At the Movies, the ‘Older Woman’ Is Growing Up

The older woman has been very busy lately. By “older woman,” I am referring to the cinematic figure who is defined by her sexual and romantic relationships with younger men. Depending on your own age, you may know her as the “cougar,” the “Mrs. Robinson,” or the joke about “your mom.” Now she is the protagonist. And she has never had so many scene partners to choose from.

Let’s review her banner year. In a succession of streaming romance films, she was wooed by a boy-band member (“The Idea of You”), an action movie star (“A Family Affair”) and a finance bro (“Lonely Planet”). For Christmas (having been very good all year), she got a starring role in the erotic thriller “Babygirl” as a robotics company executive who fell into a submissive sexual relationship with her new intern — and fixed her life.

The bounty of the older woman’s recent plots, and the complexity of her new arrangements, come as a thrill, and a relief. For so long, the movies have flattened her into a villain or reduced her to a joke. They have paired her with weasels and virgins. She has been made to manipulate young men because she is pathetic or insane. She was less a character than a stand-in for the movie’s themes — a symbol for some form of generational rot or another.

Now, she can still be a monster (as in Catherine Breillat’s “Last Summer,” where she is a defense attorney with a sadistic streak who pursues her teenage stepson). Occasionally she’s a victim (as in “Disclaimer,” the limited series about an investigative journalist ensnared by a depraved teenage tourist). But increasingly she is a person in a nuanced relationship. Her personality has been cleansed of the too-obvious psychological tics (alcoholism, narcissism, delusion) used to explain her unseemly propositions. These days, it is often the young man who comes on to her. He has become the blunt tool for revealing the depths of her shifting character.

The older woman archetype is as old as film itself. In the 1927 silent film “Cradle Snatchers,” she takes the form of a trio of wives who — frustrated by their husbands gallivanting with young women — pay young male escorts to make them jealous. (“We don’t have to neck ‘em, do we?” one of the repulsed boys-for-hire asks). In her original design, the older woman’s only power is her own shrewishness, and the depths she will sink to browbeat her spouse or lover into compliance. In the 1950 classic “Sunset Boulevard,” as Norma Desmond, she was inflated into a comic and tragic character, a former movie star who plunges into a delusional decline.

In 1967’s “The Graduate,” as Mrs. Robinson, she scrambled to a slightly higher perch, representing a legitimate sexual threat. Her wardrobe of animal prints marked her as an apex predator and predicted the rise of the term “cougar” to describe women like her. Then, in 1999’s “American Pie,” as Stifler’s mom, she was declawed and packaged as a leggy mascot who inspired a mommy-themed pornographic category, one that would be used to contain all the older women who came after her.

The older woman character has been unleashed before — see her triumphs in the kooky “Harold and Maude,” the misty “How Stella Got Her Groove Back” and the fizzy “Something’s Gotta Give” — but she has always been at risk of being yanked back into her cage, dismissed again as a desperate animal. Now she is presumed to be an attractive human. As her new movies redirect our sympathies, they tap fresh sources of tension. Sometimes the dated “older woman” archetype itself becomes the specter haunting these movies, forcing our players to vanquish its distortions in order to finally forge an honest relationship on equal ground.

Even in the casting stage, you can see why these new arrangements work. Many of Hollywood’s best actresses are over 40, and they are often now producers, digging up projects suitable for their talents and partnering with female writers and directors to develop them. Frankly, they are running out of men who can keep up. Now it feels as if a casting director has spun a gigantic wheel to generate unexpected romantic pairings. Anne Hathaway (42 when she made “The Idea of You”) with Nicholas Galitzine (30 at the time)? Yes. Nicole Kidman (57 in “Babygirl”) and Harris Dickinson (28)? Yes, please. Laura Dern (57 in “Lonely Planet”) and Liam Hemsworth (34)? Absolutely not, but spin for Laura again, let’s give her another shot!

As for the men: They’re hot now. The older woman has too often been paired with losers, signaling her own diminished status. Rewatching “The Graduate” recently, I was struck by what a sniveling twerp Benjamin Braddock is — a listless man-child who only becomes vaguely interesting when he shares a scene (and bed) with the strange and alluring Mrs. Robinson. In these new plots, the older woman’s suitor might be a famous pop or movie star. Or an unexceptional finance guy who is nevertheless built like a famous Hemsworth brother. And if our older woman has a daughter closer to his age, he is studiously uninterested.

Yes, the older women slotted into these plots are typically thin, white and expertly dermatologically preserved. But so was Anne Bancroft (and she was only 35!) Something has shifted, where we’re finally allowed to recognize a Hollywood feminine ideal for what it is. In “Sunset Boulevard,” Norma pursues bizarre beauty treatments with a comic absurdity. In “Babygirl,” Romy’s executive regimen is also depicted as a gantlet of zaps and jabs, with results that provoke her daughter’s mockery and her intern’s uncomfortably close interest. After he spies a new injection under her eye, and teases his approval, we watch an assistant apply concealer, tending to Romy’s face as if after a prizefight. Now beauty work reveals our protagonist’s vulnerability, and stokes intimacy with her love interest, too.

The new older woman, by the way, does not generate her power from snagging the younger man. She sources it herself. She runs a chic gallery, or writes best-selling novels, or chairs a robotics company she founded. Her experience with sex (and dating, marriage and child-rearing) is not a trade secret that she lords over some poor virgin. It is a well of life experience that she is not eager to surrender to an unserious young man. She uses her sexual experience not to ravage his body but to protect her heart.

There used to be something wrong with the older woman, but now there’s often something off about her younger man. In “The Idea of You,” Hathaway’s character is pursued by Galitzine’s boy-bander only to discover that he has a history of older girlfriends, and a romantic playbook for snagging them. When the tabloids catch on, and call her a “cougar,” she decides he’s not worth it. The problem isn’t that she’s too old, but that he is too young. (She makes him wait five years for another date, and he shows up just after she turns 45). In “A Family Affair,” a similar plot unspools, and in the end a preening movie star (Zac Efron) must win back his older writer crush (Kidman again) by entering unfamiliar territory — a grocery store.

Those are rom-coms, so their trivial romantic mismatches are resolved by the film’s end. But in the erotic thriller “Babygirl,” the stakes are always shifting, and unresolved questions of gender and power drive the film’s plot and pervade its soft-B.D.S.M. sex scenes. When Romy begins a relationship with her intern, Samuel, she exploits the height of the corporate power differential. She’s the elder boss, but he is an unnervingly confident young man who floats easily through the business world and — as he reminds her — can always expose their arrangement, break up her family and derail her career. Samuel describes their sexual dynamic as “handing power back and forth,” but he could be describing the appeal of the film itself.

The punishment exacted on older women in past stories — the black mark society would apply to Romy if she was found out — becomes the backdrop for their erotic game. In the 1983 comedy “Class,” in which an exquisite Jacqueline Bisset plays a kind of manic pixie dream mom who improbably pursues the dough-faced prep school kid Andrew McCarthy, our older woman disappears into a psychiatric institution. In “Sunset Boulevard,” she is led off to jail. In “The Graduate,” her affair partner runs away with her daughter, who makes a crack about Mrs. Robinson’s age as she flees.

One of the pleasures of “Babygirl” is its exploration of how power is always performed — in their sadomasochistic affair, and their age-gap relationship, but elsewhere, too. Romy’s corporate act is significantly more complex than her male peers. She is advised to appear “nurturing” and cutthroat, to possess “emotional intelligence” alongside actual smarts. At home, she wears an apron at the kitchen table and acts the sexually liberated wife as she fakes an orgasm with her husband. Power — in the corporation, the family, the secret sex hotel — is make-believe. Samuel’s the only one direct enough to tell her to loosen up.

Kidman has been playing the older woman for more than 30 years. In “To Die For,” the 1995 erotic thriller written by Buck Henry (of “The Graduate”) and inspired by the real-life murder conviction of Pamela Smart, Kidman was a 20-something TV weatherperson who seduces a teen to kill her husband. Why? Because she is crazy. Kidman is hypnotic in the role, but she is less a person than a projection, an indictment of tabloid culture and a lesson on the degradations of fame.

In Todd Haynes’ 2023 film “May December” — which also plays with tabloid interest in real-life older-woman narratives, and their Hollywood derivatives — these ripped headlines are capably rearranged into something new. The same can’t be said for “Disclaimer,” an Apple streaming series in which the investigative journalist Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett) discovers a mysterious unpublished novel distributed among her family and friends. The novel claims to expose a dark incident from her past, revealed in fantasy flashbacks: In it, a married journalist (a younger version of Catherine) encounters the young tourist Jonathan on a beach vacation, seduces him, and then allows him to drown in the ocean in order to protect the secret of her affair. The book’s readers delight in the older woman’s punishment: death.

In the novel, the Catherine character is cartoonishly evil, and we must watch the surfaced tale destroy her family and career until we reach the perspective-shifting ending, where we learn that — spoiler alert — it was in fact the cartoonishly evil young Jonathan who pursued Catherine, then brutally raped her for hours before he drowned. It’s a testament to how much mores have changed that the twist plays as so predictable. At this point, we’ve all grown out of that material, haven’t we?

Images at top: Clockwise from top left, Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson in “Babygirl” (Niko Tavernise/A24); Laura Dern and Liam Hemsworth in “Lonely Planet” (Anne Marie Fox/Netflix); Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine in “The Idea of You” (Prime); Léa Drucker and Samuel Kircher in “Last Summer” (Sideshow/Janus Film ).