Homebody

And Feminine Hygiene In Prison

I like movies that are “Genre Destroyers.” These tend to be films that fit within a certain pre-established genre or subgenre that attempt to take a new perspective on the topic. What makes a movie a Genre Destroyer is then it proceeds to follow an outline that completely skewers and invalidates every other approach to that genre that you’ve seen before. It de-legitimizes those movies. It KILLS the genre. And as much as I love genre films, we need to chop ‘em up and spit ‘em out. It’s ridiculous how narrow our concept of cinematic storytelling is when you tell someone something is a “cop movie” or a “rom-com” and we generally understand this shorthand as a type of synopsis.

One of the all-time best Genre Destroyers is Shane Carruth’s “Primer”. It correctly deduces that if time travel were to be real, in its most strict single-universe sense, we would not be able to “see” it, we would not be able to discern it. And as soon as we started arranging the building blocks of plausible time travel, it’s already happened, and it’s more than a little scary. After “Primer”, few, if any, time travel movies are as enjoyable. “Primer” exposed them as fantasy. Another such example is Jeremy Sauliner’s “Blue Ruin”, where a man with minimal resources goes about plotting revenge for the death of his parents. Finally, it’s a movie about someone who is as good at revenge as you are – which is to say, he’s terrible at it. So many films place revenge at the center of their narrative, often as a virtue. When “Blue Ruin” does it, it’s not only to exploit the moral emptiness of it, but also to laugh at it. Revenge, a driver of so many of your favorite films and mine, is an inherently cartoonish concept, and “Blue Ruin” understands that to the point where I feel like, after that film, we need to find new ways to talk about these ideas.

“Homebody”, an intentionally-slight comedy, is a Genre Destroyer., and I love that. The genre in question is one of the most infamous ideas that movies keep pursuing – the body-swap comedy. The natural comparison is “Big”, as “Homebody” follows Johnny, a nine year old boy who absentmindedly slips into the body of his adult babysitter, Melanie. Turns out, he’s been studying a whole lot of transcendental meditation lately – Mom (Maria Dizzia) has to talk him into going outside the way other kids have to be goaded into doing their homework. He doesn’t clock exactly what’s going on when he wakes up from a nap, looking into the mirror and seeing an adult woman looking back at him.

The movie does not take the logistics of this idea all that seriously, nor does it need to. Jimmy can speak using Melanie’s body, but inside her, his voice alternates with her. His internal voice is connected to his external self, which puts him in communication with her body, but her voice comes from a place deep inside her, oblivious to what is happening beyond Jimmy’s own descriptions. Jimmy’s body, conveniently, lies lifelessly across his bed. Jimmy, in a way, has expanded his mind to dominate an adult woman’s body. And he’s confused and frustrated. But he’s also a bit bemused. Adults are cool. Adult women are cooler. And, though it’s not overstressed, like many boys he’s a little bit in love with his sitter.

He looks in the mirror. He squints. Is that me, he thinks. He smiles. It’s a nice feeling. It’s an agency he’s never had before. And then it addresses what few body swap movies want to address – what is it like to have this strange adult body? And, inevitably, how strange a woman’s body is for a boy who wouldn’t normally know. Tom Hanks didn’t have A.I. on his smartphone when he had questions, but in this case, I don’t think the explanation of what a tampon actually is really helps a perplexed Johnny. Thanks for nothing, Alexa. The problems with a female body intensify when Johnny realizes that Melanie is double-booked. It turns out, Melanie is a doula, and her friend is about to give birth. Great. More confusing womens’ bodies.

“Homebody” is distinctly queer-coded in regards to how it explores this type of story. Despite Melanie’s adult responsibilities, the movie takes time with Johnny’s fascination regarding this odd new vessel. Normally, this genre stages one immediate obstacle on top of another, ignoring what so many people have experienced in real life – the strange notion that you’ve lived inside the wrong body until today. Here, Johnny is fascinated with slathering makeup onto Melanie’s face, he loves exploring her wardrobe. When a man leers uncomfortably at him when he is in control of her body, his Melanie – born that day – smiles and blushes. Curiously, as Melanie, Johnny doesn’t notice this same man eerily starts to stalk her, pretending to just be an ordinary guy out for a walk. You don’t see that in a lot of body swap movies.

Much of this would be sharply observant and amusing, but you wouldn’t be nearly as invested without Colby Minifie as Melanie. Minifie’s probably most recognized as Ashley Barrett, who goes on to become the first female President in the universe of “The Boys” (in one of the show’s most clever moments, she loses the office when she ends up bearing the consequences of the juvenile actions of manchildren). But acting is such a rich profession in that it takes so many forms. Many performers have the gift of seeming “convincing”, some have a mastery over vocal intonations or body discipline. And some just have a face, the kind of face you’ve never seen before and never will again. Minifie has these abnormally-expressive features that seem like a rope-and-pulley system, where her eyes bulge (in surprisingly varied ways) as her mouth shrinks comically, or the eyes narrow as the mouth expands, or sometimes you get a funny extrapolation. I think she has an underbite, and it is used as a weapon of exasperation within her delivery, in a way that earns a laugh but also conveys an impotent sense of anger. Body swaps provide unusual opportunities for actors, but this is a particularly colorful new one – she is playing Melanie, but she is also playing Johnny, and she is playing Johnny who is learning a new body inside Melanie, so she is playing him playing an adult, and she also is playing him as a puppeteer trying to control an adult body. Minifie has the slapstick energy to convey all of this, but she also finds nuance in the smaller moments when Johnny reflects surprise, and then a newer, less-familiar feeling as an adult woman. The newer feeling is one of the most deceptively-tough for any actor. It’s joy.

Speaking of the mystery of a woman’s hygienic product, well, look, don’t quiz me. I’m a straight man, I’m never gonna know as much as I should, and I’m probably going to be quietly wrong about more than a few things. But I do know that prisons aren’t built to accommodate a woman’s medical needs. So it shouldn’t have surprised me to know that only twenty-two states mandate that women be given free menstrual products – I imagine the other twenty-eight states only provide opportunities to make purchases on the commissary. My initial feeling is that these should be handed out the way they gave us toilet paper – they would issue two rolls during one week, and then one roll the next, three rolls every two weeks. In other words, helpful, but hardly generous.

The complaints mentioned in this piece are, of course, hilarious. Supposedly, one institution in New York stopped giving out tampons a couple of years ago despite a mandate passed in 2016 making it a rule to allow free access. The explanation given by an official (it’s not said who, though I have a hunch what their gender might be) was that tampons would be used to sneak in drugs or contraband, and tampon strings would be used “to light drugs”, which, seriously, guys. This is the same excuse being used to limit inmates’ access to books, the idea that pages are soaked in fentanyl being used as a reason to keep prisons understaffed so that no one has to be paid to analyze mail. It’s the continued prioritization of prisons operating as business, maximizing as minimal a staff as possible. And in this case, it’s women’s health (constantly marginalized in and out of prison) that’s paying the literal price.