Are movies still short-changing middle-aged women?

Cinema doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to its treatment of women over the age of 40. When they’re not busy being mothers, tossed aside by their partner in favour of a younger woman, or cheerily solving cosy crimes, they are relegated to the sidelines or are corrosively bitter about their age. For men (both on and off screen) age is little barrier to opportunity – when did a few grey hairs ever stop the De Niros, Mortensens or Clooneys from scooping awards and acclaim? Yet there’s another issue at hand: on the off-chance a film does centre on an older woman, her age is inevitably a key part of the plot.

This awards season would appear to have brought with it a tidal change. Rather than veteran male actors, seasoned female stars have been in the spotlight: Demi Moore, Nicole Kidman, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Pamela Anderson and Fernanda Torres are among those having a well-deserved mid-career renaissance. Beyond that, middle-aged womanhood is suddenly a hot topic in everything from Ted Lasso to The Split: Barcelona, while Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is the second film in the franchise to pick up the character’s story on the other side of 40. Michelle Yeoh seemed to forecast the trend when she insisted during her Oscars acceptance speech in 2023: “Ladies, never let anyone tell you you are past your prime.”

It’s refreshing to see a universal issue affecting women – the seemingly impossibility of balancing families and relationships with careers – explored frankly onscreen, and Moore, Kidman and Anderson are rightfully being recognised for their top-tier performances. But in this trio of roles there is something suspiciously similar. All three women are cripplingly afraid that they are no longer desirable, and all at some point are mocked – not altogether unrealistically – for trying to maintain their professional standing. Two are willing to go to concerning lengths to chase after the beauty or ego associated with their youth.

Although there is some truth in these portrayals, they seem to echo other films that have come before – especially in their decision to pit older and younger women against each other. Halina Reijn’s Babygirl is part of a recent haul of “MILF” movies, alongside the likes of Lonely Planet and The Idea of You. Romy (Kidman) runs a tech firm, while her intern, Samuel (Harris Dickinson), begins a streak of behaviour which surely violates numerous company policies, informing Romy “I think you like being told what to do” and hitting on her in front of colleagues. It seems telling that when Romy finally reciprocates, it’s when she spies Samuel hooking up with another young intern at the office Christmas party, igniting her jealousy. Just a scene later, we see her getting Botox.

The Substance is far less subtle in its regressive positioning of older and younger women as rivals. Spawned from TV aerobics instructor Elizabeth Sparkle (Moore) after she takes the titular substance (a shady new Ozempic-adjacent injectable), 20-something Sue (Margaret Qualley) is the physical manifestation of Elizabeth’s anxieties about her waning beauty – just as the conniving Eve Harrington becomes the walking embodiment of theatre maven Margo Channing’s “age obsession” in the 1950 drama All About Eve.

Both films focus on fading stars unfairly booted from their jobs because of ageism, while Sunset Boulevard (also released in 1950) – arguably the prototype for the “hagsploitation” genre, which siphons dread from the supposed horror of the wrinkled female body – sees bygone Hollywood idol Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) also undergo beauty treatments in anticipation of her return to fame. Of course, this path back to glory is a delusion: in show business older women can never win. With limited roles for women “of a certain age” at that time, stellar actors Bette Davis and Joan Crawford would be fated to play gorgons and crones for the rest of their careers. It’s troubling that 75 years on we’re seeing near identical narratives for female actors, albeit with a more extravagant helping of blood and gore.

As someone who tries to steer away from the toxicity of the beauty world, it has been disheartening to see these new features applauded as significantly diversifying the representation of middle-aged womanhood onscreen, or being definitive portrayals of it. Even stranger is many of these films and shows’ muddled insistence that their protagonists are past their prime. In The Last Showgirl, part of the glamorous appeal of Las Vegas’ dancers is that they are symbols of a lost era. Crudely, Anderson, now in her fifties, is used to symbolise that obsolete beauty, a simplistic metaphor unaided by the heavy-handedness of the script. During an audition taking place after Shelly (Anderson) is discarded as the lead of her show, she says of her own appearance, “distance helps”, before performing an excruciatingly bad dance routine. This denigration sits uneasily within a narrative which insists that these women are beautiful, all the while working a little too hard to show them as society supposedly sees them – valueless.

But it’s worth recognising there are some filmmakers for whom a woman’s age isn’t an issue. In Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, Marianne Jean-Baptiste is formidable as the acerbic Pansy, a mother and sister experiencing depression which manifests in biting anger. In other films where age is a topic for exploration, such as Antonella Sudasassi Furniss’ Memories of a Burning Body – a fusion of three women’s stories in their 60s and 70s, told with depth, wit and hope – we see that there is a richness and joy to middle and older age beyond the shallow stories which dominate pop culture.

The protagonist of Sophie Hyde’s Good Luck to You, Leo Grande shares a history of faking orgasms with Romy, but this story, like Furniss’, places equal emphasis on the positives of older age and its detriments. Mia Hansen-Løve’s 2016 feature Things to Come (written with then-62-year-old Isabelle Huppert in mind) also finds freedom and euphoria in the life of a later-in-life divorcee. The latest Bridget Jones instalment is refreshingly non-judgemental about Bridget’s relationship with a younger man, and more generally celebrates the pleasures of this particular unique chapter in life.

It may be true that not a huge amount has improved for middle-aged women in 75 years, but films rehashing problematic old tropes – even while providing roles for women over 40 – shouldn’t be uncritically celebrated. The likes of Furniss, Leigh and Hansen-Løve are proof there’s a middle ground – and that age really is just a number.