A movie that seems to be practically begging for a blurb like "quintessentially quirky," Cherish starts out strong, stalls out almost immediately, and then skids into one of the weakest windups of any indie film in recent memory.
Robin Tunney stars as Zoe, a pretty but painfully awkward young woman who's seemingly oblivious to her more annoying eccentricities, while being way too self-aware for any hope of normal human interaction. A perennial outsider, ill-at- ease with others and uncomfortable in her own skin, Zoe generally finds herself either ignored, exploited or looked upon as some harmless fruitcake by most of the rest of the world. To potential boyfriends, she's just a nut who talks too much, says the inevitable wrong thing, and scares them off. To her therapist, she confides that the walls of her new apartment seem to be squeezing in on her.
Zoe knows she has problems, but she hasn't seen anything yet.
Cherish is one of those movies that's great at devising interesting dilemmas for its characters and absolutely terrible at developing or resolving them. The film is at its best in its mildly stylized opening scenes, when it's introducing us to Zoe and her peculiarities in a way that's engaging and, at times, strangely endearing. One complicated chain of events later and Zoe's under house arrest for a crime she didn't commit, and the movie very quickly begins seeming mannered and not exactly sure where it wants to take us. Zoe winds up spending the bulk of the film with an ankle bracelet monitoring her every movement, a virtual prisoner confined to the big empty apartment that serves as her jail.
It's an intriguing premise, but Cherish doesn't quite know what to do with it. We get smatterings of story that don't add up to a whole movie, beginning with a plot thread involving a repressed romantic flirtation between Zoe and her straitlaced jailer (actor/filmmaker Tim Blake Nelson from O Brother, Where Art Thou?). Then we get Zoe's budding friendship with her downstairs neighbor, a self-mocking gay dwarf in a wheelchair (all indie movies need at least one). All of this is interspersed with a whole lot of pointless footage of bored Zoe roller-skating around her cavernous digs, testing the parameters of her new environment by tying a rope around her waist to see how far away she can get before setting off an alarm.
Cherish coasts along for the better part of an hour before completely coming unglued. Way past the point of no return, the movie seizes on a minor plot point from its first act and inexplicably makes a half-assed attempt to transform itself into what looks for all the world like a made-for-TV thriller. Incredibly, Cherish mutates at the last moment into a bargain basement Run, Zoe, Run, complete with generically throbbing techno suspense-beat, as Zoe, in an effort to vindicate herself, breaks out of her apartment-prison and becomes a quasi-action hero/sleuth for the film's final half-hour.
The movie's music is a crucial and nearly omnipresent element, with the flashy retro soundtrack (Human League's "Don't You Want Me," 10cc's "I'm Not in Love") often used to communicate Zoe's emotional states, personality, projections and desires. The music serves as ironic counterpoint as well, with an attempted abduction set to Soft Cell's "Tainted Love," and a stalker's fantasies shot like a dated music video complete with a vintage Hall and Oates' song. All things considered, it's a good thing the movie allows the music to do so much of its talking for it, because, left to its own devices, Cherish would almost certainly bungle that too.
Lance Goldenberg can be reached at lance.goldenberg@weeklyplanet.com or 813-248-8888, ext. 157
This article appears in Jul 3-9, 2002.