Niall Richardson's astute and timely book offers a refreshing and welcome ‘queer’ perspective to an emerging body of scholarship concerned with narrative film, stardom, gender and ageing (Chivers, Reference Chivers2011, Gravagne, Reference Gravagne2013; Dolan, Reference Dolan2017). A concise introduction deftly locates Richardson's thinking within theories of cultural ageing and critiques of ‘successful ageing’, while a rehearsal of established arguments concerning mainstream cinema's consistent denigration of older women usefully establishes a backdrop for his subsequent exposition of varying ‘age-affirmative’ representations of femininity mobilised across a range of film genres by both female and male stars. Consistently, this book highlights the extent to which ‘age-affirmative’ narratives are co-opted into the processes of ‘greywashing’ whereby sympathetic older characters ‘disguise a less pleasant political agenda’ (p. 206).
The first of six substantive chapters points to the ‘lady power’ of genteelly independent older women depicted through heritage conventions in films like Tea with Mussolini (Zeffirelli 1997). While this ‘age-affirmative’ female figure offers resistance to masculine and/or macho control, it may also cloak ‘the harsh realities of old age and the less palatable aspects of heritage sensibilities such as its unashamed celebration of imperialism and British jingoism’ (p. 52). As well as foregrounding the pleasures of audience identification and participation, the following chapter further develops an account of ‘age-affirmative’ female characters when attention shifts to the performances and performativities of active and ageing female bodies in the musical interludes of The Last of the Blonde Bombshells (MacKinnon 2000) and Quartet (Hoffman 2012), the ‘karaoke’ song and dance routines of Mamma Mia! (Lloyd 2008), and the action choreographies of RED (Schwentke 2010) and The Debt (Madden 2010). Richardson rightly observes that the age-positive revisions to the genre and gender expectations mobilised by examples of ‘action’ in its broadest sense have yet to be repeated. Chapter 3 continues to unpack the age and gender intersection through the play of camp in the late-career performances of Bette Davis, Joan Rivers and Maggie Smith, with the latter renowned for acerbic one-liners that undercut the offensive ‘code ageing [of] femininity as grotesque or even horrific’ (p. 114). While offering a convincing argument for the potential of camp to expose the reiterated gestures of age and gender, and thereby subvert their naturalised alignment with biological dispositions, Richardson is careful not to over-state its reach due to a reliance on media-literate viewers who recognise the double articulations of irony, as much as the reductions of a postmodern media culture that reduces strategies of social critique to meaningless semiotic playfulness.
Ranging across small and big screens, the book's remaining three chapters are variously concerned with ‘the intersection of ageing with queer sexuality’ and ‘LGBT-identified older people’ (p. 115). With the near absence of ageing lesbian representations deftly established, Chapter 4 argues that rare exceptions fail to recognise the diversity of lesbian experience. Equally, films such as Notes on a Scandal (Eyre 2006) and Cloudburst (Fitzgerald 2011) also serve to recuperate the ‘ageing as decline’ narrative via the former's ironic reclamation of ‘the vicious, lonely, and imbalanced, old “dyke”’ stereotype (p. 142) and the latter's insertion of older lesbian characters into the hetero-normative frame of the ‘charming, devoted and monogamous couple’ (p. 142). Richardson's focus then shifts to representations of ageing trans-femininity in the celebrated television series Transparent (2014–) and the movie Transamerica (Tucker 2005). These narratives are contextualised through a succinct account of the social and theoretical tensions over the meanings of transsexual and/or transgender identities, and subsequent struggles for transgender rights that effectively disentangled sexual and gender identities. Now, with older bodies typically coded as asexual, cinematic and televisual representations of ageing transgender women now stress ‘the point that transgender is an issue of gender identification rather than sexual desire’ (p. 171). Chapter 6 is initially announced as a ‘cheat’ (p. 173), though the legitimacy of including effeminate male characters in a book about older women and cinema is largely self-evident following the ‘queering’ of gender already established, though the point is thoroughly made through a litany of similarities between ageing gay men and ageing femininity that include societal pressures and media stereotypes. Developing the thread of ‘age-affirmative’ narratives, Richardson foregrounds challenges to polarised stereotypes of asexual or predatory older gay men in films like Beginners (Mills 2010), Love is Strange (Sachs 2014) and Gerontophilia (LaBruce 2013) that invite spectators to ‘revise narratives of gay ageing’ (p. 199). But he adds, this invitation has limits since each film culminates in death, restoring the prominence of conventionally attractive young people while any challenge to heteronormative family life is safely extinguished.
Throughout, despite tracing ‘age-affirmative’ narratives along the spectrum of ageing femininity, Richardson is troubled by both the proximity to enfreakment of characters for whom age is the primary source of identity, and the extent to which ‘grey-affirmation cinema remains at the level of greywashing’ (p. 210). Overall, this is a well-achieved book that throws a welcome and overdue ‘queer’ spotlight on previously neglected aspects of cinema's ageing femininity. The book is written with great clarity and is sensitive to cinematic conventions while avoiding theoretical jargon. It deserves to be read by researchers, teachers and students of ageing and/or cinema, and lends itself to reading lists for both undergraduate and postgraduate courses.
