Lisa Edelstein is part of a new ladies' club
NEW YORK — "Go find yourself" is the tagline for Bravo's first scripted series, Girlfriends' Guide to Divorce, about an attractive, smart, sexy, sensual woman of a certain age (House's Lisa Edelstein) who finds herself suddenly single. To complicate matters, she's a relationship guru minus the relationship, not a great place to be when you teach moms how to find personal bliss.
Guide, due Tuesday (10 p.m. ET/PT) joins two other projects that showcase women who find themselves at odds with the lives they're living, and who, in very different ways, finally find themselves.
Wild, opening Friday, stars Reese Witherspoon as a distraught, drug-abusing woman who gets her groove back after trekking the Pacific Crest Trail. And Big Eyes, Tim Burton's Christmas release, tells the story of a '50s artist (Amy Adams) who's the real talent behind a popular series of paintings credited to her spotlight-hogging husband — and how she moves out of his shadow.
Telling stories from the female perspective isn't new (see Davis, Bette) but it's notable that three such high-profile projects are arriving at the same time. Yet none set out to bash viewers over the head with heavy-duty messages about Important Issues.
"The theme of female empowerment sort of snuck up on us," says Big Eyes co-screenwriter Scott Alexander. "With this movie, we'd made an active decision to tell a movie from a woman's point of view. "
For Edelstein, who ironically married artist Robert Russell just before starting production on a show about marital destruction, it's a welcome conversational change: a chance to show women that not everything turns out like a fairy tale involving love, marriage and a baby carriage.
"The story about women and what their lives should look like — that they should be married and have kids — it's a horrible story to give to little girls. If those things aren't right for that little girl and she lives her life true to herself, she will have to mourn the loss of something that was never hers to begin with," says Edelstein. "I didn't have children. And I had to really sit with myself and ask myself if it was my loss or the loss of an idea that was never mine to begin with. We're told these stories of what life looks like that are really limited."
As to whether it's easier to start over in your early 20s or your 40s, for Edelstein, there's no contest. When you're just out of your teens, you have no real idea what you want, so there's not much left to lose. In your middle years, there's more at stake.
"We jump into these ideas of ourselves as adolescents, when we don't even know who we are," she says.
That's a topic that anyone can understand. There's a universal aspect to the stories of women trapped in lives they don't want, says Big Eyes co-screenwriter Larry Karaszewski.
"I could relate to this because of my mother. She stayed in a relationship with my father for 20 years and he really mistreated her. I witnessed all that firsthand. We talked to Margaret and found out how Walter treated her. I could understand her thought process," says Karaszewski. "This has happened throughout history. Hopefully that era is over."
Certainly, Guide deals with those topics, with a lighter, more comedic touch. Yet Edelstein hopes that the message is the same for both genders: Let's think about our lives, and not follow a script we didn't write.
"There's a language problem. Part of what this show is about is also a language problem, about a man's role in marriage. Boys are told they'll find a wife and take care of their family. Because of the economy, everyone works. Because of successful feminism, women are very successful today. There are so many women who end up being the earners in their family. A lot of the women in this show are powerful women who are supporting their families," she says.
Edelstein says that oddly enough, the destruction of her fictional marriage helped her nourish her real one, because her series traffics in real-world problems — like presenting a perfect front to your friends, when behind closed doors, everything is wrong and you're text-fighting with your husband in front of the offspring.
"Robert and I had been together for years, so there's that. I've never been married and I'm not a kid," she says. "I looked at marriage in a very realistic way, with as little fantasy as possible. As a grownup, I thought a lot about divorce while I was getting married. What kills a relationship? What makes it thrive? How do you keep it alive and healthy?" she says. "Whenever the topics came up at the show, it made me look at us and ask how we score in that regard in our relationship."
Although the stories told in the three projects vary in detail — a woman dealing with the death of a mother, a woman handling the death of a marriage, and an artist coping with the death of a mirage she'd created — all are relatable.
"Margaret so enabled the situation by allowing the man to stand in front of her and speak for her," Alexander says of Big Eyes. "It has real emotional resonance. She let him steal her identity."
The story is big in scope. It's emotionally resonant. The denouement is stunning. But that begs the question: Why did it take the writers a decade to get a film about a woman made, when much lesser stories about men are released every year?
"It drives me crazy. Is it because of stupidity? The power structure as it is? There need to be more women writers. That's crazy too because a lot of female studio heads don't make women pictures. It's kind of criminal," says Karaszewski.