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August 12, 2005
Pretty Persuasion
NO STARS (out of four)
What is it about high school that fascinates Hollywood so? We all survived it, didn't we? Still, it's positively alarming the number of filmmakers who still have an axe to grind with the popular kids who pushed 'em around back in high school. It's one thing to manufacture brainless high school comedies for teen audiences coping with all those funky hormone changes and new peer pressures they're experiencing. But it's quite a different story for angry old men to exact their revenge years after the fact through hardcore jock-hating, pretty-girl-bashing satires aimed at audiences who've long since graduated past such adolescent cheap shots. Get over it already.
And yet, because high school remains the one shared trauma that otherwise privileged kids have to whine about, we'll have to endure movies like Pretty Persuasion until the end of our days. About as pleasant as eating broken glass, Pretty Persuasion is a tacky, obvious
There's enough estrogen gone awry in this bitchy teen comedy to make Mean Girls look like a Disney after-school special (had the distributors even bothered to submit the film for a rating, the MPAA would've surely slapped it with an NC-17). A nubile she-devil in a grey skirt, Kimberly Joyce (Evan Rachel Wood) is the kind of construction you only get in the movies, a politically incorrect airhead (full of bon mots like "I have respect for all races, but I'm very glad that I was born white") who's shrewd enough to orchestrate a media circus designed to launch her acting career.
Wood is a talented actress (as she proved in Thirteen), but there's not much she can do here but stand up straight and try to look like a demure young Nicole Kidman while spewing jaw-droppingly tasteless dialogue. As for James Woods, there's no telling why the two-time Oscar nominee agreed to play Kimberly's sleazeball father. When his outrageously anti-Semitic character says, "There is a difference between bona fide racism and just speaking the truth," the movie is smart enough to know his jokes aren't appropriate, but it still wants us to laugh at them. Sorry kids, but you can't have it both ways.
The result is anything but pretty: Writer Skander Halim and director Marcos Siega have created a safe space for repressed bigots to put aside their respect for one another and hee-haw at the kind of off-color comments they wouldn't dare make in polite company. Such maliciously unfunny antics might play to the fans of movies like Jawbreaker and Saved!, but even Pretty Persuasion's potential cult fan base will start to grow restless once it hits that clumsy courtroom stretch where everything falls apart. What Halim and Siega have failed to realize is that it's easy to be "ironic" and mean-spirited, but damn near impossible to pull off something sincere.
[as featured on Premiere.com]
Posted by Peter Debruge on