Where Are the Women? The Gambler

BASIC REPRESENTATION SCORE: -20

FEMALE AGENCY/POWER/AUTHORITY SCORE: +5

THE MALE GAZE SCORE: -10

GENDER/SEXUALITY SCORE: -10

WILDCARD SCORE: 0

Is there anything either positive or negative in the film’s representation of women not already accounted for here? (points will vary)

No.

TOTAL SCORE: -35

IS THE FILM’S DIRECTOR FEMALE? No (does not impact scoring)

IS THE FILM’S SCREENWRITER FEMALE? No (does not impact scoring)

BOTTOM LINE: One way this remake could have stood apart from its source material and found something fresh to say about its subject would have been to swap out its male protagonist for a woman. We can safely assume that this didn’t occur to anyone involved in making the film. Indeed, with an almost entirely male-dominated cast apart from the protagonist’s mother and too-young-for-him girlfriend, this is a great example of how movies typically want nothing to do with women unless they’re propping up a man. The film’s score would have been even worse, because the mother character could have easily been a father (as the female bank manager in one brief scene could have been played by a man), but those are positives only in the veritable woman-desert that movies are.