I still haven’t seen Barbie, of course, but being reminded yesterday of Greta Gerwig’s co-authoring of Disney’s seemingly woke-as-fuck Snow White bummed me out. This plus her reported interest in directing a Chronicles of Narnia film and her apparent general leanings as a writer-director since 2019’s Little Women, which seemed to signal an ardently feminist chapter…a proverbial turning of the page as she began to swim in a politically ideological stream…
Gerwig is obviously an inventive and visually exacting filmmaker, but I’m less taken with the incarnation that has come to be seen, felt and heard over the last four or five years than who she seemed to be (and with whom I fraternized two or three times) during her Obama-era output…her Greenberg, Frances Ha, Mistress America and Lady Bird period (2010 to 2017) when she was radiating a curiously appealing take on 21st Century life…truly imaginative and wonderfully peculiar…among the most idiosyncratic and organically rooted creative minds out there.
“Antonioni Gerwig,” posted almost exactly ten years ago:
