In Tomb Raider, Alicia Vikander channels her inner Indiana Jones, with a dash of Rambo thrown in: affecting just the right number of scrapes and cuts and a no-nonsense gaze, she vanquishes small armies of men with just her wits, physical strength and a quiver full of arrows.
Vikander presents an earthier, more realistic version of Angelina Jolie’s impossibly voluptuous video-game heroine Lara Croft – a character that launched a hugely successful franchise around the same time Milla Jovovich started kicking tush in the Resident Evil spinoffs. As the daughters of such action heroines as Sarah Conner in The Terminator and Ellen Ripley in Alien, and the godmothers of Charlize Theron’s Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road, these hard-bodied heroines have become familiar cinematic tropes, one side of a coin that includes the unapologetic bitch, most recently personified by Frances McDormand in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and Allison Janney in I, Tonya.
It’s telling that both performances earned an Oscar this year: Each seemed to tap into the same vein of inchoate anger that propelled both the outcome of the 2016 election and the response to it. And there’s no denying the subversive frisson inspired by watching actresses go full harridan, especially when it comes to traditional ideas about female agency and the approving male gaze. Next to McDormand’s literal bomb-thrower, Meryl Streep’s aristocratic Katharine Graham, who came into her own in The Post and claimed her due far more quietly, had nary a chance.
As cathartic as badasses and bitches can be as expressions of female power on screen, both for actors and audiences, that paradigm feels just as played out as the damsels in distress and helpless love interests of yore. What was once liberating now feels limiting, reducing our notions of power to hysterically pitched burlesques or tough-as-males drag. Are these really – still – our best options?
One answer to that question can be found in the documentary Mankiller, a film about Wilma Mankiller, the first woman elected principal chief of the Cherokee Nation. As a young person who was relocated from her ancestral home in Oklahoma to California, Mankiller came of age during the 1960s and 1970s, when the Native American, labor, civil rights and women’s movements were helping millions of Americans find their voices. After returning to Oklahoma, Mankiller overcame her self-doubt to become a brilliant community organizer, working with often mistrustful tribe members to help bring social and economic change, whether in the form of badly needed water lines or horticultural businesses. (The film is airing on PBS in March.)
Mankiller was produced by Gale Anne Hurd, whose movies The Terminator and Aliens helped make Sarah Conner and Ellen Ripley household names. Those heroines, she said at a February screening of Mankiller at the Athena Film Festival, “don’t realize the power and the strength and the leadership abilities they have within themselves.”