Ben Wishaw as the lead male, a central sympathetic character in Women Talking (this is the only still I could find in a large size)
Claire Foy as one of the women talking (she is seen as a central dominating presence and she is certainly angry, and “difficult”)
Jessie Buckley, endlessly mentioned as part of the stellar nature of the case (and so complained about as exaggerated, and too sarcastic)
It’s being presented with the same timid mild praise and objection that the film itself practices ,.. I don’t say there is nothing worthy seeing: I see that that the film is a disappointment as feminism and its compromises indicative of our era and mainstream media.
Dear friends and readers,
I make it a policy usually to not review movies I find awful; you get little thanks for it, though it may attract attention. It needs to be bad in some important way: like a book on anorexics which purports to be sympathetic but is actually a vitriolic attack. (Another hatchet job by Kate Chisholm.) This film cannot be described as awful; it is rather wholly inadequate, insulting and as to what is presented for consolation, ludicrously inappropriate for most contemporary people; it moves into badness because it is not being reviewed truthfully: the subject matter on the face of it should be matter for feminism, and its being advertised as feminist; instead the film strips most of the context of what led to the women being in this room, allows us to see hardly anything horrific that has happened (in fact barely describes it) and centers on a useless vote, punctuated by in inset-sweet romance between Wisham as a young man who has himself been ejected from th colony and Maria Rooney as this continuously sweet woman who regards herself as blessed by her enforced pregnancy. It’s worse then tepid, and non-dramatic, the only philosophy presented is that of the Bible (some passages literally taken), and the only fates these women can imagine is to be mothers, grandmothers, to hold hands.
Mick LaSalle of Datebook Movies and TV is the only reviewer who takes the above point of view; I use some of his language. I presume (hope) the book tells the full story of women nightly drugged and raped in a Memnonite community, finally breaking out and going to court. In the movie house I was in the movie opens with these women as girls being indoctrinated into strict obedience. It was like one might imagine a Taliban session. Then we see them in the fields, and sudden switch to them gathered a barn (with Wishaw who as he takes the notes does become a sort of leader). Only at the end of the film do intertitles give the watcher some sense of what the serious case concerned.
In the ads what is focused upon are the rare moments of justified anger and rank misery (after having gone back to her man for one night, Jessie Buckley comes back with a broken arm and badly bruised face). We listen to two teenagers who seem to think themselves very rebellious for smoking. In some of the many reviews of (usually mild) praise, there are complaints about Buckley as giving an exaggerated and caricature performance. Her sarcasm was not appealing it seems. Praise for the older women’s religiosity was profuse. I was by turns bored and irritated. For lukewarm praise see Sheila O’Malleyyon Ebert.com. As the still above A.O Scott’s piece for the NYTimes shows, all too typical moments are let’s console one another
Judith Ivey as one of the group “elders”
This meeting of the women as real people afterwards remembering what the experience had been like sounds more effective (it is an ad).
This has a feel of reality: 
Benjamin Lee in The Guardian wisely concentrates on what you do not see in the film (the gaslighting of the real women, told they were having hallucinations): “stiff theatricality” is too kind.
Why do I bother write of it? because this is being served up as feminist. And it’s timid.
It also seems to me indicative of our era and time when it comes to mainstream social media. I finally unsubscribed from The Women’s Review of Books after its last sad years of the unexciting language, compromise and ennui; it’s no wonder that at the end their pages were dominated by trans issues (with to me its alienating nomenclature), Black lesbian writers, chummy columns of what was my favorite serial and novel this season? The problem with the passion of Foy and Buckley is they end up on a bandwagon of women headed out for they know not where, surrounded by children as their natural burden.
What have we seen? why difficult noisy women. I took two courses with Elaine Showalter at Politics and Prose (which runs online courses as part of the bookstore community) towards the end of the pandemic; it seems the new fashionable phrase for radical political women writers is difficult women. So that’s what we saw here with Ben Wishaw kowtowing to their every sensitivity.
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
In response to one remark someone made to me about this blog off the blog, I reply: Here’s a serious question (it really is, given how mad — truly crazed — these religious fanatics can be: Do you think the Taliban capable of deciding to exterminate “excess women” as “redundant?” If they started that, would western countries’ govts at long last intervene? …
Diane Kendig:
“I really like the film and am going today to pick up the book. I find that people around me in Ohio appreciate the film much more than my Eastern friends. I live very close to Amish communities, one of which was prosecuted and several men sent to prison recently for what was bring done to member men AND women there. And this story is based on a similar cult, but much further removed from Canada in time and space.”
My reply:
“I assume the book is much better and gives the context and trial.”
UK Guardian “Women Talking” review
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/feb/09/women-talking-review-ensemble-drama-forefronts-female-experience-of-violence
The trouble is they don’t discuss it — or only in rare moments. They spend more time reading the Bible. And we don’t learn about the horrific context until the film ends.
Someone has told me I need to read the book
Eileen Kessler:
“The book is one of the best I’ve read in the last few years. I have not seen the film yet. The book is tremendous in the way that it portrays the women’s struggle to go against their religion and the men who have harmed them.”
My reply:
All that is omitted in the film. I probably should buy it but I have so much on my “plate” just now.
Ellen
UK Telegraph review below (paywalled)
—————
A gripping prison-break film in which women are the prisoners and men the jailers
4/5
Rooney Mara, Jessie Buckley and Claire Foy star in Women Talking, a tale of a remote religious community in which men cruelly call the shots
By
Robbie Collin,
CHIEF FILM CRITIC
9 February 2023 • 12:23pm
Women Talking
There isn’t a barred window or barbed-wire-topped wall to be found in Women Talking, but it’s a prison-break film nonetheless. The latest feature from the Canadian actress and filmmaker Sarah Polley unfolds in a staunch religious community whose female members – drugged and raped in their sleep for years by men who must number among their husbands, fathers and sons – have every reason to want to escape.
Yet leaving their set-apart life and starting afresh isn’t as easy as lobbing a packed suitcase into the next horse-drawn buggy leaving camp. Rather, the mere possibility must first be spoken into existence – collectively but also in secret, or at least out of range of male ears and eyes. Pros and cons must be weighed; alternatives ruled out; eventualities conjured and mulled.
“What follows,” an introductory on-screen caption declares, “is an act of female imagination”. But do those words refer to the film itself, or the quasi-spell-casting process it depicts? With apologies for the spoiler, it’s both.
Women Talking gathers together a multi-generational ensemble of gifted actresses in a barn, then has them verbally extract themselves from the patriarchy while you watch. The talkers include Ona (Rooney Mara), pensive, gentle and pregnant by one of her rapists, and Mariche (Jessie Buckley), who is beaten by her husband, and whose despair has curdled into defeated acceptance of the women’s broader lot.
The bolder Salome (Claire Foy) is fired by righteous fury, while Frances McDormand’s village elder rages in the opposite direction: to leave would be grounds for damnation. As for Ben Whishaw’s August, a trusted schoolteacher carrying a torch for Ona, he’s there to take minutes of the meeting, and the story’s living #NotAllMen disclaimer.
Despite a morose colour palette that can feel a little eat-your-vegetables at times, the film is beautifully performed and gripping in a chewy, nuanced, contemplative way – as its title suggests, the talking, as well as the thinking it kindles, is the point. And of course Polley’s script, adapted from a 2018 novel by Miriam Toews, is holding a far broader swathe of society than isolated sects to account.
Initially, the film plays coy about exactly when it’s taking place – it could be a century ago – until a pickup truck pulls up, Daydream Believer blaring on the stereo, and asks the women to come out and register for the 2010 census. In an otherwise play-like film, it’s a thrillingly cinematic sequence; the Monkees track hitting like a stray sunbeam from the outside world. You mean this is happening now? we think. Well, that’s the point, the film replies. When it comes to sexual violence, the old ways die hard.
Regarding today’s post on “Women Talking”: I read the book before seeing the film, which rendered the film more understandable. I approached the book and the film through the lens of someone critical of patriarchy and theocracy in its brutality of and psychological hold on women. Although irritating to watch the “sweetness” of the woman made pregnant by the rape and the focus on faith and God, I recognize that these women, not permitted education beyond the bible, spoke and thought using the only language they knew. The film follows the book in this regard. So, with the exception of Clair Foye’s character, the women talk about leaving the colony based on God’s edict to protect their children – instead of their own conscience – partly due to religious propaganda and perhaps also how the neural structure of their brains don’t allow them to question or think critically – or even leave the cult.
Jeanne Mayer
My argument was the movie was disappointing, and poor because stripped of the full context of the book, and, to tell the truth, I thought this type of group
of women deliberately chosen as not to allow the women viewer to find a far more radical or at least secular and modern lens through which to view what
happened. I did send away for the book and will read it when it arrives …
[…] stands out against Women Talking‘s meretriciousness. For this coming week we have She Said to discuss, and we began with A Man Named […]