The controversial history of age gap movies
The recent release of Halina Reijn’s latest film, Babygirl, starring Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson, is one of several new movies featuring an age-gap romance between an older woman and a younger man. Coming shortly after films like The Idea of You and A Family Affair (also starring Kidman) – and just before Bridget Jones: Mad about The Boy – these titles all explore the trope in various ways, reflecting a noticeable spike in on-screen depictions of a somewhat controversial trend.
Why are these kinds of films suddenly more popular than ever? We’ve seen ‘cougars’ and ‘toyboys’ appear on screen for decades, with iconic movies like The Graduate and Harold and Maude both centring around men in their early 20s becoming entranced by older women (in the case of the latter, a 79-year-old woman). These films both garnered significant controversy due to their depictions of women engaging in relationships with much younger men, even though neither film ends with the pair walking towards a sunset hand-in-hand. In The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman’s 21-year-old character runs off with Mrs. Robinson’s age-appropriate daughter, while in Harold and Maude, the elderly love interest dies, leaving Harold alone but forever changed.
People reacted strongly to these movies, perhaps because the idea of an older woman – someone stereotypically seen as ‘no longer in her prime’ – going after a young man, one who could be described as virile and attractive, is quite the taboo. For many audiences, this setup makes no sense. ‘What can each partner give to each other?,’ ‘How can a young man be attracted to an ageing hag?!’ audiences might exclaim. Of course, misogyny is a major factor here because the sad truth is that women are typically deemed as useless once they meet middle-age, something cinema has often perpetuated.
You rarely see rom-coms featuring a couple both over the age of 40, with romantic and sexual roles for ageing female actors quickly slipping away from them. It’s no surprise so many actors turn to plastic surgery, Ozempic, and Botox – looking young, wrinkle-free, and thin is the only way they can seemingly book good roles.
By contrast, many older men get cast in romantic leading roles, even if they’re greying and their faces are decorated with crow’s feet and smile lines. This has always been the case, especially before the 21st century, when middle-aged classic stars like Gene Kelly or James Stewart were paired with love interests barely out of their teens. Only now, when we look back on these films, are these uncomfortable age gaps highlighted; yet at the time, no one said anything. Look at Singin’ in the Rain, for example, Debbie Reynolds was 19, while Kelly was 40.
The trend has continued for a while – Julia Roberts was 22 in Pretty Woman while Richard Gere was 40, and in Entrapment, Sean Connery was 68 while Catherine Zeta-Jones was 30. Even Love Actually is guilty – Kiera Knightley was just 18 while Andrew Lincoln was 30. These age gaps are often glossed over and ignored, normalising the idea that the only suitable love interest for an older man is a much younger woman, perhaps one hardly out of her teen years. Hollywood has also tried to convince us that barely legal – and often illegal – partnerships are romantic, or, in some cases, the filmmaker simply fails to condemn immoral age gaps with enough severity.
You only have to look at 1997’s Lolita to see a prime example of a movie failing to adequately depict paedophilia. Jeremy Irons, who was almost 50, played Humbert, while 17-year-old Dominique Swain played 14-year-old Dolores, and the pair can actually be seen kissing and engaging in sexually charged activity. The movie’s uncomfortable and overly sexualised images were heavily romanticised online by impressionable teenagers during the 2010s – surely that’s a sign that the film failed to achieve the message Vladimir Nabokov so eloquently explored in the original novel.
Relationships between older men and younger women – or girls – have been explored much more succinctly in recent years, as exemplified by the likes of Fish Tank, An Education, and The Diary of a Teenage Girl, all of which communicate the trauma that can emerge from being taken advantage of at a young age. The same goes for stories about younger women preying on boys under the age of 18, like May December or Last Summer. These films don’t hesitate to hide the horrors of these situations, although movies featuring female paedophiles are considerably less common.
Instead, consensual age-gap relationships between a middle-aged woman and a 20-something-year-old man are the newest trend, although these movies often present us with significant food for thought in terms of how these dynamics differ when the genders are reversed. The Idea Of You, where the 24-year-old male love interest meets a 40-year-old woman and becomes enamoured, is complicated by the fact that he is a world-famous pop star. The film asks us, “If a younger man has considerably more status and power than an older woman, how much does her age affect the dynamic?” The fact that Anne Hathaway could easily pass for being close in age to him aids these questions, too, because she looks firmly like a movie star, not your average 40-something-year-old woman.
In Babygirl, Kidman’s Romy worries that, by being the boss of Dickinson’s Samuel, she is exploiting her position of power, but he reassures her that it’s actually the other way around. The ball is in his court here – he could report her for her illicit behaviour at any moment if he so pleased. Director Reijn has defended the couple’s age gap, telling W Magazine, “If we see a movie where the male actor is the same age as the female actor, we find that odd. Which is insane. It should completely be normalised that the age gaps switch and that women have different relationships. We’re not trapped in a box anymore. We internalise the male gaze, we internalise patriarchy, and we need to free ourselves from it. It’s really hard.”
Age-gaps relationships within movies will always be controversial, it seems, and gender will always affect the way people look at these kinds of relationships. Older men pairing up with younger women has been so normalised that when it’s the other way around, and middle-aged women are engaging in perfectly consensual relationships with a man in their late 20s, many people still get a shock. In most cases, the men in these films aren’t barely legal, either, whereas that is often the case when it’s women in the younger roles.
This recent cinematic trend of 40+-year-old women engaging in sexual and romantic couplings with men several years their junior offers an insight into the kinds of relationships that aren’t often shown on screen. These films remind us that older women can still be seen as desirable when Hollywood (and patriarchy) has historically claimed otherwise. What we also need more of now, perhaps, are stories involving older women being paired with men their own age, showing audiences that love and desire can blossom at any age, regardless of how many wrinkles you’ve now acquired.
