Whatever Heather
Pretty Persuasion
Directed by Marcos Siega
Oops!-Rewind!" That's what Kimberly Joyce (Evan Rachel Wood) says whenever she misspeaks and embarrasses someone-or exposes herself-in the new high school satire, Pretty Persuasion. Maybe that phrase won't catch on any better than "as if" from Clueless or "fetch" from Mean Girls, but it's far more significant. Kimberly's contempt for the phony people around her comes out in that expression, meant to erase whatever feeling she has revealed because, she all too painfully realizes, nobody cares about feelings.
In Pretty Persuasion, a beautiful middle-class white girl observes the socio-political undercurrent at her Beverly Hills high school. The story takes place during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Though Kimberly's not political, she callously turns up the heat. She hurts a lot of people when she accuses an English teacher (Ron Livingston) of sexual harassment, but no one more than herself. This sets her apart from the heroes of other recent movies that glorify the narcissism of disenchanted youth. Take Last Days-please! But anyone who suffered through The Edukators and My Summer of Love also knows the air of smug self-righteousness in these tales about young-adult know-it-alls. (Kimberly's "Oops!-Rewind!" might even suggest a tasteful moviegoer's regret.)
There's a trend afoot, typified by Donnie Darko, where melodrama is used to sanction the young generation's distrust and nihilism. Hollywood's latest youth-market indulgence can be recognized by the calculated blend of pessimism and narcissism. (The Edukators is from Germany; My Summer of Love is from England; The Holy Girl is from Argentina-the virus has apparently spread.) This egotistical unease is best captured in Kimberly's alluring sociopathic behavior. Pretty Persuasion constantly teeters between admiring Kimberly's toughness and recoiling from it. If youth audiences could summon the courage to face up to her egotism, they might learn to temper their own.
But pop culture rarely works so instructively. Flattery entices audiences, and Kimberly is guaranteed to scare them. There's unsettling power in Evan Rachel Wood's performance. Her Lolita-like seductiveness maintains a frightening duplicity. When her blue eyes darken, they're deadly. And director Marcos Siega frames her well, always scrutinizing. He has a slow rhythm (between laconic and mesmerized), but Wood holds the screen in a vice of sexiness and guileful innocence-a very modern, pop-inspired duality. (The character concept is too precise and recognizable to be mistaken for a right-wing, George Bush effigy.) Kimberly achieves the complex level of corruption that inveigles today's youth more than the diva-tramp roles Don Roos wrote for Christina Ricci in The Opposite of Sex and Maggie Gyllenhaal in Happy Endings. I specifically point out these near-similar vixens because Pretty Persuasion conveys the exact social and psychological depth of a modern bisexual bad girl that a hack like Roos can never make credible.
Director Siega and screenwriter Skander Halim don't have the polish of Hollywood pros or indie fashionistas. A lot can go wrong in Pretty Persuasion's farce structure, making its satire seem off-kilter. (Kimberly's openly racist dad, played by James Woods, exaggerates the crisis of family influence way past cartoonishness. The comely boys Kimberly teases are not clearly manipulated. The vain tv reporter played by Jane Krakowski is inherently unscrupulous.) But hey, a lot has gone wrong in the world today. Siega and Halim are more perceptive about it than they are adept farceurs. They take moral chaos as their subject. Perhaps they can be accused of being too cynical, yet their open cynicism about Kimberly is bracingly honest. Despite some wobbly race jokes (Kimberly befriends an Arab student played by Adi Schnall) and puzzling riffs on class (Kimberly manipulates her imitative best friend, played by Elisabeth Harnois), Pretty Persuasion dares to itemize our moral chaos, and that's preferable to what has gone wrong in other recent topical youth films.
Compare Kimberly to Joseph Gordon Levitt's gay teen hustler in Gregg Araki's vile Mysterious Skin. Her viciousness is analyzed; his is sentimentalized. Siega and Halim advance beyond the old-fashioned bitch-queen premise, while Araki indulges the recent queen-bitch premise. Kimberly, in the end, is to be pitied; Gordon-Levitt (like the schoolmate he helped molest) embodies a surfeit of self-pity. In Kimberly, Siega and Halim have created the rare youth character who is neither blameless nor accusatory. This is the honesty that is desperately needed but almost never seen.
The key to Siega and Halim's insight comes at the start of the film when Kimberly skips school to audition for a role on a tv show. Two leering producers instruct her booty-shaking in a scene that recalls the Quentin Tarantino lechery Spike Lee arranged in Girl 6. But Kimberly, costumed in high-heel fuck-me pumps, undergoes an exploitation that extends to all races and genders. The media world she fantasizes being part of, the acceptance she seeks, is a con. She belongs to the reality-tv demographic that doesn't know reality from sham, honesty from dishonesty. Her politically naive generation gets warped from constantly being on audition. They think they live in MTV's The Real World.
Siega and Halim put Kimberly in a world where evil acts have tragic consequences. I don't pretend that Pretty Persuasion is perfect. But despite its problems, it raises more political and moral issues than any of the more stylish releases. Sure, it's inferior to Alexander Payne's Election, but that misses what Siega and Halim do right. Turning the feel-good charm of Clueless into Columbine-era sensationalism gets to the heart of things better than Elephant. Kimberly's scheme to play Anne Frank in a school play gauges the widespread cultural ignorance that most filmmakers blithely ignore. This movie grasps depravity without being part of it. It's both shambling and devastating-like Robert Downey, Sr.'s classic Putney Swope. Siega and Halim's brazenness puts other movies' coolness to shame. I hope "Oops-Rewind!" indeed becomes a popular expression. It's got more heart than the nihilistic "Whatever!"
Grizzly Man
Directed by Werner Herzog
Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man is rigorous enough to shame the advent of "mockumentary" by salvaging the misguided life of nature enthusiast Timothy Treadwell, whose infatuation with grizzlies ended when he was mauled to death in 2003. Herzog combines judgment with admiration, but the film is distinguished by its respect for truth, while an eye for Treadwell's accidental nature epiphanies is captured on his doomed video-cam.
Treadwell also sought stardom. Pop documentary no longer relies on honesty to hold viewer interest, either jacking-up "atmosphere" and "suspense" (Capturing the Friedmans) or pandering to political prejudice (Fahrenheit 911), contributing to the public's inability to reason. Praising the current nonfiction vogue slips into the nether world of reality tv, where viewers are accustomed to set-up conditions, withheld (but undisclosed) information. Today's docs have become a variation on game shows: contests between drama and fact, entertainment and realism. Without Herzog's integrity, no one wins.
-A.W.