Screenwriter
turned director Dustin Lance Black deserves some credit. It is difficult to admit your indie labor of
love just isn’t happening, but Black forthrightly faced up to the uniformly
negative reception for What’s Wrong with
Virginia at Toronto and headed back to the editing bay. Unfortunately, the problems are just too
deeply rooted in the film now simply titled Virginia
(trailer here),
which
nevertheless belatedly opens in New York today.
Emmett’s
mother Virginia is sleeping with Sheriff Tipton, the holier than thou Mormon
state senate candidate in a judgmental southern town. At least, she was until she became too great
a political liability. Emmett deeply
resents Tipton for tarnishing his mother’s reputation with their brazen
carrying-on. Tipton wants no part of
Emmett either and he expressly forbids the sullen youth from seeing his daughter
Jessie. After all, he has been paying
calls on Virginia for quite some time, if you follow. Emmett fully understands this fact, but he
doesn’t care. As he pursues Jessie, his
mother slowly begins to breakdown mentally.
She convinces herself she is pregnant (causing no end of embarrassment for
Tipton) and contemplates some rash criminal acts. Still, she is cool enough to give Emmett’s
courtship of Jessie her blessings.
Evidently,
in the previous cut much of this was presented as farcical comedy. Black certainly succeeded in draining all the
ostensive humor out of the film, which sounds like it is just as well. While the dreary tone might be more
consistent, huge problems remain. The
gauzy, nostalgic cinematography (and to a certain extent the costumes) give the
film a 1950’s-early 1960’s vibe, but the cars and set trappings are clearly of
a later vintage. It is also hard to
figure out where this could all take place.
From what the audience is told, this is a small town in the Deep South,
politically and socially dominated by Mormons, within easy driving distance of
Atlantic City. Okay, find that on the
map for us.
This
is not just a matter of splitting pedantic hairs. Penned by Black, the ex-Mormon Big Love scribe, Virginia’s screenplay is far too concerned with schooling people the
director disagrees with, such as his former co-religionists, southerners, and Republicans
(presumably), than telling a coherent story. Nor is there much character development here,
but rather a reliance on stereotypes.
Tipton is a conservative Mormon, therefore he is a hypocrite. Virginia is a “free spirit,” so she must be
saintly.
Indeed,
Tipton’s kinky laundry is predictably and repeatedly aired in public, lest we
miss the point. What can be said of a
narrative that hinges on the realization Sheriff Tipton allowed a reality TV
show to film him walking from a crime scene to the town’s fallen woman next
door for a bit of action on the side?
The purpose of this review is hardly to give cheaters tips to prevent
detection, but duh.
Jennifer
Connelly is quite compelling as Virginia, but she portrays the title character
as such a lost little girl in a state of perpetually arrested development, it
adds layer of creepiness to the lurid sexual content. Conversely, Ed Harris is nothing more than a
caricature as Tipton.