Ambition paired with jealousy can be a dangerous cocktail. Especially when gender expectations are thrown into the mix.
Prestige offerings, from “Fair Play” and “Oppenheimer” to “Past Lives” and “Lessons in Chemistry,” have mined that tricky terrain this year. “Maestro” and the latest seasons of female-led “Julia” and “The Morning Show” have tackled it as well.
And while men suffer the slings and arrows of jealousy in several high-profile Oscar contenders, women arguably experience more fallout from it than their male counterparts. This goes for female characters who are ambitious themselves or those partnered with men who suck all the air out of the room, as in “Oppenheimer” and “Maestro.”
“Nobody likes an ambitious woman,” Sarah Lancashire’s Julia Child advises a female colleague in Season 2 of the Max series named for her, explaining why she credited men at WGBH with advocating for “The French Chef” when the show had previously established many of them were initially skeptics about the pioneering cooking show for women.
Throughout its run, “Julia” has deftly explored the obstacles Child faced at home and professionally when she reinvented herself as a chef in middle age. We see Child continually disarm naysayers with her joie de vivre. Her tendency to share culinary treats with staffers also helps, as does her strong marital bond with husband Paul (David Hyde Pierce), who mostly supports her endeavors and provides additional cover for her covert ambition.
But other women have had a trickier go of it in recent offerings. At the outset of Chloe Domont’s “Fair Play,” Phoebe Dynevor’s Emily has a seemingly enviable relationship with Alden Ehrenreich’s Luke, but he becomes jealous when she’s promoted over him at work and resorts to physical dominance in ways that recall pulpy potboilers of decades past, such as “Fatal Attraction” and “Basic Instinct.”
In the more elegiac “Past Lives,” writer-director Celine Song establishes Nora Moon as highly ambitious from her South Korean girlhood to adulthood in the U.S. It’s not until her childhood friend heads home after a visit that we understand the price Moon (played as an adult by Greta Lee) has paid for following her dreams — even with an incredibly supportive husband in the form of John Magaro.
Lee, who also portrays similarly ambitious Stella in Apple TV+’s “The Morning Show,” relishes the opportunity to play characters with a strong drive to succeed — just like many women she knows. “The reality is, we don’t get to compartmentalize things like our ambition with every other aspect of our lives,” she says.
Here is a look at the fallout other characters have faced for ambition — whether theirs or that of their romantic partner — on the big and small screen.
“The Morning Show,” Season 3
Jennifer Aniston’s Alex Levy has increasingly shown her mettle in the Apple TV+ series, and in the latest season she falls for Jon Hamm’s billionaire Paul Marks, who helps her realize her desire for more power in the workplace. Other female characters, including Reese Witherspoon’s Bradley and Lee’s Stella, are shown to be equally ruthless in pursuit of advancement.
“Oppenheimer”
Cillian Murphy plays J. Robert Oppenheimer as a brilliant physicist who is open to new ideas — a trait that gets him in trouble when a jealous bureaucrat (Robert Downey Jr.) orchestrates a successful campaign to get his security clearance revoked in 1954. Oppenheimer’s wife (Emily Blunt), a scientist in her own right, finds her career overshadowed by the man who helped develop the atomic bomb.
“Maestro”
Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein is brimming over with ambition, and his passion for men can’t be contained, either. Collateral damage: the career and happiness of his wife, Felicia Montealegre, a Chilean actor who is increasingly frustrated by his “sloppy behavior” in pursuit of sexual conquests.
“Lessons in Chemistry”
In this Apple TV+ adaptation of Bonnie Garmus’ novel, Brie Larson plays Elizabeth Zott, a scientist who overcomes an unwanted sexual advance to find fame as host of a cooking show. It’s set around the same time as “Julia,” but the characters are worlds apart: Zott is self-contained and unbothered by defying social norms, while Child leads a decidedly more conventional life.
“Rustin”
Bayard Rustin, a close associate of Martin Luther King Jr., was double trouble for white society as an openly gay Black man fighting for civil rights. But the Netflix movie shows Black power brokers used his sexuality as a wedge between him and King in an attempt to control them both. The duo ultimately prevails with the March on Washington.
“Barbie”
Margot Robbie’s Barbie isn’t so much ambitious as she is confident, while Ryan Gosling’s Ken is her yearning supplicant in this gender-flipped world. Then the roles are reversed, and the women must contend with power dynamics that more closely resemble contemporary life.