Directed by Scarlett Bermingham and Andrew Rhymer, All That She Wants is ostensibly a quirky comedy about a woman in her mid-thirties whose life falls apart. As she rediscovers and realigns her priorities, the film apparently wants to make the point that sometimes women just really want to have babies. This would be an interesting enough thesis were it not for the simple and disappointing fact that this film is, upon closer inspection, dizzyingly obsessed with how crucial a man is in a woman’s life.
Written by David West Read (executive producer of Schitt’s Creek), the film follows Emma (Annie Murphy), a 35-year-old dancer whose ten-year-long relationship has just ended. The relationship dissolved because Emma desperately wants a child but her ex doesn’t, at least not with her. In an effort to get over her hurt, Emma heads to the club with her sister (Zosia Mamet). There, she meets Luke (Cooper Raiff), a 24-year-old grad student. They get drunk, dance, have sex and spend the next afternoon together.
Despite their age difference, they have a lot in common and Emma falls for him. She doesn’t pursue anything, however, sensitive to the optics of the ten-year age gap. But the chance encounter leaves a mark on Emma, who decides to enroll in grad school herself and have a baby on her own. She asks Luke to be her sperm donor and, in classic rom-com fashion, he becomes something more.
Murphy does her best with Emma, cracking each sardonic millennial joke right on cue, but it’s tough to ignore the fact that the character is fairly threadbare. She doesn’t have any friends, save for her sister, and has a fraught relationship with her mother (Christine Baranski) — a relationship which, jarringly and incomprehensibly, doesn’t really get introduced or explored until the third act.
It’s tough to like Emma, or to care about her in any meaningful way, because she lacks interiority. She falls headlong into her actions, leaving the viewer wondering who Emma actually is outside of an obsessed desire for a baby. West Read, Bermingham and Rhymer do not seem at all curious about their protagonist’s psychological landscape. We don’t fully grasp why Emma is dissatisfied by her dancing career, which she has spent, apparently, her entire life building. All we know is Emma decides to go to grad school because of Luke (a man who is very mediocre!), and therein lies the rub.
The film, and Emma’s dialogue specifically, makes much of Luke’s beauty and perfection, but he doesn’t really do much on screen, and he lacks the vibrancy and comic sensibilities of Emma. And yet, much of Emma’s story is dependent for its development on Luke: she doesn’t have any personal impetus nor any existential dynamic that turns in her psyche, and she doesn’t have any ambition until Luke shows up. Emma is traditional womanhood embodied — uninterrogated desire for a baby and a partner. The film seems to believe it is feminist if a woman chooses this type of womanhood, not realizing that it is hurling Emma down a gender normative path. Emma’s choice would be intelligent and bold were it justified by her. But we don’t know why she chooses traditional womanhood: we don’t see her thinking about her position in society, considering why she wants what she wants, or having moments of doubt or unease. I need more from this movie if it wants to package a desire for a baby as a renegade choice.
All That She Wants is a rote painting of a woman who wants to have a baby, who relies on a man for her growth. Personally, I don’t care that Emma wants to have a baby, but I am curious, as a woman, about her desires and motivations, about her essence — aspects that the film refuses to engage with. Every woman I know has had to reckon with what it means to be a mother; what it means to bring a baby into the world as it is right now. We discuss our reasons, and we talk about why we might not want to have a child. We dialogue, something that doesn’t happen in this film at all.
Perhaps I should have known this from the film’s title. All that Emma wants, according to the filmmakers, is a man and a baby, not a life she intentionally and actively and carefully constructs and chooses for herself.
