina, who may struggle to make genuine, healthy relationships, but she does not struggle to make goals. This woman wants to be a star while having a basic, human breakdown over what it means to be light. While she can be her most authentic self on stage, steaming her wit with societal commentary the same way an iron steams a blouse, it is her “love triangle” between Chace Crawford’s Joe and Rafe that helps viewers see how a world that rejects you on gender teaches you how to reject yourself in general.
Chace Crawford’s Joe and Rafe are juxtaposed in Nina’s life as the “bad guy” and the “good guy.” Joe is they typical guy that sees his woman as “his,” and never sees her dreams as equally valid/urgent in being built when compared to his own. Yet, Rafe is the genuinely supportive, loving man that Nina deserves, but will not give her heart to. When you realize that Joe is her ex-husband, and yet she cannot let herself be loving/ loved by Rafe, you witness Nina’s self-sabotage. For however much she desires better, she does not let herself get it or, at least, learn to attain it. Still, because she is a woman, such self-destructiveness feels amplified and endangering to how far she wants to go when so many are ready to hold her back.
In this world, everybody struggles to find their purpose, but when you are a woman that struggle can feel doubled because others will go out of their way to say your gender renders your voice meaningless. It is in this nuanced, but heightened level of “struggle” that Nina finds it hard to connect to this world, which, oddly, explains why she is such a good comedian. Comedy is born from analyzing how humanity connects and disconnects from itself. In being based on the comedy world, All About Nina confronts how disconnected we become from ourselves when we feel the world is cutting us off. All About Nina Comes Out In Theatres September 28.
