Murray (my husband) and I saw Cheri last night, a new movie with Michelle Pfeiffer and Rupert Friend. Of the three reviews I read before seeing the movie, all focused on how beautiful Michelle Pfeiffer still is. After seeing it, I can report that she is beautiful, was beautiful, and probably will be beautiful for the remainder of her life. What is so remarkable about this?

Our local critic gave the movie four stars. I would not have been so generous. The characters are not fully developed and Rupert Friend who plays Cheri, Pfeiffer’s love interest, never makes us care about him at all. In fact, I’d say he is dislikeable. Therefore it is hard to see why Pfeiffer’s character would have cared about him–except as trophy in the older woman-younger man sweepstakes.

There is one scene toward the end where Cheri looks at Lea (Pfeiffer’s character) when she doesn’t know he is looking at her. At 25, he sees the future (there is 30 years difference in their ages in the story), sees her as an “old” woman, and doesn’t like the future he sees. Given the premise of their relationship (sex, brandy, and more sex) I can understand this.

Women and men do not have the same currency with each other about sex. Women have their beauty. Men have their power (regardless of a woman’s professional power). I know this is a gross generalization, but as generalizations go, women are desired for aesthetic reasons more than financial. I don’t even quarrel with this. What I do quarrel with is the narrow definition of beauty as synonymous with youth. Women of a certain age now dress better, have better bodies because they exercise more and eat better than their mothers and grandmothers. We (as I count myself among these women) are beautiful, not in spite of our age, but at our age, whatever age that is. Even though we might not turn the head of a 19 year old (Cheri’s age at the beginning of the movie), we are indeed beautiful.