It’s on this stage that Josephine Decker’s “Madeline’s Madeline” makes her debut. Its main character, Madeline (Helena Howard), is a mentally ill, biracial teenager doing what teenagers do: fight constantly with their authority figures, discover what they’re passionate about and figure out who they are. Only, in Madeline’s case, she resorts to acting out against her overprotective, sometimes judgmental mother, Regina (Miranda July). It occasionally veers into violence, either fantasized or realized.
Madeline finds support in in her acting class, especially in the eyes of her doting coach, Evangeline (Molly Parker). However, as practices wear on, there’s a growing sense in the acting troupe that their leader is preoccupied with impending motherhood and hasn’t figured out the direction of their new work. Her eyes then shift to using her youngest pupil, Madeline, as a muse, slowly cannibalizing her lived experiences of a troubled relationship with her mom and history of mental illness for the coach’s production. The young girl is uncertain with what to do.
Does acknowledging these women have no right to tell Madeline’s story absolve Decker from doing the same thing in her own heavy-handed way? I’m not convinced, even as the movie annoyingly reminds us multiple times that’s it’s a metaphor. The film’s first image is a hazy image of a black nurse, reassuring Madeline that she’s not a cat. “What you’re experiencing is a metaphor.”
"Madeline's Madeline" wants to discuss race but not blatantly. So, it half-heartedly brings the subject up in scenes like when Evangeline brings an inmate to talk with her students about what it was like to feel trapped. It’s indirectly brought up when Madeline and her friends sneak into her family brownstone’s basement and finds mostly nudes of white women—presumably left by her dad. They joke that her mother has “jungle fever,” but Madeline doesn’t respond. Both Madeline’s mom and coach are (or were) in love with black men, yet there’s rarely a black man onscreen for long. Evangeline doesn’t mention her husband until Madeline meets him at a party, and there are no photos or mentions of Madeline’s dad. If this movie wants to confront those issues of authorship, why stereotypically erase black men in the process?
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