Hollywood puts out maybe one all-around good movie per year, but often less than that. And what just happened to Halle Berry is a shining example of why.
Berry, the only nonwhite woman to have won an Academy Award for best actress, on Monday put out a statement declaring that she would give the social justice demons what they want. She will back out of an upcoming role wherein she was tentatively set to play a transgender character identifying as a man.
“As a cisgender woman,” Berry said, using the term for biological women who identify as such, “I now understand that I should not have considered this role, and that the transgender community should undeniably have the opportunity to tell their own stories.”
She also apologized for what she said in a previous interview about the role.
“That’s what I want to experience, and that’s what I want to understand, and that’s what I want to study, and that’s what I want to explore,” Berry said. “It’s really important to me to tell stories, and that’s a woman — that’s a female story. It changes to a man, but I want to understand the why and how of that. You know? I want to get into it.”
Liberals were appalled by Berry’s repeated reference to the transgender character (which is presumably fictional, though little is known about the movie project) as “female” even though the character would have, in every sense of the word, been a woman.
The left-leaning Daily Beast wrote that “the very notion that a trans man is a ‘female’ role demonstrates that Berry has some misguided notions about trans people.”
I apologize if you read that last sentence and your eyeballs are now stuck in the back of your head from rolling them too hard. Take a break and come back to finish this piece when they’ve reset.
The issue (for people who believe that claiming perpetual oppression and victimhood is the ultimate trump card) is that a role about a transgender person (inherently aggrieved and sad, right?) must be played by a transgender person, even though that kind of undermines the entire idea of “acting.”
That could have been a stunning role for Berry, one that would remind people that she was once a mega movie star. Nope, not allowed under today’s rules, which state that message is more important than quality or art, and the message must always, always, always be about diversity, inclusion, and representation.
The gay and transgender lobbying group GLAAD tweeted in response to Berry’s statement that it was “pleased” she had “listened to the concerns of transgender people and learned from them.”
By “listened to the concerns” and “learned,” what GLAAD actually means is “succumbed to our threats.”
We’re not allowed to have good movies anymore because they can’t be produced without getting the approval of radical transgender activists, the “Latinx,” and people in wheelchairs.
Felicity Huffman may now be a convict, but she was also stellar as Bree in the 2005 drama Transamerica, a movie about a conservative transgender woman who finds out just before undergoing surgery that she has a teenage son. New York Times film critic A. O. Scott described Huffman’s performance as “a complex metamorphosis, and it is thrilling to watch.”
That’s because it takes talent to be a woman imagining yourself as a man who is convinced he is a woman and attempting to convince others he is a woman, too, all the while getting an audience to believe you really are that person you’re imagining yourself as.
We don’t get to see that kind of talent anymore. It offends the people who don’t care about quality entertainment and instead obsess over “representation.”
Too bad, Berry. It could have been the one good movie we’d see out of Hollywood in the coming years.
