DIRECTOR
Jane Campion
SCREENWRITERS
Anna Campion
Jane Campion
PRODUCER
Jan Chapman
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Dion Beebe
MUSIC
Angelo Badalamenti
EDITOR
Veronika Jenet
CAST
Kate Winslet (Ruth Barron)
Harvey Keitel (P.J. Waters)
Julie Hamilton (Mum)
Sophie Lee (Yvonne)
Daniel Wyllie (Robbie)
Paul Goddard (Tim)
Tim Robertson (Dad)
George Mangos (Yani)
Pam Grier (Carol)
MPAA rating: R
Running
time: 114m
U.S. release: December 3, 1999
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Other Jane
Campion films
reviewed on this site:
- The
Portrait of a Lady
|
I
usually give unconventional movies the benefit of the doubt,
sometimes for far longer than they deserve. But there's a fine
line between idiosyncratic and stupid, and Holy Smoke
crosses it and never comes back. It's not your ordinary bad movie;
the director, Jane Campion (The Piano), never makes ordinary
movies, whether bad or good. But neither can Holy Smoke
really be called extraordinary. It keeps flirting with comedy;
it flirts with seriousness as well. Eventually, one grows weary
of the movie coyly batting its eyelashes at one tone or another.
Campion first worked this material into a novel, written with
her sister Anna (herself a director; her obscure movie Loaded
may have influenced The
Blair Witch Project). It's entirely possible that Holy
Smoke should have remained a novel, where its exchanges of
ideas and dabblings in absurdity might have been more palatable.
In any event, there's not much story here to power a novel or
a film. The heroine is Ruth (Kate Winslet), a lost soul who's
fallen into a cult during a visit to India. Her parents connive
to lure her back home, where she will be deprogrammed by an "exit
advisor," the legendary P.J. Waters (Harvey Keitel), who
promises to have her mind back safe and sound within three days.
Campion isn't terribly interested in the actual mechanics of
deprogramming, which has been handled before in such intense
early-'80s dramas as Ticket to Heaven and Split Image
(the latter of which boasted James Woods as the snarling exit
advisor). She's taken with the idea of deprogramming as a metaphor
-- for the battle of the sexes, for the paradox of relinquishing
one form of control for another, even for romance. The over-confident
Waters doesn't have to work too hard to crack Ruth's devotion
to her guru -- it seems all he really has to do is show her a
videotape and she's burning her ceremonial garb the next day.
The movie is really about what happens when Ruth turns the tables
on Waters -- subjects him to her own brand of deprogramming,
in which she forces him to question his masculinity, his sexual
power, his very core of self-worth. Reading this, you may think
Holy Smoke sounds interesting, and writing it, I'm tempted
to go easy on the film. Campion does give you a lot to chew on;
the trouble is, she doesn't give you anything to wash it down
with afterward. Her movies can mean anything or nothing; they
feel half-realized, half locked up in her head. You feel you'd
have to be one of the Campion sisters to fully decode the film.
And there doesn't seem to be enough there to justify the mental
gymnastics of interpretation.
Campion remains a gifted pure filmmaker. She has an unerring
visual sense -- a sense of what catches and seduces the eye,
what makes a movie move -- and she creates moments here that
feel indescribably right. Neil Diamond, for instance, is recruited
on the soundtrack not once but twice; his melodramatic "I
Am, I Said" is blaring when we first meet Waters, who demonstrates
his machismo by dislodging a luggage cart at the airport. It's
an unreasonably funny moment, bordering on prankish, and yet
Harvey Keitel has seldom had a cooler introduction. It's a scene
Quentin Tarantino would be proud to have thought of.
Keitel keeps his cool until the climax, when Ruth turns him into
his sex slave and makes him wear lipstick and a dainty red cocktail
dress; he loses his mind, and so does the movie. We get the point,
but a movie by its very nature literalizes whatever it shows
us, so what we see is not Man giving up his devotion to the cult
of machismo, but just Harvey Keitel grovelling in a dress. Holy
Smoke is worth a look for Kate Winslet's head-first performance
-- she just dives right in, fearlessly, no matter how ludicrous
the scene is; Keitel, no wallflower himself, matches her. They
get an intriguing, erotic rhythm going. But what they say to
each other mostly sounds like feminist platitudes circa 1972,
even though the movie is set in the present. Jane Campion is
busily dismantling gender myths that few people take seriously
any more. By exalting spiritual female power at the expense of
pathetic male power, though, she continues to make herself part
of the problem: True feminism is about equality, not one gender's
moral superiority to the other. |
