'Slums' an endearing look at growing up in the 1970s
by Wallace Baine Santa Cruz Sentinel
Another stereotype falls in writer/director Tamara Jenkins's coarsely funny and surprisingly touching first feature `Slums of Beverly Hills.' Unlike a certain tired TV show, this one features a handful of kids from the world's most elite zip code who don't look like their first words as babies were `Vidal Sassoon.' In fact, Jenkins points out in this autobiographical coming-of-age comedy set in the summer of 1976, even Zsa Zsa's neighborhood has its white trash. Front and center is bug-eyed Vivian Abramowitz (Natasha Lyonne of `Everyone Says I Love You'), a gawky teenager struggling to make her way through adolescense in a barely functional family of males with no tact when it comes to the special challenges of female puberty. It's bad enough that her older brother is always making cracks about her rapidly expanding bust and everyone mistakes her father for her grandfather. On top of that, Dad (Alan Arkin) is constantly moving the family from one cheesy Beverly Hills apartment building to another, skipping out on rent when necessary and struggling to ride out a slump in his job as a car salesman (He trying to sell giant American-made gas guzzlers during the oil crisis). As if that weren't hard enough for a girl to whom dignity is denied every day, here comes a new neighbor, a leering dope dealer with an alarming admiration for Charles Manson and thirst to see Vivian naked. And then, enter Rita (Marisa Tomei), the out-of-control cousin fresh from a stint in drug rehab, who moves in as a kind of female role model for Vivian. Rita's apparent reasons for living, however, seem limited to vibrators and Seconals. With her frizzled mop of red hair and her doofus bearing, Lyonne plays Vivian as a girl not yet sure how to wield her sexual weapons (`It's just a building thing,' she says to her neighbor trying to keep him from blabbing after he fondles her suddenly womanly breasts). Vivian looks at the wreckage of family neurosis around her and can't decide whether to rebel or join in. Her role is primarily to play as foil to the weirdos around her and when these prickly personalities bounce off each other, `Slums' finds an entertaining sense of comic mania. Jenkins's script, heavy on girl-centric themes such as sprouting breasts and menstruation, nicely surfs that territory between pain and humor. In nearly every scene, Vivian's self-image is assaulted by the mega-ton embarrasments of adolescense. At one point, she is trapped with a `girl problem' in the bathroom of her dad's post-menopausal lady friend (Jessica Walter). The woman comes to the rescue, digging around for products she hasn't used in years, finally producing a maxi-pad as large as tennis shoe with an accompanying `menstrual belt' to keep everything in place. Vivian's slack jaw and slumping eyes betrays an oceanic mortification. Marisa Tomei is also stellar in her role as Rita, the daffy cousin who can't seem to keep her clothes on. But this film's most endearing performance comes from Alan Arkin who as divorced dad Murray Abramowitz puts up with the indignities of poverty to keep his children in the highly regarded Beverly Hills school district. He is the very picture of Dad-ness: insisting Vivian wear a bra under her halter top or, dragging the whole brood off to T-bones at the Sizzler ... for breakfast. But, ultimately, his is a kind, warm portrayal and is the film's most convincing evidence that director Jenkins harbors no bitterness about her unorthodox upbringing. It's refreshing to see the '70s themes not played as obviously as other similarly set films tend to do. The details, however, are impeccable from a genuine delight for shag carpeting to the omnipresent flickers of `Let's Make a Deal' on the TV. Jenkins presents the '70s in loving memory as a benighted time when Trix cereal could happily co-exist with bong hits, neither of which are often associated with Beverly Hills. There goes another stereotype.
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