October 20, 2003

I am not reviewing The Matrix Revolutions…

I am not answering your detailed questions about The Matrix Revolutions…

I am not going to give away any spoilers in what might be the most spoiler-heavy Matrix movie yet…

Today, I just want to talk about the human women of The Matrix. Not the characters so much, but the women behind the characters. Carrie-Anne. Jada. Nona.

I got to spend a little time with each of them over the weekend at the film’s non-junket junket. The theme at Stage 22 was darkness, but apparently they realized sometime before I got there that it was a little too dark. Black carpets with green-gelled lamps and black draping forty feet high. Coffee, tea, POM pomegranate juice, Red Bull and vitamin charged water at one end of the corridor. Joel Silver at the other. Each member of the assembled team (Reeves and Fishburne join the ladies and Joel) lurks in a room as cleanly appointed as a Matrix construct program.

These human women of The Matrix each bring such different characteristics to the party. Yet after getting through Revolutions and reflecting back, the casting is dead on. Carrie-Anne Moss and Jada Pinkett Smith are the two poles of this epic’s feminine soul.

Pinkett Smith actually auditioned for Trinity back when they were making the first movie, and now seems pleased that she didn’t get the part. Trinity started, in the first movie, as a role that would seem tailor-made for her. Yet as the trilogy has evolved, it seems a better fit for Moss. The hardness of Trinity has softened, bit by bit, as her destiny has come to pass. Seeing Carrie-Anne a few months ago at the Reloaded junket, about five months pregnant and now, with her seven week old child, it is almost as though she is living in a Matrix sequel that will never be made… a sequel that goes back to the beginning of the Matrix cycle, to birth and the beauty of that love.

In my eyes, Carrie-Anne has never been more beautiful. She is as ripe as nursing mother can be. Right now, she makes Monica Bellucci look like a flat-chested schoolgirl. Her face is fuller than we are used to, but somehow, it makes her eyes seem even larger. But most importantly, her energy, which has always been open when I have seen her in real life or at press events in a way that seems so unTrinity, is even more open. She has that look of a woman who has just given birth to a new world.

Jada Pinkett-Smith has given birth to a new world. She has knocked out two kids while in the midst of a thriving career and a marriage to one of the world’s biggest movie stars. When the Wachowskis hired her for Niobe, a character with a singularity of vision that good parents cannot have, Jada was seven months pregnant with her daughter Willow, who will turn three just days before the release of Revolutions.

What is the sub-text of Niobe that brought the Wachowskis to Jada? The journey of her arc is a little less dramatic than Trinity but she too grows as a character through the last two films. The mythological Niobe’s vanity was so intense that she lost her children to it. In the trilogy, Pinkett-Smith’s Niobe comes to see beyond her own arrogance.

As open as Carrie-Anne Moss is as you wander into her space, Jada is closed. She is fiercely alive. But the guard is up. She speaks of herself comfortably, which can feel like arrogance. But as she allows herself a little room to relax (make no mistake, this is her world and strangers are just in it), the twinkle in her eye flashes. Her passion for this experience - her honesty about the reexamination this process caused in her own life and the fact that she was open to the experience, with all that was in her life at the time ... including a newborn - one gets the sense that once you are a part of her group of intimates, she would kill or die, in an honorable pursuit, for you. Just like Niobe.

The distinction between the outcomes of the experience of these women is not all that dramatic. Each has given birth, literally, during the process of these films. Both speak of the ways the experience has changed their lives. Both are believable kicking as on the big screen. Both are clearly loving and committed parents.

When I think about the other great trilogies in movie history, I think about how the actors have tended to fade over time, as the power of the overall tale becomes what we remember. But The Matrix feels different. The Wachowskis seem to have cast the films by casting the real people as well as the performers. Of course, at the core of movie acting, there is the personality, far more than the skill of acting. There are great actors in the world. But movie stars are something else all together, whether they are great actors or not.

The third member of this trio of Matrix women is Nona Gaye, who came to this as a novice in film acting. And over this weekend, she felt almost like the movie child of Jada and Carrie-Anne. A striking caramel beauty whose physicality seemed torn between Carrie-Anne’s soft, nursing lushness combined with Jada’s muscular, strong athleticism. She is clearly intelligent and, for all her femininity, seems to have a toughness lurking behind her caution. This is all still fresh for her.

Of everyone I spoke to, Nona is the only one who doesn’t seem to feel that she has been deeply in the Matrix life. Her part is pretty small and, while she has more action in Revolutions, she was not pushed as hard as the other two. Yet, she was pushed. She speaks of the moments in which she did not know whether she could get through some of the physical demands of fighting the machines. But she did. And now, she is terribly hungry for more.

She is, as are most of the denizens of Zion, just at the beginning of the spiritual journey. She went into The Matrix with young eyes, she met her challenges, and she is ready for the next battle.

Did the Wachowskis know that Nona had an Aunt Zee in real life? Who knows?

Though she is young, Nona Gaye has seen a lot. She has a six year old. She’s lost a father and an uncle, both of whom passed at too young an age. She’s even put up with Prince. She was prepared to understand her performance as a woman who fights for what she loves. And the hunger grows…

The experience of Matrix Revolutions will be fascinating and there will be more to talk about as the day of release comes closer. The Wachowskis have created something that doesn’t just allow you to follow the hero of a thousand faces, but which seems intent on putting you through the rollercoaster emotional experience in much the same way as Neo. And like Neo, our perspective is what will drive our feelings about the films. And as one of the men of The Matrix, Laurence Fishburne, opined, only time can give us true perspective.

The women of The Matrix have already gone through this experience, jacked in, in ways that we, as viewers, can never quite capture. But that was their journey and this is ours. They will always have the experiences of making the films and bringing them to us. We have only the films.

But the opportunity to luxuriate in the power feminine of The Matrix for one half-afternoon, allowed me a memorable glimpse. After all, The Oracle only tells you what you need to be told. You have to open the door yourself. Nosce te ipsum, my friends, nosce te ipsum

E ME: You can ask, but I will not tell.