Hollywood’s Hottest Husband Is Made Of Wicker. That Says A Lot.

In the world of “Wicker,” no one is having good sex, except for the Fisherwoman. Her husband is tall, chiseled, and surprisingly limber. You see, he’s made of wicker.

After one too many jokes from the townspeople at her expense, the Fisherwoman goes to the Basketmaker to end their snickering at her singleness and get a husband. The artist-turned-miracle-worker tells her to meet at the chapel in a month, and when she obliges, she’s shocked to see that somehow, the weaver has really done it; he’s made a man out of a handbasket, and suddenly the whole village goes to hell.

“Wicker” has gotten a lot of attention online for its absurd premise and promise of frequent bed-breaking romps between Fisherwoman (Olivia Colman) and her Wicker Husband (Alexander Skarsgård of “The Legend of Tarzan”). Its trailer guarantees comedy and lots of logic-defying sex. It’s best if you don’t think too much about it. Based on a 2008 short story called “The Wicker Husband,” feminists are praising what they see as a powerful anti-patriarchy movie.

On the surface, that’s exactly what it is: The men in the film are controlling, bumbling, and oblivious. They don’t know how to keep their wives happy, and they’re disturbed that this wicker husband is showing them all up. One Atlantic writer called it “a cautionary tale about marriage.”

The film is definitely playing to modern fears. “Wicker is perfectly calibrated for our moment of peak heteropessimism,” affirms The Cut. Heteropessimism is another way to say that our culture is now pretty down on man-and-woman relationships. And in “Wicker,” it shows.

The men are comically inept. The village doctor is infamous for failing to treat (i.e., killing) his patients, and when the tailor passes out while helping to administer stitches, his wife finishes the job only to have the doctor, her father, congratulate her husband for the fine work. One character refers to marriage as a “contract” — not, of course, a “covenant.”

One character attempts to mend his roof to woo his wife like the Wicker Husband; instead, he falls, injures himself, and eventually dies. The baker and his wife are not having sex; when they finally do, he’s role-playing as the Wicker Husband. She gets pregnant and seeks out a secret abortion. Near the end of the film, the couple tries to get a wicker woman as a “third.”

There is something sinister about these portrayals, which the film plays for laughs. Can you believe the tailor doesn’t trust his wife to join in his business, telling her that “tailoring is my thing”? Isn’t it entertaining to watch the lecherous butcher finally get his comeuppance?

The women have their vices, but they are mostly just drained. Beaten down by the strictures of their small village and a culture that believes wifedom is little more than a duty to cook and clean and maybe occasionally sleep with your husband just to bear children who will overwhelm and annoy you, these women are petty and gossipy because their society hasn’t given them a chance to be otherwise, “Wicker” seems to say.

“It paints a picture of the bleak reality of many traditional marriages in a patriarchal society—one where women are expected to live a life devoid of pleasure and partnership, physical and otherwise,” says the beauty director at Harper’s Bazaar. “As you get to know the townspeople better, their growing jealousy of the fisherwoman and her husband feels earned. Who wouldn’t become jealous? Who wouldn’t turn to desperation?”

But “Wicker” might not ultimately be as anti-marriage as the feminists want it to be. Hiding behind these virtue signals to leftist sensibilities (ha, aren’t men ridiculous?) is a story about vulnerability, trust, and what it means to make and form a commitment. Marriage isn’t all bad; the Fisherwoman is married to a basket, but she is married, and her life is now better than ever.

The townspeople are not good people who happen to have bad marriages; they are bad, selfish people who let an orphan (the young Fisherwoman) fend for herself and then mock her for being single and smelling like the fish they buy from her at the market. Fisherwoman is a decent woman who didn’t realize what she had been missing. And now that she’s found love, she’s afraid of its power.

Her wicker husband may not be human, and he may literally owe his life to her, yet he does have free will. Being made of flammable material, he has more to fear from fire, but it’s Fisherwoman who feels like she’s about to get burned. “You have my heart now,” she tells him. “It’s very flammable.”

Husband and wife Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, who wrote and directed the film, buried a sweet, if strange, love story beneath a lot of gender war garbage. Their comments about the movie point to a much different, and better, film than the actual result.

“The whole movie is about jealousy and envy corrupting a great love,” Fischer said in an interview.

Wilson seems to imply that Fisherwoman’s struggles will resonate with Gen Z; in the modern day, she might feel compelled to defend her husband to her girlfriends by explaining that he’s not like other guys.

“[N]ow, you meet someone that you like, and the world is telling you that men are horrible and you shouldn’t trust them,” she said. “It’s very hard to not listen to the echoes of society, and also your own past relationships and the baggage that you bring to a new relationship.”

Love and romance are exhilarating and edifying, but “Wicker” isn’t totally sure about marriage. After spurning him in a fit of jealousy, Fisherwoman returns to her husband and promises to do better. “My love doesn’t require a promise,” he assures her. It sounds romantic, but the deepest love does usually involve a promise, a veil, and a ring.

The irony of “Wicker” is that certain threads of the film, and the directors’ comments themselves, point to a fundamentally meaningful if deeply strange film that values the commitment it takes to make a lasting, loving relationship work. But the movie is too busy getting its viewers to laugh at horrible men for the sake of feminist applause to focus on its real, universal truths. If only this viral romance had the courage to challenge its viewers, it might be worth your time.

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