BEAUTIFUL GIRLS
A film review by Greta Christina
Copyright 1996 Greta Christina
Guy Stuff Copyright 1996 Greta Christina. Written for the Spectator; posted with permission. Replies to this review may be printed in the Spectator Express Mail section; please indicate if your response is not for publication.
Beautiful Girls. Miramax. Starring Matt Dillon, Timothy Hutton, Rosie O'Donnell, Martha Plimpton, Michael Rapaport, and Uma Thurman. Produced by Cary Woods. Written by Scott Rosenberg. Directed by Ted Demme. Rated R.
When the lights dimmed and the first few minutes of Beautiful Girls started rolling, my immediate reaction was to roll my eyes in dismay. "Oy," I thought to myself. "A bunch of dudes talking to each other about their feelings and relationships and why they can't commit. It's a chick movie for guys. God help us. Why don't they shut up about their feelings and go shoot something? It'd be much more entertaining." But then I gave myself a good, hard mental slap in the face for being such a typical boneheaded American. I mean, I gripe all the time about gender stereotyping in movies and how the media macho myth cripples men emotionally. Why should I complain when a movie seems to be undercutting that myth? So I sat back and did my best to give Beautiful Girls a chance. My final assessment: Nice try. Not a particularly successful one attempt, but an interesting and apparently heartfelt one. The writing is well-meaning but often clumsy, with characters dropping into long overwritten speeches about The Meaning Of Life And True Love And Stuff at the drop of a hat. And while the performances are earnest and sweet, they lack the sparkle, the elusive sketching-a-character-in-a-few-short-lines quality, that's needed to make an ensemble film shine. But it is a genuinely nice try. And more to the point, it has some interesting things to say about men and men's sexuality. Unlike the traditional chick movie, a genre that tends to skewer men's foibles mercilessly (an understandable exercise and one I've been known to indulge in myself on occasion), Beautiful Girls deals with men's foibles from the men's point of view. It questions, even mocks, traditional male attitudes towards sex and love and relationships; but it does so gently, with understanding and sympathy and good humor. Essentially, it's--well, it's a chick movie for guys. (As such, it will most likely drop at the box office like a sixteen- ton weight, so if you're at all interested in seeing it, I suggest you do so as soon as possible.) The story focuses on bunch of guys from a small town in Massachusetts approaching their tenth high school reunion. One of them, Willie (Timothy Hutton) has managed to get out of town and is struggling to make it as a piano player in New York City; he's now back for the reunion, to connect with his old friends and try to make some decisions about his life. Most of the guys still live in town, though; they plow snow for a living, hang out, drink, fight with their girlfriends, try to pick up cute women, and belt out "Sweet Caroline" in the local bar. And they talk. They talk about sex, they talk about love, they talk about relationships. They talk about women; about their wives and girlfriends and exes, about porn stars and supermodels and girls they had crushes on in high school. They talk about what they want from women and what they think women want from them. They talk in a way that guys in movies rarely talk to each other; showing their awkwardness and fear, their passion for sex and their disappointment in it and their worry that the disappointment is somehow their fault, their longing for something better than what they've got and their anxiety that they don't have what it takes to make that happen. And when they talk, they show a balance between toughness and vulnerability, swagger and doubt, that has an uncommon feeling of truth to it. Now obviously, I don't have any idea whether guys really talk to each other like this when women aren't around. (Any guys who see the movie and feel like clueing me in as to its verisimilitude, feel free to drop me a line.) But the dialogue does have a ring of truth to it. The style isn't always the most authentic; much of the language is speechy and poetical and not very much like the way people really talk. But the feeling behind the words, the sentiments driving the sometimes dippy and flowery speeches, do feel quite real. Now, just the very sight of men talking to each other about love, and talking about it as if it matters to them, is enough to make this movie stand out in a crowd. But it isn't just the sight of men talking with each other about their personal lives that makes this movie unusual. A number of the specific things that they say about their lives, and particularly that they say about sex and love, are things that I've rarely heard before from guys in Movieland. For instance. When Paul (Michael Rapaport), who is sort of the movie's scapegoat/whipping boy, complains that his girlfriend Jan (Martha Plimpton) is pressuring him into making a commitment, the other guys rag on him mercilessly, pointing out that he's been with her for seven years and a commitment is not an unreasonable thing to expect. When Tommy (Matt Dillon) gripes about his girlfriend Sharon (Mira Sorvino) and her insecurity and shitty self-esteem (not to mention her bulimia), his buddies point out rather bluntly that his ongoing affair with his old girlfriend Darian (Lauren Holly) might have something to do with it. When Paul gasses on about how terrific supermodels are, how they represent promise and hope and how he wants to date one more than anything, the guys roll their eyes in mock despair at his obsessive evasion of real-life women and real-life relationships. And when Willie describes his lovely and talented lover Tracy (Annabeth Gish) to his pals, they read him the riot act for waffling about his relationship and sniffing around other doors looking for something better. I can't remember the last time I saw a movie in which the male characters encouraged one another to take some responsibility for their emotional lives. It's quite refreshing. But I don't want to get too carried away here, either. There are a number of traditional notions about sex and love that the movie doesn't question at all, and they're ones that I find particularly annoying. The first has to do with the whole idea of marriage and relationships and commitment. Yes, it's certainly a refreshing change of pace to see male characters taking love seriously and talking to each other about their emotional lives. But it's not such a refreshing change of pace to see marriage and monogamy and Long Term Relationships presented as the ultimate answer to all these knotty problems of sex and love and intimacy and fear. And Beautiful Girls does exactly that. Although each of the guys in the movie has a different problem with sex and love, they all wind up with the same solution: It's time to settle down. The big winners in the movie are the guys who decide to put away childish things, stick with their women and make The Commitment; the big loser, Paul, is the guy who realizes just how valuable his girl is after it's too late and he's lost her for good. I'm not saying that Committed Relationships are a bad idea, you understand. I'm just saying that a slightly less preachy tone about it might have been nice. The other big problem I have with Beautiful Girls has to with how the movie sees female beauty, what kind of girls it perceives to be beautiful. The wives and the girlfriends and the objects of desire are all very traditionally attractive in a very standard Hollywood way; slender and willowy and feminine, with gym-toned bodies and flat stomachs. And in a stunningly unoriginal bit of casting, Uma Thurman plays Andera, the stunningly beautiful stranger who sweeps into town and knocks all the men off their fee. Uma, not surprisingly, is held up as the ultimate pinnacle of female beauty, the one that all the men naturally and rightly desire. The movie repeatedly pokes fun at men for coveting supermodels and other unreal ideals of female attractiveness; but although it pokes fun at those ideals, it nevertheless manages to perpetuate them. And it perpetuates the notion that these ideals are based on some sort of objective truth that all men can and do agree on. Now, I will admit wholeheartedly that this is a very personal grudge I carry against movies in general. I get real tired of seeing the same damn female body over and over again when I go to the movies. It's not that I don't like tall thin women; it's just that a little variety now and then would be nice. And in the clit-hardening department, Uma Thurman does just about nothing for me. I'm a bit tired of seeing her held up as the reigning sex goddess, and I'm real tired of seeing her bony body put forth as the ne plus ultra of female sexuality. Especially when there's a babe like Rosie O'Donnell on the same screen. Again, I will admit to a bias. I think Rosie is just about the hottest woman in the movies today. I'd do her in a New York minute, no questions asked. And it baffles and enrages me to see her, time and time again, playing the buddy or the best friend, never getting sex or love simply because she's big. With the exception of Exit to Eden, I don't think I've *ever* seen Rosie O'Donnell presented as the object of anyone's desire--and it pisses me off. Every other woman in this movie has a boyfriend or husband or lover; the guys may be jerks, but they're there. You think Rosie O'Donnell has a boyfriend? You think anyone man in the movie even considers Rosie O'Donnell as girlfriend material? Think again. She gets lots of smart funny lines, and she gets to make a very groovy speech about the unrealistic standards of beauty that so many men hold women to. What she doesn't get is laid. And like so many other Hollywood movies, Beautiful Girls treats the big woman not getting laid as a completely understandable and indisputable fact of life. In a movie that supposedly questions the concepts of traditional American masculinity, I find the things that it doesn't question at all to be very revealing. -- For information on the Blowfish Catalog of erotic books, movies, comix, edible things and arts & crafts write to info@blowfish.com. Our WWW home page is located at http://www.blowfish.com/
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