'Tis the Halloween season and all, so if the movies opening this week — In the Cut, The Human Stain and Pieces of April — all sound suspiciously like companion pieces to Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it's only natural.Don't be fooled, though. There's not much more than an ounce or two of splatter to be found amongst these new movies — unless, of course, you're counting the emotional-psychological fallout on display.
The first of these three new movies, Pieces of April, is a comedy, technically. It's one of those small, "serious" comedies that American independent filmmakers so dearly love, and without which the Sundance Film Festival would shrivel up like a diseased testicle and disappear.
The setup is simple and oft-told — black-sheep daughter invites the family over for Thanksgiving dinner, mayhem ensues — but the specialized indie treatment allows the movie to transcend (or at least sidestep) the more obvious trappings of formula.
First of all, Pieces of April simply looks different from all those other Thanksgiving Dinner From Hell movies. While it's not exactly a Dogme film, Pieces of April was shot mostly handheld, on Digital Video. There's almost no effort made to disguise the grainy, shaky, under-lit images, the working assumption apparently being that the rawness of those images will somehow automatically bestow everything with an extra layer of credibility, or at least "edginess." Not even the most innocuous or familiar images are safe, as in the close-up of an uncooked turkey getting stuffed — a shot that suddenly begins to look like something straight out of Alien Autopsy.
Katie Holmes plays April, a tattooed and pierced punkette shacked up with her slacker boyfriend in a typically ratty, lower Manhattan walk-up. Holmes and writer-director Peter Hedges want us to like April, and we do, but we're also supposed to know that she's an absolute mess. April is damaged goods, figuratively in pieces, with a psyche so fractured she's unable to be in the same room with salt and pepper shakers that look too much like the ones she had as a little girl.
Then again, April's family is no Norman Rockwell painting either. Granny's a senile loon, Dad's a wimpy sad sack, baby brother's a pot-head, impossibly perky sis is a neurotic neat-freak, and Mom (indie fave Patricia Clarkson) is an overbearing bitch with cancer, hellbent on making the whole world pay for her condition.
The movie plays most of this for laughs, juxtaposing April's bungled attempts to make Thanksgiving dinner with bizarre glimpses of her suburban family as they wind their way toward her. The family squabbles, binges on junk food, and stops to bury road kill and puke at roadside toilets. Meanwhile, April encounters a series of ethnically and culturally diverse weirdos as she attempts to locate someone in her apartment building with a working oven.
The humor here is gently effective, mostly revolving around the absurdity of people trying to be what they aren't or doing what doesn't come naturally. April tries to be domestic, her family tries to be accepting, and the potential for disaster is immense and frequently very funny. Hedges displays much of the same quirky charm he did in his scripts for About a Boy and What's Eating Gilbert Grape, resulting in a small story that manages to find something sweetly amusing and even endearing in what might otherwise have been predictable or cloying.
The camerawork in In the Cut is even shakier than in Pieces of April, but the movie's a lot less fun. The camera flits about as if suffering from ADD, relentlessly sucking up all the urban garbage in sight, and every frame of the film looks like it's been smeared with Vaseline. The movie is either a thriller passing itself off as an art film, or vice versa. Either way you look at it, it fails.
Meg Ryan, trademark perkiness all but obliterated, stars as a seriously neurotic woman hanging out with a variety of creepy men, almost any one of whom might be the serial killer menacing the city. And yes, there are two or three grisly moments here, including a few dismembered body parts scattered about, but most of the flesh on display is of the warm, breathing sort, primarily the naked form of Ryan herself. There's some major heavy breathing going on here, but none of it's designed for comfort or pleasure.
The movie clearly has sex and murder on its mind, but director Jane Campion (The Piano, Portrait of a Lady) never manages to make any sort of meaningful or interesting connections. All that finally surfaces here is a view of human nature that's simply grubby for the sake of being grubby. Generic thriller or faux-art film, In the Cut is the sort of movie that makes you feel dirty watching it, as if you'd accidentally walked in on someone in the bathroom and then stayed a moment too long.
There's even more famous flesh on display in The Human Stain, the naked celebrity this time being Nicole Kidman (who, coincidentally, also produced In the Cut). Kidman stars as a yet another damaged female — that makes three for three this week — a troubled bit of white trash having a fling with an older man (Anthony Hopkins) who's got troubles and secrets of his own.
None of these secrets is all that surprising, though, and the movie never really establishes a voice or even a coherent narrative, rambling back and forth between clumsy flashbacks and scattershot tidbits about various characters. Kidman and Hopkins are woefully miscast, the movie's rife with hackneyed symbolism, and the Big Secret upon which the whole thing hinges (not divulged until over midway through) is so ludicrous that I'm tempted to give it away simply because I can. In the end, it's that scariest of all movies you'll see this Halloween — something that's simply horribly, horribly boring.
Halloween Happenings
There's plenty of cool stuff going on around the Bay area this Halloween, beginning with Tampa Theatre's screenings of The Rocky Horror Show, complete with lip-synching performers cavorting on the stage. Audience members are encouraged to get in the spirit by coming in costume.
St Petersburg's Dali Museum will screen The Snake King's Child, the first movie released in Cambodia since the fun-loving Khmer Rouge destroyed the country's film industry. The movie updates an ancient folk legend about a woman who gives birth to a beautiful girl who just happens to have a nest of writhing snakes growing out of her head. Shoddy production values give the whole thing an unintentionally campy feel, but there are some nicely creepy moments here, too. Oh, and all the snakes used in the movie are the real thing. For more information, call 727-381-4894.
As if all that weren't enough, The International Cinema Series at Eckerd College presents a killer Halloween night double-bill of Guy Maddin's Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary and Jan Svankmajer's Little Otik. Dracula is a fabulously visual tour-de-force, layering Maddin's love of poetic silent-cinema techniques onto what is essentially a filmed ballet. Little Otik is Svankmajer's darkly surreal comedy about a childless couple who treat a tree-stump like a human infant, with bizarre and terribly funny consequences. For more information, call 727-864-7551 or email andersnt@eckerd.edu.
Lance Goldenberg can be reached at lgoldenb@tampabay.rr.com or 813-248-8888, ext. 157.
This article appears in Oct 30 – Nov 5, 2003.