FEELING MINNESOTA
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1996 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Keanu Reeves, Vincent D'Onofrio, Cameron Diaz, Dan Aykroyd, Delroy Lindo. Screenplay: Steven Baigelman. Director: Steven Baigelman. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
I can't recall a previous film experience where the fairly good time I was having turned as sour as quickly as it did during FEELING MINNESOTA. For forty minutes or so, I was lured into a loopy if occasionally over-wrought romantic comedy, and I was even giving Keanu Reeves the benefit of the doubt. Then, rather suddenly, I was clubbed over the head with a nasty bit of violence; shortly thereafter, I was whacked in the gut by another. FEELING MINNESOTA is a film that made me feel violated, as though I had trusted writer-director Steven Baigelman to bring me a cool glass of water and instead he threw acid in my face.
FEELING MINNESOTA tells the story of a topless dancer named Freddie (Cameron Diaz) who finds herself in deep trouble when her boss Red (Delroy Lindo) suspects her of stealing from him. Red's punishment is to force Freddie to marry his bookkeeper, Sam Clayton (Vincent D'Onofrio), who is far from the man of Freddie's dreams. Enter Jjaks (Keanu Reeves), Sam's estranged younger brother, who arrives at the wedding just in time to catch Freddie's eye and have sex with her in the bathroom. United in their mutual attraction and their mutual loathing of Sam, Jjaks and Freddie take off together, but Sam isn't ready to let them go without a fight. Freddie, meanwhile, isn't ready to let Sam's money go without a fight, and thus begins a series of violent confrontations.
There is both style and substance to the beginning of FEELING MINNESOTA, as Baigelman opens with an effective montage showing Jjaks and Sam's intense sibling rivalry as boys, and their mother (Tuesday Weld) sending Jjaks away to live with his father. It does a great job of setting up Jjaks' unstable life, a life which has landed him in trouble for petty crimes and always trying to please his family; Reeves' wounded look is just right for Jjaks. The wedding sequence includes a number of nice moments, most notably the aforementioned bathroom scene in which a simple question is given a very funny spin. Most important, Baigelman begins to establish the connection between Freddie and Jjaks with humor and economy, as in a scene where they both spontaneously begin singing along to the Replacements' "I Will Dare" on the car radio. You would have every reason to expect that relationships -- both familial and romantic -- would be the focal point of FEELING MINNESOTA. Unfortunately, you would be dead wrong.
I suppose I should have expected daisies and valentines after an early scene in which Red threatens Freddie as she tries to avoid the wedding, but I certainly didn't expect what I got. What I got was yet another in a long line of recent films trying to ride the Tarantino wave by mixing gags and brutality, or rather creating gags about brutality. Suddenly, the story of romantic entanglements and family conflict becomes a story about a corpse, and everything which had come before degenerates so completely that virtually nothing is recognizable. The sibling rivalry not only becomes little more than an excuse for one round of beatings after another, but there is no consistency to the characterizations. Vincent D'Onofrio turns in a manic performance as Sam, whose jealousy, competitiveness and apparent sense of inferiority seem far more in keeping with what we know about Jjaks, while Reeves turns into a framed hero too reminiscent of CHAIN REACTION, and both of them spend most of the second half of the film screaming and covered in blood.
There are films which have managed to employ a radical shift in tone successfully (Jonathan Demme's SOMETHING WILD and Neil Jordan's THE CRYING GAME come to mind), but they didn't try to draw an audience with the promise of relatively innocuous entertainment. I don't want to dismiss Baigelman's successes out of hand -- he gets a fun performance out of Dan Aykroyd as a crooked cop, and some well-crafted comic moments -- and it is not his fault that Fine Line has chosen to promote FEELING MINNESOTA as a light-hearted caper. It _is_ his fault that he violates his own characters for the sake of shock value, and that he can't make his two halves into a whole. FEELING MINNESOTA left me feeling used, and there's not much funny about that.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 bad feelings: 4.
Visit Scott Renshaw's MoviePage http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~srenshaw Receive Scott Renshaw's pre-release reviews directly via email! Write to srenshaw@leland.stanford.edu for subscription details.
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