A digression. In 1996, David Cronenberg made a movie named Crash, about a group of people who had a sexual fetish for car crashes, wounds, broken bones, crutches, and so on. It was a good movie, but as I wrote at the time, it’s about “a sexual fetish that, in fact, no one has.” I didn’t get a lot of letters disagreeing with me.
John Waters also goes fetish-shopping in A Dirty Shame, treating us to such specialties as infantilism (a cop who likes to wear diapers), bear lovers (those who lust after fat, hairy men), and Mr. Pay Day, whose fetish does not involve the candy bar of the same name. We also learn about such curious pastimes as shelf humping, mallet whacking, and tickling. As the movie introduced one sex addiction after another, I sensed a curious current running through the screening room. How can I describe it? Not disgust, not horror, not shock, but more of a sincere wish that Waters had found a way to make his movie without being quite so encyclopedic.
The plot, such as it is, centers on Sylvia and other characters zapping in and out of sex addiction every time they hit their heads, which they do with a frequency approaching the kill rate in Crash. This is not really very funny the first time and grows steadily less funny until it becomes a form of monomania.
I think the problem is fundamentaclass="underline" Waters hopes to get laughs because of what the characters are, not because of what they do. He works at the level of preadolescent fart jokes, hoping, as the French say, to epater les bourgeois. The problem may be that Waters has grown more bourgeois than his audience, which is epatered that he actually thinks he is being shocking.
To truly deal with a strange sexual fetish can indeed be shocking, as Kissed (1996) demonstrated with its quiet, observant portrait of Molly Parker playing a necrophiliac. It can also be funny, as James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal demonstrated in Secretary (2002). Tracey Ullman is a great comic actress, but for her to make this movie funny would have required not just a performance but a rewrite and a miracle.
Fetishes are neither funny nor shocking simply because they exist. You have to do more with them than have characters gleefully celebrate them on the screen. Waters’s weakness is to expect laughs because the idea of a moment is funny. But the idea of a moment exists only for the pitch; the movie has to develop it into a reality, a process, a payoff. An illustration of this is his persisting conviction that it is funny by definition to have Patty Hearst in his movies. It is only funny when he gives Ms. Hearst, who is a good sport, something amusing to do. She won’t find it in this movie.
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
(DIRECTED BY CALLIE KHOURI; STARRING SANDRA BUTTOCK, ELLEN BURSTYN; 2002)
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood has a title suggesting that the movie will be cute and about colorful, irrepressible, eccentric originals. Heavens deliver us. The Ya-Ya Sisterhood is rubber-stamped from the same mold that has produced an inexhaustible supply of fictional Southern belles who drink too much, talk too much, think about themselves too much, try too hard to be the most unforgettable character you’ve ever met, and are, in general, insufferable. There must be a reason these stories are never set in Minnesota. Maybe it’s because if you have to deal with the winter it makes you too realistic to become such a silly goose.
There is not a character in the movie with a shred of plausibility, not an event that is believable, not a confrontation that is not staged, not a moment that is not false. For their sins the sisterhood should be forced to spend the rest of their lives locked in a Winnebago camper. The only character in the movie who is bearable is the heroine as a young woman, played by Ashley Judd, who suggests that there was a time before the story’s main events when this creature was palatable.
The heroine is Vivi, played by Ellen Burstyn in her sixties, Judd in her thirties, and, as a child, by a moppet whose name I knoweth not. Yes, this is one of those movies that whisks around in time, as childhood vows echo down through the years before we whiplash back to the revelations of ancient secrets. If life were as simple as this movie, we would all have time to get in shape and learn Chinese.
As the film opens, four little girls gather around a campfire in the woods and create the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, exchanging drops of their blood, no doubt while sheriff’s deputies and hounds are searching for them. Flash forward to the present. Vivi’s daughter Sidda (Sandra Bullock) is a famous New York playwright, who tells an interviewer from Time magazine that she had a difficult childhood, mostly because of her mother. Whisk down to Louisiana, where Vivi reads the article and writes the daughter forever out of her life—less of a banishment than you might think, since they have not seen each other for seven years and Vivi doesn’t even know of the existence of Sidda’s Scottish fiancé, Connor (Angus MacFadyen).
Connor seems cut from the same mold as Shep Walker (James Garner), Vivi’s husband. Both men stand around sheepishly while portraying superfluous males. No doubt their women notice them occasionally and are reminded that they exist and are a handy supply of sperm. Shep’s role for decades has apparently been to beam approvingly as his wife gets drunk, pops pills, and stars in her own mind. Both men are illustrations of the impatience this genre has for men as a gender; they have the presence of souvenirs left on the mantel after a forgotten vacation.
Anyway. We meet the other adult survivors of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood: Teensy (Fionnula Flanagan), Necie (Shirley Knight), and Caro (Maggie Smith). Why do they all have names like pet animals? Perhaps because real names, like Martha, Florence, or Esther, would be an unseemly burden for such featherweights. Summoned by Vivi so that she can complain about Sidda, Teensy, Necie, and Caro fly north and kidnap Sidda, bringing her back to Louisiana so that they can show her that if she really knew the secrets of her mother’s past, she would forgive her all shortcomings, real and imagined. Since the central great mystery of Vivi’s past is how she has evaded rehab for so long, this quest is as pointless as the rest of the film.
Why do gifted actresses appear in such slop? Possibly because good roles for women are rare, for those over sixty precious. Possibly, too, because for all the other shortcomings of the film, no expense has been spared by the hair, makeup, and wardrobe departments, so that all of the women look just terrific all of the time, and when Vivi is distraught and emotional, she looks even more terrific. It’s the kind of movie where the actresses must love watching the dailies as long as they don’t listen to the dialogue.
The movie is a first-time directing job by Callie Khouri, author of Thelma and Louise. She seems uncertain what the film is about, where it is going, what it hopes to prove apart from the most crashingly obvious clichés of light women’s fiction. So inattentive is the screenplay that it goes to the trouble of providing Vivi with two other children in addition to Sidda, only to never mention them again. A fellow critic, Victoria Alexander, speculates that the secret in Vivi’s past may have been that she drowned the kids, but that’s too much to hope for.
Domestic Disturbance
(DIRECTED BY HAROLD BECKER; STARRING JOHN TRAVOLTA, VINCE VAUGHN; 2001)
John Travolta plays a nice guy better than just about anybody else, which is why it’s hard to figure out why his seemingly intelligent wife would divorce him, in Domestic Disturbance, to marry Vince Vaughn, who plays a creep better than just about anybody else. Maybe that’s because it’s not until the wedding day that her new husband’s best friend turns up, and it’s Steve Buscemi, who plays the creep’s best friend absolutely better than anybody else.