SURVEILLANCEPlot In A Nutshell
Jennifer Lynch’s offbeat thriller about a pair of FBI agents interrogating the survivors of a bloody roadside encounter with a serial killer.
Thoughts
I have only dim memories of Boxing Helena, the only other film directed by Jennifer (daughter of David) Lynch. What I recall is being aware of its many shortcomings, but also kind of admiring the openness of its fetishistic imagery, and the masochistic bravery with which Jennifer Lynch made a film that she must have known would be compared to the work of her father — probably unfavourably. It’s the same head-shaking admiration I feel for Frank Sinatra Jr.’s decision to become a big-band crooner or Ravi Coltrane’s picking up the tenor sax.
Jennifer has admitted in interviews that she could not get Surveillance financed until her father volunteered to add his name to it as a producer. I’m a little surprised that she had more trouble getting this film set up than Boxing Helena; it's got a much more conventional setup I’d have thought would have made it pretty easy to market as a straight-to-DVD thriller. (Plus, it only has two basic locations, which must have kept the budget down.) I guess Boxing Helena’s reputation remains pretty noxious, even 15 years after it was made.
Make no mistake: Surveillance is a thoroughly ridiculous, pretty terrible movie, but it held my interest all the way through, if only to find out what the hell happened out there on that lonely stretch of prairie road. (The film was shot in Saskatchewan, and makes good use of the province’s featureless landscape and its long stretches of empty wheatfield-flanked highway.) Maybe the knowledge that the film was made by a member of the Lynch family gave it an extra layer of suspense: Surveillance is nominally set in the real world, but who knew what kind of crazy supernatural demonic force from an alternate dimension would turn out to be at the centre of it, right?
Actually, the resolution is much more mundane — and pretty easy to figure out. But even that didn’t bother me, if only because of the way the reveal allowed a couple of the actors to suddenly cut loose in an entertainingly hammy way. I think Lynch errs in making so many of the characters so unlikable — especially a pair of psychopathic cops played by co-screenwriter Kent Harper and sitcom actor French Stewart (!) who spend their days pulling over innocent motorists and subjecting them to mind games that even Matt Dillon’s character in Crash would find a little sick — and the casting of Stewart and former SNL regular Cheri Oteri in thoroughly non-comedic roles is, I think, more distracting than Lynch intended it to be. Lynch seems to have taken a lot of time plotting out the violent roadside incident, and where all the passengers in the three different cars involved are in relation to each other at any given moment, but some scattershot editing in a couple of crucial moments renders some important moments needlessly confusing. (It looks like she wasn’t quite able to get all the shots she needed during filming and had to make the best of things in the editing room.)
I can’t really recommend Surveillance, but it’s certainly a step up technically from Boxing Helena and I find myself really rooting for Jennifer Lynch to find a project that will allow her to step out from her father’s shadow. She apparently has another film in the can called Hisss, which appears to be set in India and is based on an ancient legend about a snake that can turn itself into a woman. My heart’s sinking already at that title, but my fingers are crossed.
RATING: 2/5
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SMILEPlot In A Nutshell
Director Michael Ritchie’s 1975 satire about the contestants and organizers of a “Young American Miss” beauty pageant in California.
Thoughts
I’ve never had strong opinions about Annette O’Toole one way or the other — I think I was just too young to see or appreciate the films she was making in the early ’80s, and even after I got older, I sort of lumped her in with a lot of also-ran actresses of that era like Lisa Eichhorn, Kate Capshaw, and Anne Archer. I remember being intrigued, when A Mighty Wind came out, to learn that she was married to Michael McKean and co-wrote a bunch of songs in the film, including the Oscar-nominated “A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow.” And after seeing her performance in Smile — she was 23 at the time, but she reads as at least five years younger — I’m even more fascinated by her. She seems so much slyer and funnier than I ever gave her credit for being. Or Hollywood, which seemed to write her off around 1987, when she was given the impossible task of making audiences buy Martin Short as a romantic lead in Cross My Heart.
But back to Smile, in which she plays sweetly cynical pageant contestant Doria Houston — she keeps telling the fellow contestant she’s rooming with to cry more and to tell the judges how her father died when she was two, only to smile shyly and say, “That was a horrible thing to say, wasn’t it?” I think her shock at the things that come out of her mouth is genuine, though; she’s smart enough to feel a little thrill of scandal at how she’s unconsciously internalized the pageant’s phony, corrupt values.
O’Toole’s finest moment (and perhaps the most audacious scene in the entire film) comes when Doria gets her turn in the talent competition — in a brilliantly conceived bit, she performs what it essentially a striptease, but disguises it as a morally uplifting speech on the importance of simple, natural beauty. O’Toole never tips her hand once during the entire scene, but you can still sense the delicious calculation behind Doria’s act, which appeals to the D.A.R. types in the audience and their dirty-minded husbands at the very same time.
Director Michael Ritchie walks a very thin line in Smile between satirizing beauty pageants and small-town American boosterism and sneering at them. A montage of pageant contestants demonstrating their talents — which includes a memorably strange, deep-voiced rendition of “Delta Dawn” and a girl whose talent is demonstrating the proper way to pack a suitcase — is probably the closest he comes to outright mockery of the girls. But even in the film’s cruelest moments, you get the sense that Ritchie sympathizes with the characters, or at least recognizes that they’re all doing their best.
Bruce Dern, this blog’s patron saint, has the trickiest role, as car salesman Big Bob Freelander, who’s also one of the pageant’s main organizers. He’s not a very deep or reflective guy — he’s the kind of guy who buys dirty plastic novelty items and joins asinine fraternal orders — and he has no idea what to do when his son or his best friend need help sorting out their personal problems. But Dern imbues this guy with a surprising amount of soul. He doesn’t want to see any of the girls embarrassed or humiliated. But he doesn’t quite seem even to believe in the pageant the way he used to, either, even if the salesman within him keeps him from voicing such thoughts out loud. He’s a guy who’s always selling, selling, selling, perhaps as a way of keeping the emptiness of his life at bay. And when he tries to talk about his own wartime experiences to a couple of soldiers who helped out with the pageant, only to realize they have no interest in anything he’s saying, that emptiness nearly swallows him up for a few minutes there.
A young Melanie Griffith shows up as another pageant contestant, speaking in the same kittenish adolescent rhythms she’d still be using 30 years later. Michael Kidd is very good as the high-priced pageant choreographer brought in to help run the show; he brings just the right mix of matter-of-factness and self-loathing to the line where he observes that his job is to take fresh-faced teenagers and turn them into Vegas showgirls. George Wyner, a familiar face from hundreds of sitcom guest appearances, is a welcome sight as one of the initiates into Big Bob’s secret fraternity — as part of the hazing ritual, he has to kiss a dead chicken’s asshole, which he eagerly does, proclaiming, “I love it! I love it!”
Well, that moment made me smile, anyway.
RATING: 4/5
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