Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut goes from feminist to eugenicist.
The Lost Daughter is so perfectly rotten that it surely reflects some twisted, deep-seated attitude held by Maggie Gyllenhaal, the actress turned director-writer, again taking to her soapbox for a politically modish statement. The title suggests the female condition: a wayward woman trying to understand her life’s path as radical feminists see it. She assumes the privilege to be obnoxious.
The film’s protagonist is prickly Harvard literary professor Leda Caruso (Olivia Colman), a malcontent who feels superior to everyone because they don’t see her unique intelligence or the urgency of her private needs. On vacation in Greece, the middle-aged Cambridge resident rolls her eyes at rowdy plebes — the deplorables — who invade her safe space.
Yes, Gyllenhaal is that obvious, but her banality is disguised as sophistication. The film is based on a novel by Elena Ferrante (a pseudonym) and sustains literary airs, starting with Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” to elevate Leda’s condition, a chronic case of postpartum depression.
We should be allowed to recognize when a serious condition is exploited simply to showcase debility. The Lost Daughter is not a breakthrough in which Gyllenhaal at long last brings the “female gaze” to cinema. She merely buys into the gender-studies fashion that seems to be at the heart of the novel. The film’s literary references are meant to intimidate and obscure.
The Lost Daughter could be a conventional women’s-picture melodrama (Barbara Stanwyck’s All I Desire, Joan Crawford’s Sadie McKee, Gene Tierney’s Leave Her to Heaven) except that it gets clinical about Leda’s restlessness and perversity, amped-up indie-movie style.
Gyllenhaal divides Leda’s ominous, no-woman’s-land retreat chronologically. We see her current distress, and flashbacks show her dissatisfied youth as an impatient mother and aspiring academic whose brilliance baffles her male colleagues — threatening a gray-haired pedant, then cheating on her husband by seducing a lecture-circuit lech who is as narcissistic as herself.
Gyllenhaal recently took home a raft of Gotham Independent Spirit Awards and Golden Globe nominations for catering to our Christine Blasey Ford culture no matter the lunacy.
And Leda, old or young, is a lunatic. She works out her anger by deceiving the boors around her, even stealing a child’s baby doll. It becomes a feminist fetish, representing the two little girls she birthed but from whom she has since become estranged. It symbolizes Leda’s sexist upbringing, then becomes the object of her spiteful retaliation. She refuses traditional maternity: “I am an unnatural mother,” she boasts.
Could this case study — oddly specific yet generic — ever be anything but bizarre? Only shill reviewers, who automatically applaud liberal tenets, would find this story credible.
The Lost Daughter could be a Planned Parenthood training film for the way it enshrines female selfishness. Old Leda, dizzy and twisted with anxiety, brags about how she hates talking to her daughters on the phone. Young Leda takes the impatience she feels with her toddlers to be proof of the folly of parenthood. Gyllenhaal tries justifying this eccentric position by evoking postpartum depression. But it’s really only self-centered cheek. The pop-music clues include Roberta Flack’s ambiguous “Jesus Told Me,” a paean to religious paradox, and David Byrne’s “People Like Us,” an ode to isolationism.
Gyllenhaal seems to identify with Leda, as if she truly thinks a mother’s frustration is an existential crisis. Perhaps it’s an attempt to link Leda to the Margaret Sanger eugenicist ideal. She’s read specious Ferrante, but has she ever read Euripedes’ Medea?
Leda’s imperious, sour disposition matches Colman’s actorly specialty. Sharp-eyed, buck-toothed, and aggressive, she recalls Glenda Jackson’s insolence without Jackson’s power. Jessie Buckley, so emotionally precise in Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things, is wasted portraying Young Leda, a phony conceit. Only Dakota Johnson escapes the film’s pretense by showing a scared mother’s basic gentility.
Gyllenhaal, who once said that America deserved the 9/11 attacks, has not evolved politically. The Lost Daughter is appalling throughout but then becomes ludicrous when Old Leda attends a screening of The Last Time I Saw Paris (gorgeous Elizabeth Taylor declaring, “I devoted the last nine months to you, but now I’m going to have fun!”), and her fantasy is interrupted by noisy louts chanting “Blue Lives Matter! Blue Lives Matter! Blue Lives Matter!” Gyllenhaal is one of those close-minded Hollywood liberals who confuse self-pity with political enmity.
