CRIME & PUNISHMENT IN SUBURBIA (director: Rob Schmidt; screenwriter: Larry Gross/inspired by Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment"; cinematographer: Bobby Bukowski; editor: Gabriel Wrye; cast: Michael Ironside (Fred Skolnik), Ellen Barkin (Maggie Skolnik), Monica Keena (Roseanne Skolnik), Blake Shields (Moznick), Vincent Kartheiser (Vincent), James DeBello (Jimmy), Jeffrey Wright (Chris), Conchata Ferrell (Bella), Marshall R. Teague (Football Coach); Runtime: 100; United Artists; 2000)
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
There's not one character in this film that I felt anything for even though, I'm led to believe, I was supposed to. The film foolhardedly evokes Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment" as the inspiration behind this contemporary film about teen-age angst, yet leaves one with little to remind them of that except for the title.
It's a disturbing film about a f*cked-up domestic situation set in the suburbs of the West Coast and how in the emptiness of life there, violence moves from the pop culture they are immersed in to their own lives becoming torn by chaos and violence. It's a story about outsiders who use violence to get what they want, as all the characters are severely dysfunctional and act goofy to make sure we know how screwed-up they are at all times. The question asked in all seriousness to sum up the film is too trivial to dignify with a serious response as it states even when a good person kills a bad person, it's still a tragedy. I don't see what's the big revelation about that, since I don't know of any sane person who doesn't realize that killing someone is a pretty serious thing. My other problem was I didn't know who was good, I just saw who was more vulnerable. I think it's rather pretentious and arbitrary to think this piece of pulp nonsense had caught the profound themes of the master Russian writer. What it caught was a sleazy and exploitive look at a teen-age wasteland, and added nothing relevant to our understanding of such empty lives.
Dostoyevsky's Raskolnikov murdered an innocent old woman to test his theories that superior human beings can act free of man-made rules. In this film, a sexy cheerleader suffering from an unhappy home life, Roseanne Skolnik (Keena), decides to kill her drunk, self-pitying, stepfather, Fred (Ironside), after he molests her. That just has nothing to do with what Dostoyevsky was getting at, it's just the typical trash seen in countless exploitive films. This unpleasant script by Larry Gross, seems to be vacuous and more annoying than anything intellectual it presents. It's a B-film that somehow thinks it could get over as an art film for the disenfranchised.
The other players in this domestic dispute are the embittered, whorish Ellen Barkin as Maggie, an unhappy wife, married to wealthy man she's not attracted to. She meets a black man who is a bartender (Jeffrey Wright), flaunts the relationship in front of her husband, and since she found the body and has the known motive for killing him and all the circumstantial evidence points to her, she becomes the innocent one who goes to trial accused of the murder. The black man is falsely called her pimp, as some kind of racial inference is made about their mixed racial relationship.
Perhaps the most unsatisfying character was the supposed hero of the messy film, high school student Vincent (Vincent Kartheiser), the alienated loner freak who can't fit in and follows Roseanne around taking pictures of her wherever she goes. He's got some kind of sexual hangup on her and to prove his hipness as a character out of a Camus novel, he tattoos the words "por nada" on his arm. He also does the voiceover to explain his motivations for following her, saying he wants to save her from hell. The more he spoke, the stupider he sounded. Roseanne will come to him for support when her dull, sexually alive, bully, football jock of a hunk Jimmy (DeBello), helps her on her request to kill Fred by holding him down while she sticks him with a paring knife and when that doesn't get the job done she uses her mother's electrical carving knife--the one mom used in the opening scene for the family roast. When Jimmy no longer serves her needs, she leaves the poor sexually frustrated chump hanging and goes to Vincent for support. Vincent gives her cliché Oprah like self-help advice and believe it or not, even without having sex with the twisted Vincent, Roseanne proclaims in jail "What a strange path it took to find my heart." When she said that, it came out of the blue and made absolutely no sense. I don't know what she found, but if she calls what she found love--then she lost me.
This is one twisted pic. Made all the worst because there's no fun in this nonsense uncovered. But the subject matter here is ripe for a Steckler flick, as it's a shame the film wasted so much good photography techniques and good background music and some good acting improvisations on such an empty story.
This film was released a year after the similar "American Beauty," even though it was made earlier. It therefore also suffers from being thought of as a copy of that film, even though it wasn't.
REVIEWED ON 9/9/2001 GRADE: C -
Dennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"
http://www.sover.net/~ozus
ozus@sover.net
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED DENNIS SCHWARTZ
========== X-RAMR-ID: 29427 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 249032 X-RT-TitleID: 1100066 X-RT-SourceID: 873 X-RT-AuthorID: 1315 X-RT-RatingText: C-
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