Dahvi Waller writes political history as a set of rooms in disagreement, and she will not give the story to one person in them. Mrs. America is fair, well built and superbly cast, and it knows what its women did better than what they believed.
Fi1m perspective
Each of the nine episodes of Mrs. America (2020) is given to one woman, most of them real, and none of them is allowed to be the lead. The series moves between the feminists in New York and Washington and the opposition Phyllis Schlafly is organising from her kitchen in Alton, Illinois, and it takes both sides seriously and lets neither off. Waller has been plain about the design: "It's not a biopic of Phyllis Schlafly. It's not a biopic of Gloria Steinem." That refusal is the closest thing she has to a signature, and it runs back through everything she wrote before she was in charge.
She came up through other people's rooms. There was reality television to begin with, then staff jobs on Commander in Chief (2005), Desperate Housewives (2006–2008) and Eli Stone (2008–2009), before she joined Matthew Weiner on Mad Men in 2009 and wrote three episodes. From there she went to Christopher Cantwell and Christopher C. Rogers on Halt and Catch Fire (2014–2015). Our review of that series credits its writers, Waller among them, with noticing somewhere in the second season that Cameron Howe and Donna Clark were the show and Joe MacMillan was a character in it. We cannot say how much of that was hers. We can say it is the same instinct that built Mrs. America: find the women the story is pretending are secondary and hand them the camera.
When it works, it works because of research and casting. Waller and her writers know how these people spoke to a microphone and how they spoke at home, and the gap between the two is where the drama lives. We were more unsettled than we expected by the scenes in which Cate Blanchett's Schlafly says things to a press conference she would never say at her own table, because the series films them as work, done well, by a woman who has found the one job she is allowed to be good at. It is a fair portrait. It is also a portrait with a hole in it. The series is sure of what Schlafly did and hedges on what she meant, and Blanchett fills the space with manner, which is not the same as conviction.
Some reviewers thought the series too kind to her. We do not think kindness is the trouble. Waller has simply not decided whether her lead believed a word of it, and a drama can be fair to a person while still being sure of her. The result is a little tidier than the history it describes, which is the price of clarity, and Waller pays it knowingly.
Her next is a screenplay from Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun, a novel told by a single narrator. A writer who has spent a career refusing the single point of view has now chosen one, and we would like to see what she does with only one voice to work with.
Biography
Dahvi Waller is a Canadian screenwriter and television producer. Born in Montreal, she holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in history from Princeton University.
She began her television career with writing credits on series including Commander in Chief (2005) and Desperate Housewives (2006–2008). Waller joined the writing staff of Mad Men in 2009, serving as co-producer and later producer while contributing episodes; the series won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series in 2011 and Writers Guild of America Awards for Best Drama Series in 2010 and 2011. She later worked as supervising producer and co-executive producer on Halt and Catch Fire (2014–2015) and created, wrote and served as showrunner on the miniseries Mrs. America (2020), for which she received a further WGA Award.
