Consider the hapless man. He’s uncertain, ineffectual, star-crossed. Nothing ever seems to work out for him; he can’t confidently take action to face a crisis. You’d think he would make for a dull story. And yet there he was last year, serving, improbably, as the protagonist in several notable films.
Instead of prestige movie heroes like J. Robert Oppenheimer, we had the unlucky lead who bumbles forward as if confounded by the plot unfolding around him. He’s a man of action, sometimes, but not much sense. He turns to exactly the wrong person for help with an important task. He spends so long numbing himself with drugs and alcohol that he can’t recall the talismanic words that will protect him.
And of course he reckons with the people these films inevitably put beside him: hypercompetent women. They are ever-present — and they are usually so capable, so confidently efficacious, that if they were the story’s focus, the movie would be over in 15 minutes.
Take Kelly Reichardt’s “The Mastermind.” James Blaine Mooney, its central figure, is an aimless, out-of-work father and a former art-school student who teams up with a couple of equally hapless men to just barely carry off a heist of Modernist paintings from a local museum. The women in his life — his wife, Terri; his mother, Sarah; and an old friend, Maude — either warily indulge him or are fed up with him. After the crime, when James has been identified as a suspect and the walls are closing in, they are the ones who recognize what a danger he is to himself and others, even as he seems unaware of how far he’d go to evade capture; they understand him, and the severity of his predicament, far better than he seems to.
Or consider the Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s Palme d’Or-winning “It Was Just an Accident.” Its protagonist, Vahid, is a mechanic who thinks he has found the sadistic captor who tortured him in jail. Vahid stalks and kidnaps his quarry — but just as he’s about to take revenge by burying the man alive, he comes to doubt whether he has the right person. Thus begins a darkly comical sequence in which Vahid drives the man around Tehran, visiting other former prisoners to confirm that this was their torturer. But the men are either unwilling to help or dangerously unhinged. It’s when he meets two female former prisoners, Shiva and Golrokh, that he gets some guidance; they are the ones who might help determine the truth.
Then there is Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another,” in which Leonardo DiCaprio plays Bob Ferguson, a bomb-making revolutionary who goes underground as the U.S. government hunts down members of his cadre. Sixteen years later, he’s a burned-out, hippie-ish single parent living on the margins in Northern California, raising the daughter he had with a fellow militant, Perfidia — a long-departed warrior-ideologue who cheated on him with the Army colonel pursuing them, then abandoned her family and betrayed her comrades to save herself.
‘You look so lost,’ she tells him.
Perfidia is the film’s driving force, directing the group’s strategy and taking Bob as a lover; her actions push the story forward even after she leaves. All through the film, though, so many of the women Bob encounters have things together in ways that put him to shame — say, the nurse doing intake at a police station after Bob is arrested in a military raid, who hands him off to another nurse, at a hospital, who calmly, unflappably leads him to freedom. Even Bob’s teenage daughter, Willa, is the responsible one, a purple belt in karate who effectively parents her own father.
All these protagonists are ineffectual bunglers. Once they’ve decided to act — not a given — they seem unmoored by the forces arrayed against them. It’s not just viewers who can see this. Early in “One Battle,” Perfidia’s mother asks Bob how he will take care of her baby granddaughter: “You look so lost,” she tells him.
The women they come across, on the other hand, seem ready for anything. They might see several chess moves ahead of both the protagonists and antagonists. They know how to affect the world of the movie, and they do so with ease — exactly what the actual “hero” of the story is completely unable to do.
You might expect the haplessness of these men to say something about modern gender relations, but it may really have more to do with politics. To varying degrees, each of these films plays out against the backdrop of a repressive society in which the government exerts control over its citizens. “The Mastermind” has James drifting rudderless in the malaise of New England in 1970, amid antiwar protests and Big Brother-like portraits of Richard Nixon. “Accident” is set in contemporary Iran, where Vahid was jailed and tortured for protesting poor labor conditions. In “One Battle,” Bob is far from his days of youthful rebellion, meandering through a liquor-and-weed-induced fog with only his paranoia to help him survive.
These men embody, on some level, our own smallness in the face of vast, oppressive forces — the pathetic haplessness of anyone who faces off against the full apparatus of the state and feels puny in comparison.
All three fit the archetype of the schlemiel: irredeemably inept, an accident of a person, the butt of some great cosmic joke. The schlemiel is as much a literary figure as a cinematic one. Think of the main characters in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Chelm stories or Benny Profane in Thomas Pynchon’s debut novel, “V.” (The long line of hapless men in Pynchon’s works includes Zoyd Wheeler of “Vineland,” the inspiration for Bob in “One Battle.”) But film history is equally littered with schlemiels, from Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp to Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot. Many of them could also be said to be put upon by the state of their world — by, for example, its dehumanizing, technocratic innovations in Chaplin’s “Modern Times” (1936) or Tati’s “Playtime” (1967).
One difference, with those figures, is that events always seem to end up working out for them; they bumble blissfully onward, not toward grim disaster but toward some kind of grace. Another is that they do not appear alongside processions of hypercompetent women — women who seem able to understand and redirect the plot as easily as the screenwriter might.
The fact that these figures are so often women may be a way of suggesting that men have had their run, and look where it has gotten us. It may be that the characters who are most capable of enacting change are the ones who have more to lose. (Perfidia’s demands include “free borders, free bodies, free choices.”) Or it may be that these women serve as mommy figures — all-powerful authorities whom these men, made infantile by the world, look to for care and guidance. (“I’m a little unclear as to what the plan is,” Bob tells Perfidia. “I’m going to need some direction.”)
Whatever the case, today’s schlemiels do not get to stumble comically through life. Their films offer no sense that anyone can escape unmarred. Even in recent movies whose protagonists are not so inept — say, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s “The Secret Agent,” which takes place chiefly during Brazil’s military dictatorship and features similarly capable women — there is no feeling that either the hero or the society around him will end up OK. The women in these stories are cures and exemplars, the ones with the capacity to fix everything. We should not be surprised if the coming years bring more films like these — all dreaming that there is somebody out there with whom we might throw in our lot, somebody competent enough to tell us what to do to make the world right.
Diego Hadis is a writer and the copy chief of T: The New York Times Style Magazine. He last wrote for the magazine about sympathetic robots.
Source photographs for illustration above: Warner Bros. Pictures; Neon; Ryan Sweeney/MUBI Mastermind Movie Inc.; Kaveh Kazemi/Getty Images; Bettmann Archive/Getty Images.
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