Winger did not go full retard
“A Dangerous Woman” seems a particularly poor title, especially since its main star is trying to do so much to add complexity to it. That would be Debra Winger and if there’s reason to watch this film from Jake and Maggie’s dad, Stephen Gyllenhaal, it would be to see how Winger so completely immerses herself into this character study of a mentally challenged woman.
Her Martha is an unreliable narrator. First we’re told by her that she lives and takes care of a woman named Martha, but it’s later revealed Martha is, in fact, her and she lives with an Aunt Frances (Barbara Hershey), who actually looks more like her sister. Frances has taken on the responsibility of supporting her, though she treats it like an inconvenience and babies her at every turn.
The rest of the town is pretty much the same way. She’s the screwball and the inconvenience, condescended to and underestimated. She has a job at a dry cleaners where the boss seems to put up with her primarily because Frances is connected in the town and has pulled strings.
One day a carpenter arrives to fix her Aunt’s porch and Martha, a dowdy and dumpy thing, suddenly there is such a thing as sexual attraction. His name is Mackey (Gabriel Byrne), and he’s a barely functioning alcoholic who can be both kind and mean, but he takes a shine to Martha, and defends her, for what he sees as a purity in her.
For Winger this is of the Dustin Hoffman/Rainman variety of acting. She has honed Martha down to every movement, tic, and behavior pattern. This is not a dumb woman but one desperately trying to understand people while adhering to her own moral code.
She prides herself on honesty and on her ability to defend herself, and as she grows in confidence with the Byrne character, more of an individuality begins to come through. The things she doesn’t understand are human behaviors- that lies are sometimes necessary, people are often selfish, and morality is not always key.
Her movements particularly are interesting to watch, especially in the sex scene with Byrne. It’s not intimate, she doesn’t know the meaning of the word. She lies there fascinated but also covering her eyes, incredulous to the idea someone might find her sexy. She also doesn’t understand love, but knows she’ll be devoted to it going forward.
Hershey is also very good, playing a sad woman who throws herself into affairs with men to erase her own unhappiness, and I liked David Strathairn, too, as a local creep. Here is a town seemingly loaded with unhappy, cheating, cheated, and unempathetic people though- the kind you might find in a soap opera- and after a while it’s not hard to imagine at least one, or several of them, will cross a line that calls for murdering.
The title sucks and so does the ending. It’s a cliche, seemingly meant to push the idea the mentally ill know nothing or right and wrong. But Martha does, which makes it also a cop out. It brushes aside major issues and let’s the Byrne character, who certainly did rape this mentally challenged lady, off the hook entirely. Martha’s story deserved better than this, but at least she’s portrayed with the utmost care by a very talented actress.