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KARLA (2005)
Sorry, grandma. Okay, first things first. You will get no bullshit from me about how this is "our" (i.e. Canadians') big horrifying crime, cheapening the ordeal of who it really happened to by painting myself as a victim by remote connection. You will also get no sanctimonious hand-wringing about how awful it is that people are capitalizing on said crime, as if that hasn't been happening for the last dozen or so years with this and with every other crime that ever piqued the public's horror. A worthwhile movie about this (or any) subject requires no justification. With that out of the way, I said I'd see anything with Laura Prepon in it, and I meant it. I saw Slackers. Woe is me, I saw Slackers. My grandma actually asked me not to see this movie, and I love my grandma, but...Laura Prepon! Karla is, of course, the story of Karla Homolka (here played by Prepon) and Paul Bernardo (Misha Collins), a great-looking young couple who kidnapped, tortured, raped, murdered, and dismembered a few girls in Ontario, and videotaped a lot of it. The sick evil shit they did was for most of us, unimaginable. Just reading the summaries made me feel ill, and pretty much put the kibosh on my interest in reading the most famous book on the case. After a wonderfully-scored intro montage of the young couple in videotaped suburban idyll, the bulk of Karla is told in flashback through the framing device of Homolka (as played by Prepon), eight years into her prison sentence, reporting to a parole psychiatrist (Patrick Bauchau, who unfortunately sounds like Hannibal Lecter and really shouldn't). On a strictly visual level, Karla is pretty tame (especially for a movie which, vindictively I think, got a rare R rating from the film board around here) - yes, there's lots of hitting and kicking and bruises and rough sex, but there's barely any blood, no nudity, and even the out-n-out rape scenes are fairly restrained. The torture is almost entirely absent, and the dismemberment happens between scenes sloppily cut in a fashion that leaves it very unclear just to what degree the title character assisted. Prepon looks...luminous. She might look better here than she ever has, goofy 80's hairdos aside. Too good, one thinks - eight years in the clink weren't easy on Homolka's good looks, but they look like they were pretty easy on Prepon's Homolka. Hottieness aside, Prepon does capture what the movie's closing title-card paragraphs tell us were the findings of the court - Karla Homolka as a conscienceless person who can perpetrate horrifying crimes with more concern about the possibility of getting caught than with the cruelty of her own actions. What Karla crucially fails at is twofold, and they're crippling. First, the whys behind the relationship between Homolka and Bernardo. It's made obvious that Homolka will do anything (short of a longer prison sentence) for her husband. But I can't fathom for the life of me why. If it's just that she's that submissive, this is not illustrated in any other relationship or aspect of her life. If it's that Bernardo is the most charming motherfucker on earth, Collins sure as hell isn't conveying that - his Bernardo is a sneering, easily-angered prick who doesn't even understand how cool it is to have a beautiful woman who'll even molest her own sister for his pleasure. Come on, I couldn't even get a beautiful woman to go to this movie, and unlike Bernardo, I have a job. Second is the most maddening aspect of the story for us Canadians anyway - since the gruesome details were withheld by the courts from the press, what really pissed off people up here at first was how Homolka was able to swangle a short-as-hell-for-the-crimes sentence and then use the videotapes to incriminate Bernardo and not herself. Argh! And once the depravity of the real-life crimes made the rounds, that only made more urgent the injustice one felt when Homolka got all of twelve years for them - unless you're a sadist, that's the really interesting aspect of this story and this movie glosses over it with a quick court scene and quicker meeting with the defence attorney. Obviously, director and co-writer (with two others) Joel Bender wanted to make a movie that kept the exploitation to a minimum and, despite the subject matter, wouldn't piss too many people off. Indeed, the news that this movie was being made at all created a lot more waves than I've heard of since it actually got released, which I wouldn't even know about if my sister hadn't told me. Even the names of the victims are changed to "protect the privacy of the families", as if those names aren't a matter of public record to the point of being household, for people up here anyway. I think that's to Karla's detriment; is this material that should be soft-sold? Karla's subject matter gets as awful as it gets when Homolka offers up her own sister as a sexual sacrifice to her husband (stand by your man, indeed!); that's bad, but the real Homolka only went downhill from there. I'm giving this a red, but it's a close call - it's mostly because Hostel is a close call too, and it's not fair to give them both yellows, so that gets a green and this gets a red. Sorry, Laura. I'll still see anything with you in it. (c) Brian J. Wright 2005 BACK TO THE K's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE |