BOYS ON THE SIDE
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1995 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: This is a road picture that runs out
of gas toward the middle, then takes a turn toward
familiar territory. Three very different women
have an interrupted journey together across country
and learn to love each other as they bond. The
film often seems artificial, but it does have some
good comic touches and some expected moments of
warmth. Rating: low 1 (-4 to +4) [Minor spoilers.]
In SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE, the characters talk about "chicks' films." There they mean romance, but there is something else that is much more a chick's film. There is a whole sub-genre of films like RICH AND FAMOUS, BEACHES, STEEL MAGNOLIAS, and TERMS OF ENDEARMENT. They are bittersweet explorations of women bonding with each other through good times and bad, often to the beautiful and lush strains of a score by Georges Delerue. [His title theme for RICH AND FAMOUS is one of the most beautiful film themes I know.] Delerue died in 1992, sadly, but the kind of films he scored go on with the latest entry being BOYS ON THE SIDE.
Actually BOYS ON THE SIDE begins atypically for a women's picture with two very different women sharing a cross-country ride. Jane (Whoopi Goldberg) is a crude club singer who makes racist comments and tells cab drivers to go back to Pakistan. Robin (Mary-Louise Parker) appears to be a slightly ditzy real estate broker with a penchant for banal Carpenters songs. Along the way they pick up Holly (Drew Barrymore), the girlfriend-victim of an extremely obnoxious drug-dealer and junkie. While there is an initial tension between Jane and Robin, of course women of goodwill always learn to respect each other eventually.
Curiously, near the middle the film seems to run out of steam and its apparent whole reason to be. Suddenly it is no longer a road film and the plot, after a short section of aimlessness, goes off in another direction. In an almost artificial manner the major women, and even some of the minor, get to show both positive and negative traits. It is better than painting them as saints, but it appears to be just a bit too deliberate. Overall, however, the film plays it safe, pushing the right buttons and espousing the right causes. Director Herbert Ross knows his audience a little too well.
Whoopi Goldberg is obviously winning as an actress, but her acting range has always seemed to me to be very limited. She has a more restrained performance in "Star Trek: The Next Generation," and Steven Spielberg definitely got her to act in THE COLOR PURPLE, but she and most of her directors are content to let her play the same character time after time. In BOYS ON THE SIDE she is playing a woman with a personality almost identical to the one in JUMPING JACK FLASH or SISTER ACT. This is a film in which she could have shown some real dramatic range, if nothing else as an investment in her own career. The meatiest part in the film actually is Mary-Louise Parker's and while her role is not as flamboyant as is Goldberg's--in fact it appears very unpromising at the beginning of the film--she makes much better use of opportunities the story affords her. We see more different facets of her personality and even of Barrymores's than of Goldberg's.
After a promising start this film gives us little besides a few nuances in Parker's character that we have not seen better elsewhere. Rating: low +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
mark.leeper@att.com
.
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