It’s always fascinating to watch people get things “wrong.” Why did I just put quotes around that last word? Because, in the end, everybody is right and everybody is wrong when it comes to interpretation. I’m writing this now because I feel that oh-so many people got Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch wrong. At least, in terms of story.
Whether you think the film is a piece of shit or not after reading this is strictly opinion, and – hey – whatever floats your boat. I dug the movie a lot. But, I dug it because of the sacrifices made by the film’s two main characters. I gotta say…I was moved.
Not to tears. Come on. But, I appreciated the sisterhood represented on screen. There are far too many times when audiences have been given stories of brotherhood. The Lord of the Rings is about brotherhood. Every war movie I can think of is about that, in varying ways, of course. And, generally, you have the lead in heroic films played by a male. I guess that’s the Hero’s Journey. Neo is the hero in the Matrix films. Luke Skywalker was hero, regardless if his sister could have been a Jedi.
It’s a guy’s world. Surprise, surprise. And, when it comes to action films? Forget about it. Name me more than five females who have played the lead in an action film within the last decade. And, I want those films to be major Hollywood productions. Can you name them?
No using the internet.
Now, name me five men.
Sucker Punch presents three versions of the same story, two of which critique the state of the female within Hollywood cinema.
Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), an inmate at Lennox House for the Mentally Insane, tells the story of an angel who saves her life. Who is that angel? Well, as her narration tells us, it can come in various forms. We are given two in this film. One is named Baby Doll (Emily Browning). The other is the Wise Man (Scott Glenn).
The first version of the story is this particular film’s “reality.” There is go with the quoting but it’s true: this isn’t a realistic reality; it’s Snyder’s creation. Still, it’s the reality we get. Baby Doll’s mother and sister die and she’s sent to the institution. The asylum's orderly (Oscar Isaac), is bribed by Baby Doll's stepfather into faking the signature of the asylum's psychiatrist, Dr. Vera Gorski (Carla Gugino), to have Baby Doll lobotomized so that she can neither inform the authorities of what really happened nor reclaim her recently deceased mother's fortune. In five days, the surgeon (Jon Hamm) will arrive to perform the procedure. Within minutes, those five days flash by and we are given glimpses of Baby Doll’s five days. When the time comes for the lobotomy, things switch on us.
The second version of the story arrives. And, this is where a lot of people misinterpret things. This second version is not a reality the Baby Doll conjures up. This is the story of those five days, retold through metaphor. In this world the inmates are dancers/prostitutes who live in a brothel. They are ruled over by men and forced to perform for them. They wear skimpy outfits and take orders from Blue Jones (the orderly from before), a pencil-thin-stached man who rules with an iron fist.
It is here that we catch up with the film’s protagonist. Sweet Pea is older sister to Rocket (Jena Malone), and through a quick bit of back story, we find that Rocket ran away from home some time ago and Sweet Pea followed to take care of her. According to her own words, she was fine with her life and home, but felt the need to protect and watch over her younger sister. The result was them landing in a fucked up mental institution (in the second version, this would be the brothel).
We’re also introduced to two other girls there, Amber (Jamie Chung) and Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens). They are important to the plot, though not the story.
Baby Doll arrives as a person. She soon becomes the vessel for an angel who has been sent to save Sweet Pea.
In order to escape the harshness of the institution (and the brothel), Baby Doll retreats to a fantasy world in which she subverts the exploitations endured by herself and the other girls. In this third version of the story, the girls find themselves in generally male-dominated situations and kick some serious ass. They wear the skimpy outfits still, but this time it’s not about turning anyone on. It’s about owning it. They stroll past scared and scarred male soldiers and have to save their asses. They bypass the male warriors and take on a dragon during one sequence.
Hell, the sci-fi sequence has them being the only human beings as they take on robots. These are not two-dimensional young women. They are living, breathing people.
And, make no mistake about that: each character exists. And, when they die, it’s real.
When Rocket gets stabbed, that’s real. Baby Doll retreats for a moment to give Rocket a hero’s death, but in reality (the first version or the second), Rocket’s done for.
So is Sweet Pea’s reason for being at Lennox House.
In Baby Doll’s fantasy world, she meets the Wise Man and he tells her that it is possible to escape before her lobotomy (or, before the High Roller shows up). She follows his directions and three girls are killed. At the hands of men. Bastards.
In the end, it’s just Sweet Pea and Baby Doll, the film’s two main characters. When things get bad, Baby Doll sacrifices herself so that Sweet Pea can escape, and tell her story to us. Once free, she nearly gets caught by two policemen. But, the Wise Man appears to her in the form of a bus driver and saves her one last time. The film ends with her, presumably, going home. She is free.
Baby Doll, as the surgeon points out after her lobotomy, dies happy, because at least she saved somebody. Even if that somebody wasn’t herself.
It’s that very sacrifice that moved me, because it’s so real. Move the fantasy aside. Move the metaphor aside. The story is about a girl who gives her life to her sister and in return gets that life back from another sister, this one not necessarily blood related.
And, you know what? I find that kind of beautiful. So, I say, “Bravo, Mr. Snyder!” Thanks for giving us a film about women. Sure, it’s definitely still a man’s world – and it takes fantasy to supersede that – but women are far too absent from film in general that I dig it when filmmakers choose to tell stories with them. And, this points out all of this at the same time. Well done.
This is the kind of self-indulgence that I can get behind.
But, maybe next time, the story can exist by itself, and the girls can be great without having to represent anything. Then, again, that’s this film.
I loved it.
