Stan reviewed this film at his site.
PAM AND SPAM: THE HELEN REDDY LIES
"Don't you put this on me," the actor playing Jeff Ward says at one point and, oh, do I hear you.
The film's called I AM WOMAN but it should have been called I AM FULL OF CRAP.
Helen Reddy was not a beauty nor did she wear all the make up that they've piled onto Tilda Cobham-Hervey. She's so heavily made up that she looks like Yvonne Craig. Now I love Yvonne and would love to see a film about her life. But let's not ever pretend that Helen Reddy looked like Yvonne Craig. She wasn't an ugly woman but she wasn't pretty or a great beauty.
Here's Tilda in the film.
Now here's Helen from the same period.
Helen wasn't ugly. She wasn't even plain. On a good day, she was cute. She's not the beauty that she's portrayed in the film -- and she would have been booed by her own fans if she'd worn all the make up that the actress does in the film. It was the 70s -- the time of the natural look.
And don't tell me looks don't matter when they've hired the fattest actress they could to play Lillian Roxon. Lillian was stocky. She wasn't obese. Possibly at the end of her life, she was. There aren't photos from that period. But look at her photos and then look at the large woman playing her in the film and wonder why they went out of their way to make Helen appear beautiful and girlish while they went as fat as possible for the actress to play Lillian.
The whole film's garbage. How did she write "I Am Woman." Well, though the film never tells you, she didn't. She co-wrote it. And the film doesn't want you to know that.
On top of that, 'feminist' Helen Reddy is never, ever responsible for anything. It's all bad guy Jeff. So Helen's not even responsible for going over a year without calling her 'friend' Lillian. Nothing's ever her fault, everything's Jeff's fault.
Jeff's just evil, we're too understand. Especially when 'poor' Helen doesn't have a career.
I don't feel sympathy for her in that scene. Jeff's gotten them a new house in LA -- from NYC -- and it's a big house. And he's working and she isn't. And we're supposed to be offended that he's saying she needs to clean the house and buy milk at the grocery store? She asks why he can't buy milk?
If you have a paying job -- man or woman -- and you're with someone else who is not working a paying job, if you're a couple, the one who's not working outside the home needs to pick up the slack in the home. I don't base that on gender, I base that on time. You have more time on your hands if you're not going outside the home to work.
So she's chatting long distance on the phone and moping around when she should be cleaning the house and buying the milk. And, let's be clear, this is before the age of cell phones. She's having a leisurely talk from California to New York. Before cell phones? I called my grandma every weekend when I was in college. She worried and made me promise to. (And it was also one of the best parts of my weekend.) And it was about a $100 a month and that's because I was 'lucky' to have switched to SPRINT. This was in the 90s. Long distance was not cheap.
So, yeah, I'm sorry if it's too much for 'poor' Helen to clean. And she knew it was a problem before she married him because while she was happy to live with roaches (joking one was named Mr. Ed), he wasn't. She knew that. Why she thought that they could move to a nice home in LA and she wouldn't be singing or working but thinking about maybe going to college to study (film lies there too) and in the meantime doing no cleaning as their expensive home becomes a pig-sty? There's no excuse for it and don't dress it up in gender cloathing to hide the excuse that she's being a lazy slob.
College?
The film lies for her over and over. As she stated over and over in interview after interview, it was to study parasychology and philosophy. For some reason, parapsychology is ignored.
Time and again, facts are altered and changed and omitted to make Helen look better.
It's a borin film that loses everything the moment after she's performed "I Am Woman" once it's a hit because that's the last time you root for her.
And it's insulting to whatever life she lived when it portrays her as a victim over and over and never responsible for anything.
She's responsible for not calling her friend on the phone, no one else.
And it's appalling that they have made her look thinner and beautiful while they have made Lillian grossly obese. PAM AND SPAM.
And, for the record, in 1972, no one's telling someone, "You got this." That's from the last ten years only.
Thank you to C.I. for feedback and support on this (and I was really mad when I called because I'd just finished watching the film) and be sure to read Ava and C.I.'s "Media: The scream in our soul."
Going out with C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"