THE VIRGIN SUICIDES (Paramount Classics) Starring: Kirsten Dunst, James Woods, Kathleen Turner, Josh Hartnett, Hanna Hall, A. J. Cook, Chelse Swain, Leslie Hayman. Screenplay: Sofia Coppola, based on the novel by Jeffrey Eugenides. Producers: Francis Ford Coppola, Julie Costanzo, Dan Halsted and Chris Hanley. Director: Sofia Coppola. MPAA Rating: R (adult themes, sexual situations, profanity, drug use) Running Time: 97 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
All right, admit it: The credits "Written and directed by Sofia Coppola" don't exactly set the heart racing in anticipation of artistic triumph. Your defining image of Sofia Coppola probably involves her single-handedly making THE GODFATHER PART III painful to watch. Or maybe you go back farther, to her script credit on the lifeless "Life With Zoe" segment of NEW YORK STORIES. If so, then consider this (perhaps faint) praise for THE VIRGIN SUICIDES: Sofia shows more visual flair in her directorial debut than Papa Francis has managed to show in the last 20 years or so.
If only she had managed a bit more story sense. Based on Jeffrey Eugenides' novel, THE VIRGIN SUICIDES is the story of the five Lisbon sisters -- Bonnie (Chelsea Swain), Lux (Kirsten Dunst), Mary (A. J. Cook), Therese (Leslie Hayman) and Cecilia (Hanna R. Hall) -- children of strictly religious parents (Kathleen Turner and James Woods) in mid-1970s Michigan. The girls inspire fascination in their male peers, but the fascination grows even more intense when the youngest girl, 13-year-old Cecilia, throws herself from a second floor window onto an iron fence spike. The family retreats even more after the incident, but that doesn't stop the flirtatious Lux from trying to find some semblance of a normal adolescence -- including deceiving her parents.
Stylistically, Coppola does plenty to keep the film interesting. There are few gimmicks she's unwilling to employ: slow-motion, split screens, odd angles. She also crafts one extremely effective sequence at a homecoming dance that captures every nuance of adolescent romantic fumbling. Her approach shows Coppola understands that THE VIRGIN SUICIDES is not a simple narrative, but a flashback remembrance of pubescent fantasy. The girls are representations of idealized visions by the story's collective male narrator (given voice by Giovanni Ribisi), not fully-realized characters -- and that's fine. THE VIRGIN SUICIDES is effective at creating a coming-of-age dreamscape where the tranquility of suburbia collides with the inherent turbulence of youth.
Sounds good on paper, doesn't it? It's true that Coppola gives THE VIRGIN SUICIDES just the right atmosphere, but she never manages to latch onto anything that would give the story focus or momentum. Her biggest mistake is making arbitrary use of the novel's structure as a remembrance told from a distance of many years, much of it through imperfectly recalled interviews with key players. In one scene she shows an adult Trip Fontaine (Michael Par) describing his fling as a teenager (Josh Hartnett) with Lux. It's a great scene -- effectively demonstrating the lasting effect the Lisbon girls had on those around them -- but it also serves to show how much better the film would have been with more moments like it. The tale's young male observers also disappear for long stretches, allowing the film to drift into trite suburban family drama. On the page, THE VIRGIN SUICIDES was hypnotic and mysterious; on the screen, it's a collection of eye-catching individual moments that too rarely coalesce into something more profound.
In a cinematic climate where films about adolescents usually bear little resemblance to reality, it's refreshing to find a film-maker interested in capturing the tangled emotions of that time. Sofia Coppola is working from a fundamentally strong source, and she has put together a cast and crew that make THE VIRGIN SUICIDES worth watching (and worth listening to, with its sublimely kitschy soundtrack of period tunes by ELO, Styx and Heart). When it latches on to those moments of wonder at the emerging adulthood of the opposite sex -- one boy's wide-eyed discovery of feminine hygiene products in the Lisbon bathroom, for instance -- it's dead on target. Unfortunately, there's also too much of the mundane in Coppola's adaptation. If she develops as much instinct for storytelling as she does for directing, Sofia Coppola could be a film-maker to watch for. And there's a prospect I'll bet you never expected.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 Sofia's choices: 6.
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