Ladies, Not Cops
I don’t make the rules
Hello and welcome to another Interval installment of Untitled Raphaela Weissman Colin Farrell Project. Next time we meet here again, I’ll be discussing the 2017 film The Beguiled, and I’ll tell you why:
I have, as you might imagine, researched Farrell’s filmography a decent amount since I began this endeavor (I revisit the list periodically to see where things are streaming because I’m reluctant to pay money to rent movies from the Internet. If I am renting a movie, I want it to be in a brick and mortar store with posters on the wall and stale candy for sale and surly film snob teenagers working behind the counter, and those don’t exist anymore because it’s 2023, so I’m out of luck, as are we all). The first half of Colin Farrell’s career, as with any actor ever, contains a less filtered, probably less excellent crop of films, and in Farrell’s case, a lot of them appear to be what I’m going to call, imperfectly, dude movies: action, guns, cops. He’s in a lot of movies whose poster is him and another guy, or maybe two other guys, in utilitarian cop sunglasses, giving a matching angry stare out into the universe: bad guys beware. That’s fine, and I’m not going to not watch any of those, but I do tend to gravitate to the later part of the filmography for selections that are more interesting. So I found a movie that seemed the farthest from Two to Three Angry Cops Staring Into the Void, which is this Sofia Coppola movie about a bunch of women during the Civil War, and Colin Farrell.
The Bechdel Test has said most everything I would want to say about the bizarre rarity of American films to even feature two women talking to each other, but I will reiterate again that it’s so, so weird. It’s wild that when I look at the list of movies that this actor has been in, there are only a couple that I’m certain will involve at least some women, and in the case of The Beguiled, it’s because the cover has only women, and in case we still weren’t sure, it’s also in woman-y colors and a woman-y font to make everything totally clear. So if you’re put off by the designations of “lady movies” vs. “cop movies” and the fact that they are absolutely two separate entities, take it up with Hollywood. You know what? Take it up with THE PATRIARCHY.
So yes, I will, in the course of this project, document Colin Farrell’s prolific experimentation with ugly sunglasses; I will watch him shoot guns, blow up cars, be too much of a wild card for his buttoned-up superiors, get his cover blown, find some sexy comfort in the arms of an actress whose name we’ll never know, trade one-liners with Bruce Willis; I’ll watch him tangle with the most nefarious of Miami’s vices, and even be totally recalled. I will. But for now, please join me in the drawing room for exacting historical details, corsets, cups of tea, probably some excellent horse acting — you know, where the ladies are.
