PECKER **1/2 (out of four) (Toronto Film Festival Coverage! Trivia! Screen and DVD reviews! Lots of forgettable crap! FILM FREAK CENTRAL http://www.geocities.com/~billchambers/ Enjoy!)
starring Edward Furlong, Christina Ricci, Lili Taylor, Brendan Sexton III written and directed by John Waters
I wish so badly I could call myself a John Waters fan. His brand of outrageousness is gleefully offensive and wholly sincere; Waters' gross-out tendencies are his second-nature. It is his emotional detachment, rather than his penchant for the perverse, that turns me off. PECKER starts out promising, and it is a warm-hearted movie, I suppose, but ultimately Waters goes through his standard motions-suburbia as sideshow.
T2's Furlong stars as Pecker, nicknamed so because he eats like a bird. He is an obsessive photographer, snapping anything that falls before his lens. His girlfriend, Shelly (Ricci), is a bitter laundromat manager; his big sister (Martha Plimpton) works at a gay strip bar; his best bud (Sexton) is a professional shop lifter; his grandmother (Jean Schertler) does a Charlie McCarthy routine with a Virgin Mary puppet; his little sister is addicted to sugar (as Chrissy, Lauren Hulsey thieves every scene she's in); and so on. They are all his subjects; when one of his exhibits is observed in a Baltimore sandwich shop by Rorey (Taylor), a traveling New York art dealer, Pecker and co. pack it up and head for the big city, where they cause quite a stir. Rorey is allured by Pecker's naivete, lavishes him with money and gifts. The impact is negative: the people of his hometown begin to resent Pecker's success.
Scenes of Pecker taking pictures with his beaten up camera are inspiring and amusing. (His work is terrific.) The trouble is, that's all there is to Pecker: he is a shutter-happy machine. While Furlong is likable in the role, his character is never anything more than a nice guy with an awe-shucks demeanor that contradicts his surroundings. As well, the culture clash between the Manhattanites and the 'Baltimore Hillbillies' that transpires is disappointingly obvious. Waters has given the film a more realistic look than some of his beach movie-coloured fantasies of the past, which is why some scenes-like a surrealistic advertisement for Ritalin-induce more discomfort than laughs: they feel out of place and laboured. Yet I was never less than entertained by PECKER--the cast looks like it's having a ball--and it's sure to start THE new term: teabagging. (I'll let your imagination run wild.) Fine Line Pictures, which is releasing the film, certainly agrees: after the press screening, they passed out teabags inscribed with the "Pecker" logo.
In this scatalogically-desensitized landscape, the most shocking thing Waters could do these days is make a movie without any repulsive jokes. Like Pecker, perhaps he should take a more observational approach: in 1998, reality is much weirder than his blatant cinematic universe.
-September, 1998 "FILM FREAK CENTRAL" Forever: http://www.geocities.com/~billchambers
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