THE VIRGIN SUICIDES
Reviewed by Harvey Karten Paramount Classics Director: Sofia Coppola Writer: Sofia Coppola, novel by Jeffrey Eugenides Cast: James Woods, Kathleen Turner, Kirsten Dunst, Hanna Hall, Chelsea Swain, A.J. Cook, Leslie Hayman, Josh Hartnett
Just the other week, a 23-year-old man who had been a student at Columbia University murdered his ex-girl friend, who was then attending the college. He then proceeded to the nearest subway station and threw himself under the wheels of a passing train. Though most of us are horrified by events like this, we can understand the emotions that informed it. A jealous and vindictive lover is tossed overboard and slaughters his girl. Filled with rage, guilt, fear--overwhelmed with sensation--he ends his own life. But not all suicides are understandable, though sociologists from Durkheim on down have published treatises in attempts to explain them.
In "The Virgin Suicides," Sofia Coppola deals with a suicide pact made by five teenage girls, all sisters living under the same roof. The young women had been confined to their home by their religious and conservative mother, a possible explanation for their disastrous action. While one critic of this film--recently named one of the two best from the January 2000 Sundance Festival--has reproached the writer- director and, by extension the novelist for failing to interpret the suicides, he completely misses the point. The whole essence of "The Virgin Suicides" is that we simply do not know the answer--that suicide is one of the great mysteries of our nature that cannot be resolved with any degree of closure.
Jeffrey Eugenides's book, meant to be interpreted as fable, allegory, a fairy tale if you will, must have been difficult to make cinematic but Sofia Coppola--daughter of Francis Ford Coppola who is listed as one of the producers--has done a most effective job of giving screen life to the tale. Suffused in equal measure by sardonic humor and a persistently tragic texture, "The Virgin Suicides" possesses the period feel of Ang Lee's marvelous "The Ice Storm," which hones in on the upper-middle-class America of the early 1970s, probing the pathologies which infect the lives of Connecticut families. The story is told from the collective point of view of five adolescent boys who had obsessed about their counterparts across the way and is narrated by Giovanni Ribisi, invisibly standing in for the quintet. The Lisbon girls, whose age range is 13 to 17, are ruled austerely by their mother (Kathleen Turner), who is conceivably all too concerned about the social pathologies induced by the new sexual freedom of the seventies. Their father (James Woods) by contrast is a timid math teacher who reluctantly goes along with his wife's inflexibility and endeavors to make up for his lack of communication with her by reaching out to the students in his classes and in the neighborhood. The Lisbon family is torn apart by the suicide of the 13-year-old Cecilia (Hanna R. Hall), who succeeds on her second attempt for reasons that absolutely nobody can fathom--not even the psychiatrist who had interviewed her, Dr. Hornicker (Danny De Vito). The story later turns to the sprouting relationship of the school's hunk, Trip Fontaine (Josh Hartnett) with the most beautiful of the Lisbon girls, Lux (Kirsten Dunst). Lux, who had been about the only girl in the school to ignore Trip, soon becomes his lover, until during one destructive night she commits an act that causes her mother to haul her entire brood out of the school, effectively putting them under house arrest for several weeks.
It would be a mistake to look upon "Virgin Suicides" as yet another satire of American middle-class suburban life ("American Beauty") or of the obsessiveness that seems to rule particular individuals in this environment ("Election"). "Virgin Suicides" cannot be reduced to a tract about how to bring up your kids or a psychological study of girls who are possessed by a kind of devil or even a commentary on the emptiness of life among the well-to-do in contemporary America. Sofia Coppola, I think, has captured the vision of novelist Jeffrey Eugenides, which is that in this enigmatic existence of ours, some things just cannot be rationally explained. An attending physician treating Cecilia after her attempted suicide shakes his head and counsels, "You have not been around, girl....You're not old enough to know what tragedy there is in life" and gets her reply, "You've never been a 13-year-old girl." At that point we realize that no resolution is going to come from Coppola's screenplay, no facile conclusion will be reached. Neat solutions are the stuff of commercial movies.
Kathleen Turner and James Woods perform out of character as the parents. Turner is made up as a frumpy housewife and Woods, in his permanent press jacket realizes the very opposite of his usual over-the-top performance. The young men from whose point of view the picture is made are the sorts we all were in high school--one justifiably swaggering, another fairly bold, others bashful and balking. But all the boys have a healthy interest in what the fair sex are like and take pleasure in peering through a telescope to observe the girls in their shower and, in a few instances, performing sexual acts on the roof of the Lisbon home. In one panorama, a group of workmen destroy trees affected with a fungus--an obvious metaphor for a creeping infirmity that has influenced the neighborhood. In another scene, some adults in the community are enjoying a cocktail party, giving us the erroneous impression that Coppola and Eugenides believe that a more accountable assembly would instead engage in group therapy sessions to try to understand the malady which has defiled the district. In the final analysis, we are deliberately and cleverly left hanging, as unsure of the causes of the alienation of these children as we were when we entered the theater. That, in no small measure, is what makes this an exceptional film.
Not Rated. Running Time: 97 minutes. (C) 2000 Harvey Karten, film_critic@compuserve.com
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