FREEWAY (director/writer: Matthew Bright; cinematography: John Thomas; editor: Maysie Hoy; cast: Reese Witherspoon (Vanessa Lutz), Kiefer Sutherland (Bob Wolverton), Brooke Shields (Mimi Wolverton), Amanda Plummer (Ramona), Dan Hedaya (Detective Wallace), Wolfgang Bodison (Detective Breer), Bokeem Woodbine (Chopper), Michael T. Weiss (Larry (stepdad)), 1996)
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
An amusingly exploitive "B" movie by writer-director Matthew Bright (Guncrazy screenwriter) about a white trash family and their abused teenage daughter, Vanessa Lutz (Reese Witherspoon), who goes on the run rather than go back to a foster-care shelter when her mother and stepfather are arrested.
"Freeway" plays with the "Little Red Riding Hood" fairy tale motif to make it fit into modern-day California and its plethora of dysfunctional families. Little Red Riding Hood is none other than the resourceful Reese who is up against a serial killer wolf (Keifer Sutherland as Bob Wolverton), while going to see a grandma she has never met and doesn't know that she is coming to see her, who lives north of Reese in Stockton. Grandma represents an ideal for the troubled girl, who has a long juvenile arrest record and faces a bleak present, never mind her bleak future.
The film opens as Vanessa is in her special education class and pathetically can't read the sentence on the board "The cat drinks milk."She kisses her black boyfriend Chopper (Bokeem) after class and when she arrives home the police come into her parents' motel room and inform her that her mother (Amanda Plummer) has been arrested for prostitution and possession of drugs. Soon her stepfather (Michael T. Weiss) is arrested for parole violation because of the drugs in the apartment. Rather than go back to the children's shelter, she cuffs the welfare care worker, assigned to her case, by the ankles to the bed, steals her car, says goodbye to Chopper and gets a gun from him as a parting gift, and heads for the freeway and grandma's house.
On the freeway her car breaks down. Bob stops to help her and by not showing her his sharp teeth, he seems to come off as being a nice man. He tells her the car she's in has had it, and offers her a ride to Los Angeles, while telling her that he is a counselor for emotionally disturbed boys and willingly listens to her tale of woe. She likes him and even tells him that she trusts him completely, telling him her whole life story. Evidently, no one has ever listened to her before and she feels good until Bob starts wanting to know about the explicit sex she had with her stepfather, and she smells a wolf. Bob turns out to be a serial killer, who has been in the local news, wanted for killing a number of prostitutes on the freeway, where he is known as the I-5 killer. After he pulls a razor blade on her and cuts her ponytail and calls her the kind of slut that he must kill, she pulls a gun on him and when he tells her to let him go but take his money, that no one would believe her word over his, she gives him one more chance to redeem himself. But, he refuses to take Jesus as his Lord and personal Savior, as she requests, so she sprays him with bullets.
She is arrested for attempted murder when she enters the diner all covered in blood and the diner staff call the police. The disfigured Bob makes it barely alive to the hospital and fingers her as the culprit, when the police question him. He becomes the source of parody, as the doctors piece him back together, whereby he can't talk clearly, looks grotesque, and has holes in his throat so that when he smokes, the smoke can be seen coming out of his throat.
She tells the two detectives who question her exactly what happened. But, of course, they do not believe her. When she calls Chopper, she finds out that he had been shot by drug dealers. So, she enters a juvenile detention facility, accepting what happened to her without any noticeable signs of depression, even laughing at the victim during her absurd trial. A trial that makes chop-suey of how the establishment conducts their business, where usually the best story heard in a case wins the decision. She didn't come up with the best story -- that takes money and a smart but sleazy lawyer to handle the case.
The prison scenes were over-the-top, trashy, and fun to watch, as the director did not care a damn about drama or plot. The film shoots for tongue-in-cheek humor in the interactions between characters and also it aims to cast some black humor on the social hypocrisies of the welfare, judicial, and penal systems. As satire, this film is tops. It was excessive, but it had enough bite in it to do some damage. Reese Witherspoon's performance was contagious, watching her cut-up, act-tough, be vulnerable, and drop comic lines with a natural ease, and all the time, the film had the feel of being noir, even though it was really satire. It had enough toughness in it to be viewed as a thought provoking film, when the action cleared and the cartoonish-type of laughs emanating from the veggie-like characters died down.
The film had a lot of little things going for it, that added up to big plusses. The film's opening credits had the Grimm fairy tale story of Little Red Riding Hood depicted in its cartoon drawings. The Brooke Shield's role of the righteously indignant wife of the killer, was a satisfying part for "The Blue Lagoon" girl, as she shows how she has matured as an actress. It should also be noted, that the detective partners, one white (Dan Hedaya) and the other black (Wolfgang Bodison), show how prejudicial they can be when investigating a crime. It is not until after the black officer finds that Reese is a coal-burner (one who goes out with blacks), that he goes out to the scene of the crime and investigates the case the way he is supposed to.
Freeway has the look of a crazed fable, as bulky onscreen figures are made to look less imposing at each impending scene and the vulnerable ones either die or get stronger just by surviving amidst such violent chaos.The film draws to its inevitable conclusion- of blood and gore, despair and muted hope, and the irrelevancy of the 1990s in trendy California, which can be seen as a failed center-piece for social change. The film's sordid family scenario, leaves its sensationalized news stories mockingly imprinted on the airwaves, depicting how sad life is and how cartoon-like are the players, left to their own vanities, frolicking in an artificial landscape of alienation and violent gestures. This is the imperfect teenager fairy tale for the 1990s, for those living out their pop culture dream without weighing what that culture means, and where for the young bored-with-life students, reading and writing cannot replace loud music and drugs.
REVIEWED ON 4/14/2000 GRADE: B-
Dennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"
http://www.sover.net/~ozus
ozus@sover.net
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