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Holy crap! Holy Smoke is a holy mess! Writer/director Jane Campion still seems unable to return to the form that made her an Oscar winner in 1993. Since The Piano, Campion has cranked out the abysmally drab The Portrait of a Lady and now Holy Smoke, which is definitely not a step in the right direction by any stretch of the imagination.
The opening credits begin promisingly enough, using slow-motion shots of India placed over a rockin' Neil Diamond track. Once the story kicks off, we learn that an Australian girl named Ruth (Kate Winslet, Hideous Kinky) went to Delhi for vacation and never came home, apparently choosing to live her life with the followers of some guy with Baba. Naturally, her suburban Sydney family is distraught, and they try to lure Ruth home so she can be deprogrammed by a `cult exiter' from Los Angeles named PJ Waters (Harvey Keitel, Three Seasons).
The first step of the plan is for Ruth's asthmatic mother (Julie Hamilton) to travel to Delhi to tell her that her father (Tim Robertson) has suffered a serious stroke, which is just a lie to get her home. While this is supposed to make Ruth fly back with her mum, she instead shrugs it off and tries to get her mother to attend one of Baba's wacky ceremonies. Long story short, Ruth finally agrees to come home to see her allegedly ailing father.
Once home, the family locks Ruth and PJ up in a second home in the middle of the Aussie outback. PJ explains that his technique generally takes three days and that he has saved 189 souls during his career, with a whopping 97 percent success rate. Ruth is still obviously reluctant, and after this forty-minute setup is complete, Smoke concentrates its focus on its two acting leads. This is when the film goes downhill – fast.
You can guess what happens next. Ruth hates him as he begins to make headway in his deprogramming, but then uses her incredible rack to turn the tables on PJ. Before you know it, they're going at it like a couple of horny teenagers. Heck, if you locked me up in a house with a mentally unstable Kate Winslet for three days, even I could get lucky. Well, maybe four or five days.
Aside from being predictable on just about every level, Smoke seems to go out of its way to be disturbing. Ruth and PJ hit it off sexually when she pisses all over herself and their crazy relationship ends when he dons a red dress and lipstick. At times, you will wonder if Campion, who adapted the script with her sister Anna, intended the film to be funny or dramatic. It's neither, so I guess her intentions really don't matter. The film is brutally uneven, but not without visual flare. It's a damn colorful picture, from the incredible blue skies, to Keitel's ghastly white ass, to his bright red lipstick.
Winslet makes the best of the crappy script, acting crazy enough to be believable. But the craziest thing about Winslet is her choice of post-Titanic films. First, she ran off to Marrakech in Hideous Kinky and now India in Smoke. Get over yourself – two lousy art films are enough of a penance to make up for starring in the biggest blockbuster of all-time. The good news is that her `area' is kept a little tidier that it was in Jude.
And just what does Campion have over Keitel where she can continue to blackmail him into taking risky roles in her films? In The Piano, he waived his tiny wiener at the camera, and here he's in a drag for the last third of the film. Whatever it is, I hope the debt has been paid off. I can't bear to see him embarrass himself again.
1:54 - R for tons of nudity, strong sexuality and a litany of adult language
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