There’s a kind of movie that must straddle the fine line between art and trash in order to obtain its goals. It requires an understanding of both the material and the style in which it is presented by all involved. In other words, high camp. Which is different from camp, in that it knows its trafficking in dubious taste.
Paul Feig is no stranger to high camp. His 2018 A Simple Favor was a sleazy masterpiece of trash of women behaving badly. His latest, The Housemaid, an adaptation of the bestselling book by Frieda McFadden, is in the same vein. The Housemaid is not as stylistically unhinged as A Simple Favor; there’s no near-topless Blake Lively serving martinis in a graveyard scene. The Housemaid is a cinematic celebration of what Pauline Kael called “kiss kiss bang bang”. Only here it’s not bullets so much as the characters who go bang bang.
The plot, as adapted by Rebecca Sonneshine, is exactly the kind of narrative nonsense a story like this needs. Longtime readers will know of my exhaustion with plotcels and the belief that plot matters, but it doesn’t. Except with melodrama, in a sense, in that the plot provides a fertile abundance of subtext for the actors to sink their teeth into. The Housemaid may suffer from overfeeding some characters and starving others, but no matter, as every actor here is having a ball and understands when to give the camera a stoic glare, a sizzling glance, or a bout of manic expressiveness that threatens to break nearby glasses.
The Housemaid is a howler. It’s been a long time since I’ve had this much ribald fun at the movies. Not since Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag has a mainstream movie been as sexy or deranged. The last half of the film hits the rarefied strata of wicked, if I may be allowed to use the much overused adjective.
Beneath the soap trash, Feig and Sonneshine mine McFadden’s material for slices of exploration about how women are forced into boxes by both society and men. I’m not going to say The Housemaid plays with identity in the same way as, say, Ingmar Bergman’s Persona. But it does dip its toe into the sandbox, as evidenced by its two stars, Amanda Seyfried and Sydney Sweeney, two stars who could be sisters, or would be cast as sisters in a less imaginative film. Here the similarities are used to demonstrate how both culture and men often view women as disposable or interchangeable.
Seyfried’s Nina Winchester plays a seemingly perfect housewife with a troubled past. The cracks begin to show early on, and if not for Sweeney’s Millie’s desperation for a job, she likely would have made a break for it. But the two dance around each other throughout the film with the balletic grace of a bullfight, only who is the bull and who is the matador is never really clear.
John Schwartzman’s camera makes sure to milk the similarities and the differences between the two leads with sly bravado. Seyfried’s demure, classy, cool exterior hides the volcanic emotions underneath. While Sweeney’s earthy sexiness masks a cool interior that hides a caged animal. Feig and Sonneshine craft a delightful little dance between the two as both Nina and Millie seemingly try to outwit the other. Only for Millie, she’s trying to figure out what exactly is going on, and it is not until later that she understands the full impact of what she’s walked into.
Yet, the fun of The Housemaid is the way Feig and Sonneshine futz with dynamics between the two. While Nina’s cold and icy facade hides a dangerous ferocity, there is also a veneer of cold, calculated caged animal that clashes nicely with Millie’s own steely resolve. A resolve that melts because of Andrew (Brandon Sklenar), Nina’s hunky and understanding husband. The heat between the two melts away Millie’s hardened defenses.
Sklenar comes off as dull and unassuming until I began to clock one of the many twists. Then I couldn’t help but wallow in the way he so clearly is playing a part, too. Everyone is playing a part; everyone is putting on an act of what they think other people want to see. Not only that, but they are playing a part they themselves detest in order to get what they think they want, which is the other person. Every character is hiding behind a carefully crafted mask without ever grasping that they are hardly the only ones.
About halfway through The Housemaid, there is a sex scene that, for a culture so desperately horny but so terrified of even mentioning anything about it, comes off like a string of black cats being set off. Or maybe I’m just a sucker for sex scenes set during raging thunderstorms. Feig, Schwartzman, and Brent White’s merciless editing make the scene ooze sensuality and breathless desire. They allow us to see Millie’s face, a shocking rarity for many Hollywood sex scenes, and allow us to witness her pleasure. By centering Millie’s pleasure over Andrew’s, The Housemaid subtly shatters the male gaze.
As breathless as the scene is, it serves as the breaking point for Millie. The moment in which she goes from the victim to the hunter. Until Feig pulls the narrative carpet once again, and The Housemaid uncovers what it’s really about, sisterhood. The Housemaid looks at the many ways society – and other women – lift and tear each other down.
Feig delights in trashy, sidesteps sleazy for the most part, and embraces the absurdity of being the narrative. He takes such joy out of characters revealing their master plans through monologues and flashbacks, gleeful care in performances calibrated for either explosion or simmer, and miraculously, never hits a false note.
So, yes, The Housemaid is a trashy, soapy movie. But it also understands the ways women must thread a cadre of identities in their day-to-day lives as they try and balance the high-wire act of being everything or nothing. It’s the way women are perceived that dictates whether they will be helped or torn asunder. Something I imagine both Seyfried and Sweeney could relate to.
Images courtesy of Lionsgate
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