TORONTO – Chances are at least 50% of the people reading this review have no idea who Helen Reddy is. Moreover, if they have heard any of her three chart-topping hits from the 1970s it was while strolling down the aisle at their local supermarket or pharmacy. Reddy, a native Australian, was one of the biggest pop stars of her era and her signature song, “I Am Woman,” became a rallying cry for the Equal Rights Amendment fight at the time. Her story is only partially told to disappointing effect in Unjoo Moon‘s appropriately titled, “I Am Woman,” which premiered at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival on Thursday night.
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The movie begins in 1966 with Reddy (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) arriving in New York City at the age of 25, divorced and with her young daughter Traci on her arm. After winning a contest on Australian television, she’s given up everything back home on the promise of a record contract with Mercury Records. It turns out the label never intended to fulfill their end of the bargain and Reddy remains in NY barely surviving as a cabaret singer in hopes that someone will discover her. At the same time, desperate for a friend, she reaches out to up and coming journalist as well as fellow Aussie Lilian Roxon (Danielle Macdonald) who introduces her to a side of the city she hasn’t experienced before. When Roxon hosts as a birthday party to help pay for Reddy’s rent she meets party crasher Jeff Wald (Evan Peters), a wannabee music manager who slowly wins her affections over, of all things, multiple games of chess. Wald soon convinces Reddy to marry him and to move to Los Angeles where he believes they can really get her career going. Of course, that’s not what actually happened and it’s just the first of a number of major creative liberties Emma Jensen‘s screenplay takes with Reddy’s life story.
Playing with music history seems to be commonplace these days with both “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “Rocketman” distorting facts in order to dramatize the events on screen. Leaving out that Reddy and Wald moved to Chicago before Los Angeles wouldn’t be that egregious if the film didn’t distort the truth about other key aspects of their lives. A major storyline finds Reddy and Wald, begrudgingly, battling Capitol Records over her aforementioned song, “I Am Woman.” The compromise reached in the movie is that track will be buried as part of her “debut” album, but Wald and their friends will push it as a single with local radio on their own. In the film “I Am Woman” becomes the song that makes Reddy a star out of the blue, but that’s not actually what happened. In real life, Reddy already had five singles that charted around the world including “I Don’t Know How To Love Him” off her actual first album (“I Am Woman” was on her second). “Know Him” was a big enough if it went to no. 13 on Billboard’s Hot 100 and no. 2 on Australia’s pop charts. Despite a glimpse of her own short-lived variety show, “The Helen Reddy Show,” the movie also completely ignores (even in montage form) her other television or film appearances which helped catapult her to a pop culture icon status. Instead, the narrative focuses on Wald’s increasing drug use and the couple’s increasingly testy relationship. Even then, it’s strange how little accuracy there is in Wald’s career on screen. A legitimate Hollywood lifer who has worked in all aspects of the business (and still does), his credits are barely mentioned on an end card after the film’s finale.
Moon and Jensen know that the title song was a key part of the Women’s Liberation movement, but have trouble placing Reddy in that fight. If you watch any archived interviews of Reddy at the time or after, she’s quite eloquent and forceful about her belief in the movement. News clips of Phyllis Schlafly, a conservative who campaigned against the ERA, are played on television sets to Reddy’s dismay, but that’s the only real context and it seems surface at best (her deep involvement with California Democratic politics isn’t even casually mentioned). It doesn’t help that Cobham-Hervey gives, for the most part, a disturbingly passive performance.
The Aussie actress clearly thinks she’s giving it her all as Reddy. No one can deny that. She tries to mimic the singer’s body movements during live performances and lays her emotions bare during key dramatic moments dictated by the screenplay. The problem is twofold, however. First, her voice is naturally higher than Reddy’s so when she’s lip-syncing the singer’s vocals there is a disconnect because Reddy’s singing voice is so much lower than the actress we’ve seen speaking so it all seems off (again, Reddy’s voice was not as high as Cobham-Hervey’s). Second, she can’t pull off the natural charisma Reddy had as a performer on stage. She’s got her looks and mannerisms down, but recreating Reddy’s onstage magic is beyond her.
Peters also commits to his role as Wald with a passion. So much so that, for better or worse, he often overpowers anyone else on-screen with him. That forceful Bronx-born energy was clearly Wald’s trademark, but Cobham-Hervey succumbs to it so often that when she tries to turn the tables on Peters it’s too hard to believe.
Despite celebrated cinematographer Dion Beebe behind the camera, a good chunk of the film’s initial scenes in New York are, frankly, embarrassingly rough. The apartment sets look too much like studios soundstage sets and are often badly lit. Moon and Jensen plot numerous scenes on the same subway car (perhaps the most unbelieveably wide subway car in the history of New York) and apartment sets giving the film an early claustrophobic feel. Micheal Turner‘s production design is so bad even a Manhattan Phone Directory our heroine ends up using looks wrong. Visually things turnaround so much when the proceedings move to Los Angeles it’s almost like the production was taken over by a different crew.
There is a moment recreated in the film when Reddy won the Grammy Award for Best Pop Vocal Performance Female. She won the honor over contemporaries such as Roberta Flack, Aretha Franklin, Carly Simon, and Barbra Streisand. Pretty much across the board, those peers are more well known by multiple generations today. Despite reaching superstardom, and unlike those icons, Reddy faded to obscurity by her own choice. Like so many other aspects of “I Am Woman,” you wish the movie simply gave you a better reason why. [C+]
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