The Lost Daughter, an astounding directorial debut from Maggie Gyllenhaal, is an intimate, brutally honest tale of one mother’s unapologetic fallibility. Hollywood has gotten better at creating nuanced, multi-faceted female characters. Yet, this is not entirely true for all of the dominating female archetypes, namely mothers. Being a flawed woman is intriguing. Being a flawed mother is unforgivable.
As such, the concept of a mother who is allowed to be flawed, and not vilified for it, is almost unheard of. Yeah, bad moms exist in the cinematic canon, even neglectful ones. But the focus of these stories is typically the child, or maybe the father saddled with often newfound parental responsibility.
Think Kramer vs Kramer. Meryl Streep is not only playing the villain of the story, but she’s demoted to a supporting character. The Lost Daughter, on the other hand, never wanders from the focus of our leading lady. The story is undeniably hers, and this solipsism comes from both the protagonist’s perspective on her own experience as well as the auteur letting us in on it. Leda, played by Olivia Colman (and Jessie Buckley in flashbacks), is reminded of her painful past by a young mother and her daughter who are vacationing on the same island that she is. Nina seems to be struggling with a high-maintenance daughter and an absent(ish) husband, which brings memories flooding back of Leda’s experience as a young mother, particularly in the times leading up to her leaving her family for three years. Colman’s impressive internal performance shows her struggling with guilt, both for having left her children and for not regretting it. Yet, the film is remarkably neutral in its portrayal of her. It does not exonerate her, yet does not condemn her either.
The reason this story and this character are simultaneously so compelling and so discomforting is that Leda contains dualities that are at war with one another. Yet, instead of this muddling her characterization, it brings a level of complexity to her that seldom gets offered to female characters in popular culture. Maggie Gyllenhaal, in an interview with the Washington Post, puts it best: “It’s asking a difficult thing of people- both men and women- which is to be able to hold in your mind a mother who is many, many complicated things- in the simplest way of putting it, who is good and bad at the same time.” Our inability to pin Leda down is exactly what makes her a compelling protagonist, and the film’s focus on motherhood provides us with the perfect lens through which to observe her.
Among the most common narratives we get regarding child-rearing, particularly as women, is that parenthood is among the most noble and rewarding undertakings one can pursue. According to the women in my life, and I suspect yours, being a mother unlocks a part of you that you didn’t know you had. You can never love as much or as deeply as you can for your child. Yet this film, and the novel on which it is based, seems to suggest that this is not a universal experience. The story resonates with its audience because it speaks aloud the anxieties that many of us, parents or not, don’t even want to admit to ourselves.
In one particularly chilling scene, Leda is speaking to two other women, one a young mother of a toddler, and the other a pregnant woman expecting her first. These two green mothers turn to the wiser, more experienced mother for a comforting perspective. Instead, they are met with Leda’s incredibly blunt “children are a crushing responsibility.” Full stop. There is no dramatic pause where she says “oh but they are so worth the trouble.” In fact, that comforting moment that we’ve come to expect never arrives. There is not a scene in the entire film in which it is ever suggested that the call to motherhood is so noble and rewarding that it justifies the frustration and sacrifice that is required to answer it. Motherhood isn’t just a duty, it’s hard fucking work. And most importantly, it’s work for which Leda was just not cut out.
This isn’t to say that she’s a terrible mom. She has many warm moments with her children, notably during the ritual they share of peeling an orange without breaking the skin. Though there are certainly moments with her girls that Mommy blogs probably wouldn’t sign off on, the main struggle she finds with motherhood is that she doesn’t like it, at least at the stage of life she’s in during the Buckley scenes. She admits to her lover, “I hate talking to my kids on the phone. They hate it too.” In this scene, it’s treated as a pretty dark admission. She hates, which is not the emotion a mother is supposed to feel regarding any aspect of her children. It should be said, though, that this is not a sentiment that she brings with her into later adulthood. The film ends with Leda receiving a phone call from her daughters, and the way that Colman’s face lights up when speaking to them suggests that maybe it was her circumstance or her time of life that made her ill-suited for motherhood.
This growth of character, which contributes to the complexity, is largely due to Gyllenhaal’s direction. Colman and Buckley are not women who look particularly alike, or even have any manneristic similarities. In fact, Gyllenhaal told Buckley, “You can have bleach blonde hair if you want to.” This is because she felt strongly that a woman can change so much over the course of 20 years that we shouldn’t have to wonder if they’re really the same person. Colman and Buckley worked separately, and never saw one another performing the scenes. At one point, Colman started to watch Buckley perform and quickly decided against it, not wanting it to impact the way she approached her Leda. It’s because, not despite, this approach that the performances work so well next to each other.
The making of this film was beautifully done by women, for women. Elena Ferrante, the author of the novel, gave the blessing for her work to be made into a film explicitly under the condition that Maggie Gyllenhaal be the one to direct it. Though Ferrante is anonymous, Gyllenhaal claims that there is no doubt in her mind that she is a woman because of how deeply she elucidates the complexities of womanhood in her works. Gyllenhaal took a very maternal approach in her direction, one where she made sure all participants had a voice to share their thoughts and where criticism was allegedly given very warmly. But most importantly, her script gives life to one of the most fascinating feminist characters of the last decade.
Leda’s characterization is completely incongruous to our image of the maternal archetype. She’s prickly, stand-offish, and incredibly cold at times. More than all that, she’s selfish. Her selfish attitude, particularly in the Colman scenes, is arguably the main tenant of her character. That said, this trait isn’t necessarily treated as a flaw. The moment where she refuses to move her chair down the beach to accommodate the obnoxious family demanding this of her is considered a triumph. Will, who works at the resort, calls this act of defiance “amazing.” We can theorize all we want about how she wanted to stick up for justice or whatever, but the simple fact is that she didn’t want to move, so she didn’t. And we love her for that.
Of course the culmination of her selfishness is her ultimate decision to leave her children, but let’s deconstruct the circumstances that led to this decision, not to absolve her, but just to attempt to understand her. Regardless of your opinion about the behavior of her children, the simple fact is that they demand more from her than she’s able/willing to give. Gyllenhaal’s direction is so effective at showing us just how suffocated she feels. The scenes with Leda’s children are so loud, close, and smothering that it took me half an hour to realize I was looking at Jessie Buckley. Of course, her husband’s focus seems to lie on his career, and we see him foist off his parental responsibility onto Leda. This is happening despite the fact that they both seem to have similar goals, but the expectation is not an equal load.
Her hunger to succeed in academia is at odds with her ability to throw herself fully into her motherhood. “One crucial aspect of being a feminist in the 1960s and 1970s that is still vital today is for women to fulfill their own desires and potentials to the fullest extent possible and to reject patriarchal limitations. To be a feminst mother continues to mean temporarily losing one’s soul connection to one’s work and one’s self in order to give love and care to the new other.” (Liss, 2009) Though we love the girlboss-y image of a “supermom” or “the woman trying to have it all,” the reality is that it’s extremely difficult to get to have both a career and be a good parent when a) parenthood is not bringing you fulfillment and b) you have to do all the goddamn work. Perhaps it’s for this reason that she tells a conflicted Nina, “you should do whatever you want.”
She’s already struggling with the suffocation aspect of her frustrations when she meets Peter Sarsgaard, who, I feel compelled to note, is ridiculously hot in this movie. But of course, he has to be. As Gyllenhaal points out in the Washington Post interview, he has to be “irresistible” or the film falls apart. She’s thirsting to do and be recognized for this work so much that she becomes giddy at the prospect of going to this conference, so for someone who seems to be a star academic to use what little presentation time he has to fawn about the work she’s doing to an admiring audience of their peers is basically the academic equivalent of John Cusack holding a boombox. He calls her work “thrilling”, and tells her that she’s “brilliant.” The cinematic canon is saturated with men who become enamored with a woman because she’s beautiful, or charming, or has a killer ass (all good reasons), but to have this man shower her in appreciation for her mind? To a woman like Leda (or any of us really), what could be more intoxicating than that?
And yet, she still comes back. When she’s asked how it felt to be away from her daughters, she admits, tearfully and guilt-stricken, that it felt “amazing.” Despite this, she returns to her daughters 3 years later because “I’m their mother and I missed them.” Does this erase the harm she’d done by leaving in the first place, or make her no longer a selfish person? Not at all. But I do think that the fact that she makes the conscious decision to return to them despite clearly preferring a childless existence means that it would be an injustice to reduce her to her selfishness.
Leda’s characterization, and the film as a whole, is a showcase of the complexities of womanhood, and especially motherhood, particularly when the two are at odds. Though the conflicts between them become sources of frustration for both the character experiencing them and the audience observing them, they’re also sources of brutal honesty about what it means to be human. Being human is to be fallible, and telling that story from the point of view of an “unnatural mother” brings us so much discomfort because it’s something we never get to see on screen. To see the story told so beautifully is a testament to Gyllenhaal and all the other women who created it so fully.
Death of the Auteur 