Shots in the Dark: how the "woman of a certain age" went from missing in action to front, center, and in charge

Actresses in their thirties and over who aren't currently Hollywood A-listers have recently been having a good time having a bad time in movies. That, of course, enables them to prove their characters' resourcefulness, resilience, and passion--whether it serves them well or not is almost irrelevant. Joan Allen, Patricia Clarkson, Anne Heche (brilliant in last year's Birth), Catherine Keener, and Tilda Swinton are at the peak of their powers. Glenn Close, Lisa Kudrow, and Swinton's Broken Flowers colleagues--Sharon Stone, Jessica Lange, and Frances Conroy--all suffered superbly onscreen this summer. And though Diane Lane has opted for romantic whimsy since 2002's Unfaithful, she has intriguing parts coming up.

This is a better state of affairs than in the '90s when the lament "There are no good roles for women" was commonplace in movie-biz chatter. We've all heard stories of certain actresses being told they couldn't have plum parts because they weren't "sexy" enough. Doubtless that acid test still applies in some producers' offices, but in a year in which Keener, 45, and Swinton, 45 next month, appear in four movies apiece, something's going right.

Nearly all these actresses have been given their best opportunities in independent movies, which shows how much Hollywood, driven by the teen dollar, has forsaken the so-called women's film. This subgenre of melodrama flourished in Hollywood's golden era, especially in the domestic roller coasters starring Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, or Bette Davis, and reached its zenith in such florid, impacted Douglas Sirk films as All That Heaven Allows (1955) and Imitation of Life (1959). Todd Haynes's 2002 Far from Heaven paid ironic homage to Sirk's cinema, in which women's crises in the patriarchal '50s are expressed through disruptive visual stratagems.

Moribund until the late '80s, the women's film revived with internationally crossbred indie cinema and the emergence of directors like Jane Campion, Sally Potter, Nicole Holofcener, and Deepa Mehta, who have each depicted the woman's place in a world that is less confidently and confiningly masculine than it was midcentury. And though it's hard to imagine Allen, Keener, or Swinton playing such drama queens as Stella Dallas, Martha Ivers, and Mildred Pierce, they've found their postfeminist equivalents, who fail and triumph as much as their forebears. All three actresses have played mothers, adulteresses, wives, and compromised career women to whom happiness is often elusive, though they find ways of lashing back at a cruel society: Allen usually with anger, Keener with sarcasm, and Swinton with steeliness.

The lot of a wife with limited choices is treated insightfully in both the current A History of Violence and Forty Shades of Blue. In the former, a visionary thriller directed by David Cronenberg, Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello play the parents of a teenage boy and a little girl living happily in low-income, small-town obscurity. When a pair of killers invades Mortensen's cafe one night, he unflappably terminates them. The resulting publicity calls his identity into question, which disorients his family. Typically tough, Bello is excellent here as a woman who tries all she can to protect her husband and kids but can only do so much. In that she's reminiscent of Jean Arthur's striving frontier wife in Shane (1953), Cronenberg's film is a throwback to a time when violence was the norm. Though furious at her husband (and turned on by his lethalness), Bello's character must watch as he takes action, and she does it with patience and dignity.

In Forty Shades of Blue, a modest realist drama directed by Ira Sachs, the Russian actress Dina Korzun (Last Resort, 2000) plays the live-in girlfriend of a legendary Memphis R&B producer 30 years her senior, with whom she has a small son. Portrayed with crusty bombast by Rip Torn, he is oblivious to his wife's boredom and melancholy. Korzun is initially chilly, but the arrival of her handsome stepson (Darren Burrows), who's locked in simmering oedipal rivalry with his dad, elicits her warmth and uncontainable desire. The idea isn't original--see La Curee (1966) and Caught (1996)--and the dawning love between the pair is poorly developed, but Korzun is electrifying as a woman facing an appalling dilemma. Her sense of honor eventually betrays her, but her emotions will not be denied. Sometimes melodrama is all a woman has.

Graham Fuller is Interview's film writer at large.

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