FOXFIRE and GIRLS TOWN
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1996 Scott Renshaw
FOXFIRE Starring: Hedy Burress, Angelina Jolie, Jenny Lewis, Jenny Shimizu, Sarah Rosenberg. Screenplay: Elizabeth White. Director: Annette Haywood-Carter.
GIRLS TOWN Starring: Lili Taylor, Anna Grace, Bruklin Harris, Aunjanue Ellis. Screenplay: Jim McKay, Denise Casano, Anna Grace, Bruklin Harris, Lili Taylor. Director: Jim McKay. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Somewhere near the middle of GIRLS TOWN, after its three female protagonists have begun to assert themselves, Emma (Anna Grace) notes that the experience "feels like a movie." "If this was a movie," retorts Patti (Lili Taylor), "we would've killed, like, fifty people by now." It's the THELMA & LOUISE model of female empowerment -- sisters only start doin' it for themselves when men are doing them wrong, and then they do it up with a vengeance. The result is often self-righteousness without much of a story to tell, with shallow female characters who are supposed to deserve our sympathy because they are less shallow than the shallow male characters. In the space of two weeks, we have two films -- GIRLS TOWN and FOXFIRE -- which continue to show what a hard time film-makers are having creating real drama out of the perils of being a young woman.
In GIRLS TOWN, the focus is on three best friends at a New Jersey high school, college-bound Emma and Angela (Bruklin Harris) and their single-mom cohort Patti, who are forced to confront harsh truths when their friend and classmate Nikki (Aunjanue Ellis) commits suicide. When the girls get their hands on Nikki's journal, they discover that she had been raped, and begin to discuss the various wrongs men have done to each of them. Eventually, talk isn't enough, and they decide that it's time to take action.
Move the story to Portland, and basically you have FOXFIRE. It begins when a drifter called Legs (Angelina Jolie) walks into a high school biology class and stands up for a shy girl named Rita (Jenny Lewis) who is being taunted by the teacher, Mr. Buttinger (John Diehl). When several girls -- including Legs, our artsy narrator Madeline (Hedy Burress), pot-smoking Goldie (Jenny Shimizu) and promiscuous Violet (Sarah Rosenberg) -- learn that Mr. Buttinger has been sexually harassing Rita and other students, they join together to confront him. That confrontation results in a group suspension, and a week where the five girls meet at an abandoned house to become inseparable friends.
There are a few fairly significant things GIRLS TOWN does right that FOXFIRE does not. Most notably, the girls in GIRLS TOWN talk like high school seniors, not like some vague melodramatized approximation. Co-stars Harris, Taylor and Grace all contributed to the script, and they have given the dialogue a real punch. GIRLS TOWN also gives its characters' acts of defiance a kind of offhandedness which makes them considerably more interesting. When Emma, Patti and Angela trash the car of a boy who assaulted Emma, there is a casual glee in their retaliation; when they confront the man named in Nikki's journal as her assailant, their actions do not seem pre-meditated. These are young women with little if any idea that their actions are political, and it would seem absurd to play their scenes of vindictiveness as though "I Am Woman" should be playing in the background.
That is exactly the opposite of the impression you get from FOXFIRE, where Legs walks into the lives of her four comrades like the Ur-Feminist, and where cries of "It's not fair!" resound through courtrooms. That might lead you to expect a hearty round of man-bashing, with Legs providing the bashing primer for her less hardened friends, and to a certain extent you would be right. But FOXFIRE, despite being based on a novel by a woman (Joyce Carol Oates) and being written and directed by women, plays decidedly like a male fantasy of female bonding. In a sequence which seems to last several hours, the five principal characters take turns getting a flame tattooed on their breasts to signify their shared trials. It's just like we men have always hoped...when women get together, they sit around topless in a candle-lit room drinking liquor from the bottle with a subtle-but-recognizable atmosphere of lesbian eroticism permeating the proceedings.
The basic problem with both films is the basic problem with so many female bonding films: they define the characters almost exclusively in terms of their problems with men. Lili Taylor's Patti in GIRLS TOWN is a notable exception, a spunky, lively but not terribly bright young woman who is doing all she can just to keep running in the same place, but Emma and Angela are given little genuine personality. It's even worse in FOXFIRE, where there is so little effort made to understand the characters as individuals they might as well be hand puppets. Madeline develops an intense bond with Legs, but we have virtually no idea why because we know nothing about her life; there are vague references to Goldie's home life, and no reference to Rita's or Violet's at all. They're just female figures to occupy the car in which they take a joy ride, stolen from one of the shadow males who try to keep them down. GIRLS TOWN at least has a bit of verisimilitude working for it, but both GIRLS TOWN and FOXFIRE mistake vandalism for character: I kick ass, therefore I am woman.
GIRLS TOWN: 6.
FOXFIRE: 3.
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