The less you know about Colossal going into it, the better. Which is to
say that if you haven't seen it, you should maybe stop reading now and
come back when you have, though what I have to say about it doesn't
contain any actual spoilers. It's just that it's a creative and
unexpected movie that continuously keeps you guessing, and the surprise
element is one of its great pleasures (as many people have noted, Anne
Hathaway's performance is another one). I don't intend to review the
movie overall so much as to get out a few of the things I've been
muddling over since seeing it (and try, again, to be better about
keeping this blog).
One of the things that I really
appreciated about the movie is that it represents both the pleasures and
the pitfalls of heavy drinking with genuine nuance. Unlike Trainwreck,
which admits that staying up late and getting drunk can be awfully fun
but ultimately insists that the heroine get rid of all the booze in her
possession in order to be redeemed*, Colossal acknowledges the damage
alcohol can wreak, and the need for limits, while also criticizing the
tendency to moralize those limits (and highlighting the gendered ways
that such moralizing tends to play out). It doesn't offer a simple
solution - the movie's final scene is brilliantly ambiguous in this
regard - and I love it for that.
Overall, this
is a really satisfying female-empowerment story. It treads a very fine
line between showing you some of the ways in which sexism structures the
main character's experiences without letting it dictate the narrative
arc, or effectively disempower her altogether. Sometimes, arguably, this
means bending away from realism. But it's so welcome and so satisfying
to see a woman winning in a way that doesn't feel blatantly idealistic
and contrived. This means that sometimes she doesn't win. This also
means that sometimes what it means to win turns out to be something
other than you (have been taught by Hollywood to) expect. That's how life works. It's refreshing to see a film that gets that.
I
have more ambivalent feelings about the way that South Korea figures
in to the movie as an uneasy combination of symbol and real place. It
literally becomes an arena for (white) Americans to work out their
issues, and sustains massive damage in the process. An elegant metaphor
for actual political/economic/affective processes, but is the film
critiquing them or repeating them? A bit of both? I do think that the
movie insists upon South Korea's tangible reality as an actual place
with actual people, and not just a tragedy that you see on tv, in important
ways. I think that the monster movie aspect is loving homage and
thoughtful hybrid rather than cultural appropriation. But I also want to
hear what other smart people think about it (especially people of
color), and I don't think it's my place to make a firm pronouncement on the
matter. To my surprise, a brief google search turned up nothing (well,
for some reason, it did turn up a lot of articles about the Gilmore
Girls, which I haven't seen but I gather has some very problematic
representations of Asians). I will probably be considered a killjoy for
even raising the question when the movie is doing such awesome things
re: gender, but them's the breaks.
In the meantime though, you should totally go see the movie. It's not perfect or even mind-blowingly amazing (there's a whole other conversation to be had about how weirdly passive the minor characters are - like, I get that they're minor, but they are so blatantly without agency that it kind of boggles the mind), but, like Bad Moms, which I unfortunately didn't write about here, it's one of those rare movies that seems to be imagining someone like me as the audience while still being relatively mainstream. So go give it some money.
* There were a lot of things that I liked about that movie, but it turns out that that's what stuck with me, and apparently I can't forgive it.
