The Bolder Woman

Here’s to you Mrs. Robinson: With the number of films coming out this summer in which an older woman gets involved with a very young or even teenage guy, it’s starting to look more like the “Summer of ‘42” than the summer of ’02.

In “Tadpole,” which is to open July 19, a 15-year-old boarding school student (newcomer Aaron Stanford) becomes infatuated with his stepmother, played by Sigourney Weaver.

In “Lovely & Amazing,” currently in theaters, Catherine Keener plays a discontented wife and mother who fools around with a 17-year-old photo store boss (Jake Gyllenhaal).

In “The Good Girl,” which is to open Aug. 7, married discount store clerk Jennifer Aniston has an affair with her 22-year-old co-worker (also Gyllenhaal).

And earlier this year, Andie MacDowell played a headmistress who falls for her 25-year-old former student (Kenny Doughty) in “Crush.”

On Broadway, an adaptation of “The Graduate” with Kathleen Turner and Jason Biggs is a box-office sensation. And in recent years television shows ranging from “Dawson’s Creek” to “Friends” to “Judging Amy” have dealt with the story line, as have the films “Y Tu Mama Tambien,” “In the Bedroom” and the “American Pie” movies.

It’s about time, some are saying.

Relationships between older women and younger men are “becoming a lot more prevalent in society ... [but] there’s still a lot of stigma attached to it,” says Felicia Brings, co-author of “Older Women, Younger Men: New Options for Love and Romance.” These films are “an indicator that people are willing to at least address it, talk about it not in a shameful way,” she says.

“What’s interesting is how slow movies are to come to this kind of thing, how the older man-younger woman thing is absolutely routine” in movies, says film critic Molly Haskell, author of “Holding My Own in No Man’s Land: Women and Men and Film and Feminists.” And although older films like “The Graduate” looked at the subject from the young man’s point of view, “Lovely & Amazing,” “The Good Girl” and “Crush” are written around the female characters.

Mike White, who wrote “The Good Girl,” says, “In this culture that prioritizes youth, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we’re seeing that women connect to this”--the idea of being with someone younger--”as much as men have throughout history of film and literature.”

With boundary-pushing shows like “Sex and the City” and the recently canceled “Ally McBeal” “in the popular media now, women are allowed to express their sexual desire more straightforwardly,” says Thomas Wartenburg, professor of philosophy and film studies at Mount Holyoke College and author of “Unlikely Couples: Movie Romance as Social Criticism.”

“Whatever forces there are in society that tell the society that women stop having their sexuality at 35 is just insane,” says Bebe Neuwirth, who in “Tadpole” plays the stepmother’s friend who beds the young man.

“Women get sexier and sexier as they get older, as many men do as well. They get better at it, and they get more confident in themselves,” says the actress, whose boyfriend is nine years younger than she.

“There’s a fact that society doesn’t want to look at, which is women come into their sexual peak in their late 30s, and men hit their sexual peak around 21,” says “The Good Girl” director Miguel Arteta, whose first film, “Star Maps,” also featured a relationship between a young man and an older woman.

“Definitely, when I was in one of these relationships, that’s something that I thought made sense,” he says. “Women can start exploring their sexuality in really profound ways, in ways that they weren’t capable in their early 20s. And the perfect person to do that with is a man in his early 20s.”

Gyllenhaal, who plays the younger man in “Lovely & Amazing” and “The Good Girl,” says, “I will be [so] presumptuous [as] to speak for many younger men that find older women incredibly attractive.”

That this attraction is being represented in film is a change from the norm. “Whereas the older man and younger woman [pairing] is almost expected as part of social custom ... a woman is not supposed to desire someone who might be the age of her son,” Haskell says. “The idea of a mother having sexual feelings toward a young man is something that is an outrage; it offends us.

“It’s offensive because we want the mother to be a repository of what is good and pure and nurturing.”

That the current incarnation of Mrs. Robinson on Broadway “is allowed to be considerably older than the young man and treated not as a grotesque,” as she is in the 1967 film, is a long way to come, Haskell says.

But in “Lovely & Amazing” and “The Good Girl,” it seems to be less about sex for the women than escape or their own immaturity. “Both Jennifer’s character and Catherine’s character are two women who are not grown up and have not figured out what they want from their life, so they go back to the age at which they started trying to figure that out,” Gyllenhaal says.

“Lovely & Amazing” writer-director Nicole Holofcener says of the character in her film, “There’s a part of her that’s still 17, very much still the homecoming queen wanting that kind of glory and excitement in her life.... He was the right person for her at that moment.”

“She’s so emotionally arrested in development,” Keener agrees. “Luckily, I think, she moves away from that and realizes, ‘ ... What am I doing?’ during the course of the movie.”

‘Last Best Chance’

In the pivotal scene of “The Good Girl,” Aniston’s character is literally at a crossroads, deciding at a stoplight whether to drive toward her disaffected lover or back to her mundane life with her pothead husband and monotonous job. She asks herself whether she should take her “last best chance.”

The young man becomes a fantasy for her, Arteta says. Even “when her fantasy starts becoming a nightmare, when the younger man who seems so attractive and so intellectual starts looking like a deranged alcoholic, she still longs for him.”

In “Tadpole,” a number of older women are charmed by Stanford’s precocious character, a teenager who would rather discuss Voltaire than attend a Moby concert. “For me it’s like a reverse coming-of-age movie more than anything else,” director Gary Winick says. “He’s a 40-year-old trapped in a 15-year-old’s body and, by the end, he becomes a 15-year-old again,” he says.

Can any relationship with such an age difference last? “I think two people could come together for a specific time in their life when it feels appropriate and right, but to sustain that, I think, would be highly unlikely,” Winick says.

“Very often, men in their 20s are not able to handle a relationship, even with a girl who’s in her 20s,” Brings says, “because they’re not settled and they’re still exploring who they are and developing who they are. But if the maturity level is there and the willingness to commit to a relationship is there, then what difference does it make if the girl is 25, 35, 45?”

“I’ve had relationships with women who are eight years older than me and it’s just as challenging or good as other relationships,” Arteta says. “And the one realistic issue comes if you want to have a family, because there is a biological reality to that.”

“Sometimes it is about love ... and then I think that other times it becomes a question of perversity and filling holes where maybe parents didn’t fill,” Gyllenhaal says. “I think in ‘The Good Girl’ it’s pretty evident that he finds this woman and falls in love with her because he’s not really loved by his parents,” while in “Lovely & Amazing,” “that is more about [his] curiosity and sexuality.”

Says Wartenburg, “It seems to me one of the things that the films are asking us to do is to really see how much of our reaction to relationships is conditioned by social assumptions, and as you actually look at two individuals, who knows what could make things work?”

“Tadpole,” “Lovely & Amazing” and “The Good Girl”--which, coincidentally, all screened last month at the IFP/West--Los Angeles Film Festival and, along with “Crush,” at Sundance in January--all treat the older woman-younger man dynamic with varying degrees of humor. But is there a double standard? Would audiences be so quick to laugh if these films were about 40-year-old men having sexual relationships with high school or college-age women?

“If you reverse the sexes in ‘Y Tu Mama Tambien,’ [if] you had a man and two young women, you’d be horrified,” Haskell says. “In other words, the young men are [considered] more able to make decisions and know what they’re doing and less likely to be vulnerable in sex than young women. Young women are still innocent, and I don’t know if we really want to no longer think of young women as innocent.”

“There’s an old tradition of older women being sexual initiators of young men,” Wartenburg says. But “I think [there is] a real reservation about having a film where the young woman is given sexual experience, and that’s a good thing, and now she can be a sexual initiator with her same-age partner.”

Statutory Rape

“A lot of women say that, I think, as teenagers they’re really not into sex the way guys are,” Haskell says. “If a man seduces younger women [it’s] corrupting them, whereas ‘corrupting’--you wouldn’t use that word of a woman and young men.... A 15-year-old male is already sexual.”

But, according to the law, the situations shown in “Tadpole” and “Lovely & Amazing” are statutory rape. Stanford says of “Tadpole,” “I don’t think this film is really advocating that in any way.”

Says Neuwirth, “Personally, I don’t condone 40-year-old women having sex with 15-year-old boys or any boys under 18.” But, she adds, the characters in “Tadpole” fall into bed together because they had too much to drink and were emotionally vulnerable. “And then my character is someone who, because of the way she is, she doesn’t think it’s that big a deal.... She doesn’t take advantage of him.”

Winick based Neuwirth’s character, Diane, an uninhibited Upper West Side wife bored with her husband, on women he knew while growing up in Manhattan, attending private school. At one point, Diane says to a friend, “If you hadn’t met someone in a long time who was excited about life, you’d consider a 15-year-old.”

Winick says that in coming up with the idea for “Tadpole,” he wanted to entertain more than to address any societal taboo, after having directed more socially conscious films like “The Tic Code” and “Sweet Nothing.”

“I’m a dark person, and no matter how light I try to make my films, there are underlying dark themes,” he says.

Says Wartenburg, “Having these sorts of high-profile cases [in the news] of teachers who are older women having relationships with their students who are younger men, I think that makes this whole issue one that people are thinking about, [that is] in the public consciousness.”

“It’s such a hot-button issue to look at it with the degree of complexity that it deserves,” Haskell adds.

In Holofcener’s “Lovely & Amazing,” the law--and the young man’s mother--catch up with Keener’s character.

“I think people of all ages can love each other and connect with one another,” Holofcener says. “I say that now, but if my son was in the situation, I’d be that mother at the car door saying, ‘Get back in your room.’ ”