director/screenwriter
Sofia Coppola
based on
the novel by
Jeffrey
Eugenides
producers
Francis Ford Coppola
Julie Costanzo
Dan Halsted
Chris Hanley
cinematographer
Edward Lachman
music
Air
editors
Melissa Kent
James Lyons
cast
James Woods (Mr. Lisbon)
Kathleen Turner (Mrs. Lisbon)
Kirsten Dunst (Lux Lisbon)
Josh Hartnett (Trip Fontaine)
Michael Paré (Adult Trip Fontaine)
Scott Glenn (Father Moody)
Danny DeVito (Dr. Horniker)
A.J. Cook (Mary Lisbon)
Hannah Hall (Cecilia Lisbon)
Leslie Hayman (Therese Lisbon)
Chelse Swain (Bonnie Lisbon)
Hayden Christensen (Jake)
Giovanni Ribisi (Narrator)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 97m
u.s.
release: May 12, 2000
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
other sofia
coppola films
reviewed on this website:
- lost
in translation
|
Five
perfectly normal-seeming blonde teenage girls -- all sisters
from the same perfectly normal-seeming suburban house -- killed
themselves in 1975. This much we're told at the beginning of
The Virgin Suicides, a glum coming-of-age/suburban fairy
tale structured like a murder mystery -- a self-murder mystery
-- to which there is no answer. The point being, I suppose, that
suicide is a void that swallows up rational questions; the very
existence of suicide cancels out logic.
I wish I'd enjoyed The Virgin Suicides more -- in outline,
it's exactly my kind of depressive anti-Hollywood fare -- but
I can really only half-heartedly recommend it. Partly it's the
timing: the source material, Jeffrey Eugenides' novel, may have
seemed fresh upon its 1994 publication, but since then we've
had a raft of films probing the suburban malaise -- The
Ice Storm, Happiness,
and American
Beauty were the better ones. By now, the idea that misery
lurks underneath the plasticized surface of outwardly happy homes
is a bit stale; these days, a truly original movie would show
us a suburban family that seems happy and then actually turns
out to be happy.
The five Lisbon girls, ranging in age from 13 to 17, have grown
up in a Repressive Environment (ah, the usual suspect in movies
like this). Mrs. Lisbon (Kathleen Turner), a grim and smothering
woman, keeps the girls safe at home every night, while Mr. Lisbon
(James Woods), a milquetoast math teacher, pretty much leaves
the decisions to his wife. The "first to go," we're
told by the narrator (Giovanni Ribisi), is the youngest, Cecilia
(Hannah Hall), whose botched wrist-slitting attempt is soon followed
by a more surefire method that seems imported from a horror movie.
After that, Mrs. Lisbon cracks down harder than ever, and the
fence outside the house is disposed of, for reasons you'll discover
if you see the film.
That fence, along with so much else in The Virgin Suicides,
feels literary in a way that doesn't present itself until later
-- you intellectualize the meaning, but you don't feel
it. And you don't really feel it when the next eldest, Lux (Kirsten
Dunst), falls for a young stud who calls himself Trip (Josh Hartnett).
The teens in this movie cling to each other in a fog of suburban
self-contempt bordering on hysteria, and all I could think was
how indelibly Ang Lee already accomplished this in The Ice
Storm.
The Virgin Suicides has been getting some glowing notices
-- let's face it, it's getting overpraised -- and I can only
conclude that many critics, remorseful about the skewering they
gave Sofia Coppola ten years ago when she was only trying to
help out her dad (in The Godfather Part III), are now
building up her writing-directing debut to be more than it is.
To be sure, the younger Coppola is gentle with her cast, and
she does some interesting things, but she also tries a little
too hard to be lyrical yet gloomy -- the movie is like a Francesca
Lia Block young-adult novel left out in the rain. She also can't
do much with the parents as written, and neither can their (elsewhere
excellent) portrayers: Turner's performance is like a joyless
remix of her Serial
Mom, and poor James Woods seems raring to play a man
sinking under the weight of unacknowledged grief, if only the
script would let him. And didn't Mary Tyler Moore and Donald
Sutherland play these same characters 20 years ago?
The movie, perhaps daringly, arrives at its conclusion without
really having arrived at a point. The point may be that there
is no point, which seems a fashionable trend in indie
films these days. Trip and the other three boys who fall in love
with the Lisbon girls -- or so the movie tells us; we don't really
feel that either -- are left with nothing except their
memories of the blonde suburban perfection that concealed such
hungry demons inside. Even when the boys become men, the girls
are never far from their thoughts. They don't know why the girls
were so miserable, but we in the audience can read the situation
pretty well: It's yet another case of blame-the-parents, and,
more precisely, blame-the-overprotective-mother. For all its
sympathy for teenage girls' pain, The Virgin Suicides
is an ode to girls as helpless waifs and women as martinets,
and inadvertently it's also an ode to suicide: What better way
for a girl to gain eternal life in the minds of her boy admirers? |
