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The Virgin Suicides

★★★☆☆

Directed by: Sofia Coppola

Written by: Sofia Coppola

Based on the novel by: Jeffrey Eugenides

Sofia Coppola’s late-90s, pre-Lost in Translation meditation on teenage angst and repression, which I gather is broadened into a social critique in Jeffery Eugenides’s novel, is mesmerizing though not, perhaps, as powerful as its cult of fans seems to believe. I haven’t read the book so this has to be a discussion of the film on its own merits, although I am led to believe it is a very faithful adaptation of the former.

That said, The Virgin Suicides chronicles the lives of the Lisbon sisters, ranging from ages 17 to 13, as seen through the eyes of a group of boys roughly the same age who admire them from afar. The girls are raised in a repressive, uptight family with an over-protective mother (played with a weird, non-commital sort of dreamy insistence by Kathleen Turner) and a rather-look-away father (played in an incongruously breezy fashion by James Woods). The youngest daughter, Cecilia, attempts suicide by cutting her wrists and then finishes the job shortly after, with the bandages still adorning her wrists, by leaping from her upstairs bedroom window onto a spiked iron fence.

The film tries to build a mystique around the girls, attempting through a variety of means to display them as might be seen from the outside and/or from the small glimpses gained by the few intrusions from neighborhood boys into the Lisbon’s lives and home. I think one small problem the movie has is that it gives the audience more insight into the girls than the boys themselves have which kind of spoils the illusion.

Much of the story revolves around 14 year-old Lux (played with edgy, flirty energy by Kirsten Dunst), who is the wild child in the family (and cause for the deception of the title) and whose actions during and after a pivotal homecoming dance—that the mother reluctantly lets her guard down for—results in a functional house arrest for all four remaining girls. This casting is a bit of a problem because Dunst gives a stand-up performance but she comes across not as a high school freshman but as a junior or senior (17 or 18) in part because that’s how old Dunst actually is here but also because there is a world of difference between a sheltered freshman and a once-sheltered senior. It’s especially weird when the actresses playing her older sisters often look and act younger than her and the whole thing gets into this bizarre sort of time-warping mishmash where age is fluid and relative and, when it serves the plot, they all seem to be functionally the same age (this includes the pesudo-anonymous cast of boys that include the collective third person of the narrator).

A couple of key directorial and screenplay decisions seem to impact the final quality of the film. First is that a lot of time is devoted to Lux and lady-killer Trip Fontaine (played with stoned vacancy by Josh Hartnett), who orchestrates the group date to the homecoming dance. As a set-up device this is perfectly acceptable but it leads the post-dance aftermath and alluring distance-only relationship between the voyeuristic boy’s club and the Lisbon sisters into a hurried, abbreviated-feeling tumble toward the film’s grim climax. To me, this is the meat of the story, the part that has the most to say about all the characters involved and yet it takes up maybe a quarter of the movie’s relatively brief running time. Second is that Coppola blends a kind of throwback, 8mm sensibility to her direction with a dreamy, palate-oriented method of mood evocation which creates a mentally discordant style that is both ethereal and retro-realistic. Combined with the—I presume—intentionally vague characterization of the Lisbon girls, possibly excepting Lux, it gives the suicides referenced in the title a sort of magical air that I didn’t find all that comfortable.

I get that the motivation for the girls’ actions is intentionally left vague; the point of the story is that the boy’s club can never quite figure out what was really going on in the girls’ heads or why they chose to involve the neighborhood the way that they did. But there is enough loving attention given to the Lisbons and enough clear blame laid at the feet of their well-intentioned but perhaps reactionary parents to make the sisters seem like martyrs, almost noble or somehow courageous. It’s frustrating also to feel like, lacking any depth of attention to the aftermath, the film seems to write off the whole incident as being shrug-worthy, sort of a cautionary tale of being too religious. Yeah, man, that’s a head-scratcher. A little Jesus goes a long way, but too much and your smart, vibrant, fairly well-adjusted teenage daughters will stage a Jonestown-like armageddon.

I guess the problem is that, in the end, I don’t know what The Virgin Suicides is trying to say. Is it telling parents to loosen the reigns or they’ll lose their children for good? Is it suggesting girls are the most interesting when they’re unknowable victims, viewed from afar? Perhaps the message is that nostalgia is all we ever really want or care about. I’m not entirely sure. In a way, I’m fine with movies that require a bit of personal application and interpretation; the film-based poem of American Beauty was like that. But this movie is maddeningly free of even implied intent: It is not a meditation on sadness or the experience of being a teenage girl or of predatory influences on innocent lives or the deconstruction of a family. It could have been about any of those things, but the fact that it ends up being about none gives it a sense of smugness I found a little distasteful.

It is a beautiful movie, and definitely the kind of film you’d like to watch with someone and then spend some time over large cups of coffee, discussing and dissecting, but on its own merits it struggles a bit and, I think, ends up feeling kind of like an extended teaser/trailer for the book. As an adaptation, that’s usually a good thing but in this case it’s kind of to the detriment of the film as a whole which I can’t help feel left something—dare I go there?—lost in translation.

from No Thief Like a Bad Movie — December 18, 2011 at 10:15AM