CINEMA: Andrew Worsdale reviews Beautiful Girls
EARLIER this year, “women’s movies” were a dime a dozen on circuit. From How to Make an American Quilt to Now and Then, their stories focused on women’s desires and dreams and how men messed them around. By the end of the ride you’d had a couple of chuckles and maybe shed a few tears.
Beautiful Girls, which opens this week, is a “men’s movie” in a similar vein, but the coin is flipped to tell the story of a group of buddies who gather for a high-school reunion and mope over the girls they used to love and to fantasize about the ones they want. In the movie, the wise-cracking Rosie O’Donnell explains to lead actors Timothy Hutton and Matt Dillon, while brandishing a copy of Penthouse, that women don’t have small hips and big breasts. “Small hips, small breasts. Big breasts, big hips,” she says. By perpetuating an unrealistic fantasy of women they want to meet, they’re denying themselves real relationships with the non-silicone, flesh-and- blood women of their hometown.
By the end of the film, the young men have all learned this lesson. Even so, feminist critics have been slagging Beautiful Girls off: “I suppose a feminist who goes to see a film with a title like this deserves what she gets, namely an exasperating and depressing evening at the movies,” said US critic Linda Lopez McAlister. “It is basically a celebration of white working-class male infantilism and male privilege,” she continues, “like a laboratory in which to study the state of sexism in American lower-middle-class life at the end of the 20th century.”
Being a white middle-class male myself, I don’t quite agree. Beautiful Girls is a vast improvement on Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead, penned by the same writer, Scott Rosenberg. In the former, the men’s inadequacies and adolescent pangs for the perfect woman are more true-to-life, sincere and funnier than the romantic contrivances of the latter; it’s got some great dialogue, honest home- truths and not a smidgin of bad plotting or arch characterisation.
The film also features a charming performance from Natalie Portman as the wisest person in town — a 13-year-old neighbour to Hutton’s Willie, who calls herself “an old soul” and through her insight converts him into a more mature guy. Tightly directed by Jonathan Demme’s brother Ted Demme, this is stuff from the heart — albeit a vacuous, somewhat chauvinistic one.
Moll Flanders, also on circuit this week, might have been dubbed a “women’s picture” in the halcyon days of the Fifties. It’s a liberal, Hollywood adaptation of Daniel Defoe’s 18th-century memoir, the subtitle of which reads: “Born at Newgate, was Twelve Year a Whore, five times a Wife, Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew rich, liv’d honest and died a Penitent.”
Told in flashback and shot in sumptuous wide-screen, this is definitely not a period action-adventure, although it is written and directed by Pen Densham, who scripted the equally trivialised Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.
Moll Flanders is soppy and Americanised, like a tougher Mills and Boon. But I warmed to its kitschiness, largely due to Robin Wright’s forceful performance in the title role, and the perfectly executed settings. Still, I’m sure feminists will revolt against its syrupy, old-fashioned tale of a woman who suffered the slings and arrows of a miserable life, and conquered them.
Possibly the best release this week, though, is Persuasion, a BBC film originally made for television. An adaptation of Jane Austen’s last novel, it shares many of the delights and eccentricities of Sense and Sensibility while not quite achieving the same heights. But, as a tale of young women searching for love, it possesses its fair share of ironic comment on the young men they pine for. Perhaps the flurry of Jane Austen movies descending upon us says something about the Nineties after all.