BROKEDOWN PALACE (20th Century Fox) Starring: Claire Danes, Kate Beckinsale, Bill Pullman, Lou Diamond Phillips, Jacqueline Kim. Screenplay: David Arata. Producer: Adam Fields. Director: Jonathan Kaplan. MPAA Rating: PG-13 (profanity, adult themes, violence, drug use) Running Time: 97 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
In the bowels of a Thai prison, two American girls learn about the horrors of bad judgment -- the hard way. Alice Marano (Claire Danes) and Darlene Davis (Kate Beckinsale), two high school grads from suburban Ohio, had only intended their trip to Thailand as a final pre-college fling. That was before Australian seducer Nick Parks (Daniel Lapaine) played them for suckers and set them up as heroin smugglers. Now, in the first year of a 33-year sentence, Alice and Darlene are beginning to discover what damnation really means. It means vaguely drab pixie haircuts, heavily filtered sunlight streaming into an exercise yard, and a non-stop soundtrack from some techno-Thai concept of Lilith Fair. Truly, this is hell on earth.
Jonathan Kaplan's BROKEDOWN PALACE is one of those gritty "issue" dramas that stabs itself in the heart by assuming the audience's sensibilities can only handle so much grit. The opening half hour works well enough, following the two friends on their early youthful adventures and establishing the basic framework of their relationship. Alice, the instigator, makes all the daring choices; Darlene, the good-girl follower, plays along with her best pal's caprices. Danes doesn't go overboard with her character, keeping Alice's devilish streak within the realm of rebellious plausibility, while Beckinsale struggles a bit more with Darlene's naivete. When Nick enters the picture, submerged jealousies begin to surface, establishing how easily a life-long friendship can be strained. It may not be particularly inspired story-telling, but it's solid enough.
Then the girls become inmates, and the whole thing falls apart. The theme of BROKEDOWN PALACE may not be "look at the squalor of Thai prisons," but it shouldn't have been "look how attractive a Thai prison can be with the right cinematography." Kaplan shoots bridge sequences as elaborate music videos, turning his actresses into cute models instead of tormented characters. Meanwhile, the various government officials who sneer and smirk their way through the film -- including Kay Tong Lim as a corrupt Thai detective and Lou Diamond Phillips (in a gruesomely bad performance) as a nonchalant U.S. embassy flunkie -- provide the tidy villainy we require. With a script by first-time screenwriter David Arata that forgets sub-plots and provides simplistic outrage, BROKEDOWN PALACE proves itself to be fairly lazy film-making. It pre-digests its story into over-wrought melodrama.
There's a hint of promise when Bill Pullman enters the story as Yankee Hank, an expatriate American attorney with that typically expatriate American sense of me-first-ism. It's fairly obvious from the get-go that his character arc will be straight out of CASABLANCA -- a jaded pseudo-Rick Blaine who gives up his own financial interest for the greater good -- but Pullman is an interesting enough actor to pull it off. Unfortunately, his story also pulls us away from the two central characters. Though in a way that's a good thing -- the fewer scenes spent in the meticulously unpleasant prison, the better -- it's also a distraction from Alice's theoretically central conversion to selfless friend.
Comparisons between BROKEDOWN PALACE and last year's RETURN TO PARADISE are inevitable -- both are tales of Americans languishing abroad, seasoned with self-sacrifice for the sake of a friend. But as uneven as RETURN TO PARADISE was, it approached every similar point with more provocative shades of gray. Instead of RETURN TO PARADISE's two casual acquaintances, the friends are best buddies from the cradle, making the choice considerably less complicated; instead of making the protagonist convincingly selfish from the outset, it makes her a misunderstood wild child. Kaplan and Arata want desperately for the plight of their characters to matter, but the final hour is too irretrievably phony to provide an emotional pull. Viewers who find this sort of morality play uplifting may find their hearts swelling at the conclusion. I found mine sinking as BROKEDOWN PALACE closed on the beatific smile of an actress, placed center stage while a well-placed beam of sunlight captured her soaring spirit in an MTV prison.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 Thai breakers: 4.
Visit Scott Renshaw's Screening Room http://www.inconnect.com/~renshaw/ *** Subscribe to receive new reviews directly by email! See the Screening Room for details, or reply to this message with subject "Subscribe".
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews