Sandra Bullock in The Proposal

I really liked The Proposal with Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds. And not just because it was hilarious, well-paced, and looked fantastic. I liked it because I thought it touched upon some issues career women face and was, dare I say it, a somewhat feminist film. Sandra Bullock plays a Type A boss with an aggressive and dominant attitude who always expects the best from everyone. She’s not doing anything wrong, but because she is a woman (and that type of behavior sure isn’t expected in a woman), it doesn’t go over so well at times.

There was one scene where she fires an employee for not doing his job that I found really interesting due to his explosive reaction and how she responds. I unfortunately couldn’t find a clip of this so I’ve written out the dialogue below:

Margaret: Bob, I’m letting you go.

Bob: Pardon?

Margaret: I asked you over a dozen times to get Frank to do Oprah and you didn’t do it. You’re fired.

Bob: I told you that is impossible. Frank hasn’t done an interview in over 20 years.

Margaret: Well that is interesting, because I just got off the phone with him, and he is in.

Bob: Excuse me?

Margaret: You didn’t even call him, did you?

Bob: But…

Margaret: I know, I know. Frank can be a little scary to deal with. For you. Now, I will give you two months to find another job. And you can tell everyone you resigned, okay?

Bob: You poisonous bitch! You can’t fire me! You don’t think I see what you’re doing here? Sandbagging me on this Oprah thing just so you can look good to the board? You are threatened by me! And you are a monster.

Margaret: Bob, stop.

Bob: Just because you have no semblance of a life outside of this office you think you can treat all of us like your own personal slaves? You know what? I feel sorry for you. Because you know what you’re gonna have on your deathbed? Nothing and no one.

Margaret: Listen carefully Bob. I didn’t fire you because I felt threatened. No. I fired you because you’re lazy, entitled, incompetent and you spend more time cheating on your wife than you do in your office. And if you say another word Andrew here is going to have you thrown out on your ass – O.K.?

Throughout the altercation, Margaret stays cool and collected. She clearly doesn’t think much of Bob by the tone of her voice when she says, “I know, I know. Frank can be a little scary to deal with. For you.” If Bob can’t do something that Margaret can get done easily, he doesn’t deserve to work with her.

There’s a later scene in the film where Margaret tells Andrew that she went into the bathroom and cried after Bob called her  a “poisonous bitch.” Despite her hardened exterior, Margaret still has feelings and being called something so degrading in front of the entire office was embarassing. Bob was clearly out of line, but there was nothing Margaret could do about it. I sometimes wonder what the outcome would have been in this exact scene if Margaret were a man and Bob was a woman.

I came across an interesting blog post “The Proposal as a Feminist Statement” by the Third Estate Sunday Review. There was a roundtable about The Proposal and feminism, and some of the stuff people had to say about that scene with Bob was pretty interesting.

Rebecca: …. Some men and masculine women insist The Proposal is sexist. They say Sandra’s playing a backlash role in a backlash film because, yet again, the career woman’s a bitch.

Ava: …. She’s playing a woman with a job and I love how everyone says “career woman” as if it’s bad thing. But I don’t see her as a bitch … Where is she a bitch in the film?

Rebecca: She fires a man, Bob, because he didn’t get an author to go on Oprah. Everyone in the office is scared of her.

C.I.: Her character, Margaret Tate, wants everyone to live up to a professional standard. Is she a bitch? I don’t see how and the film plays with this, it plays with this perception and attempts to implode it. But Bob’s fired for lying. He’s under Margaret, that’s why she can fire him. She told him to get an author to go on Oprah. He told her the author said no. She called the author, talked him into it and found out that he’d never been asked by Bob about it. She confronted Bob with that. That is grounds for dismissal. She gave Bob a direct order. He not only blew her off, he lied to her and told her that he’d tried and the author wasn’t interested. Bob gets to then call her a bitch and everything else while the office that hates her watches with glee. But why do they hate her? Because she won’t play Mommy? A man with the same standards, would he be so hated? He’d be feared but he wouldn’t be so hated. I’m tossing to Mike because he wants to say something.

Mike: Yeah. When she enters the office, her first scene, you’ve got people surfing on the net, joking around, making personal calls. She’s coming down the aisles and all the sudden, they’re freaking out and trying to avoid getting called out by her. Called out for what? For not doing their job. Why weren’t they doing their job to begin with? Where is she a bitch? She’s got standards and she’s the boss. If you don’t like the standards, get another job. But she’s called a bitch and she’s called a witch, and she’s supposedly on her broom, and you name it. And, at the end of the day, their big problem in the office appears to be that despite having a female boss they can’t do what ever they want. In other words, the female boss doesn’t let them push her around and that appears to be why they hate her and call her a bitch.

The Proposal was not meant to be a heavy film – it was marketed as a summer comedy, after all. But I really liked how they gave so much more dimension to Sandra’s character than was necessary. If you haven’t seen this film yet, you really should!

Very addicting trailer – song is Katy Perry’s “Hot N’ Cold”