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SUSPICIOUS RIVER (2000)
Man, I don't understand chicks at all. I also don't understand why "boredtodeath" wanted me to review this one, and it had all but slipped from my memory until I noticed it was going to be on CBC late night, so here we are. Half bored-housewife sex fantasy (minus the waterfall scene), half attemptedly heavy drama about one of the most wilfully unsympathetic heroines I've ever seen, Suspicious River is the kind of movie made with an appreciation of subtlety about in line with its heroine's lost innocence literally following her around in the form of her childhood self. Molly Parker plays that heroine (and Mary Kate Welsh, the childhood self), a rural motel clerk in the 70's who appears to be widely renowned in the trucker community for providing sixty-dollar blowjobs, complete with the requisite post-blowjob mouth-wipe shot afterward. One day a john (Callum Keith Rennie) opts instead to hit her twice and rape her. How do you think she reacts to that? Right, she falls crazy in love with him and has the best sex of her life. She keeps on with business as usual but soon one guy, instead of taking the blowjob (which I think most guys would've been fine with), pins her down, rips her blouse and jacks off onto her chest. This really upsets her. I mean bruises heal, but this asshole ripped her blouse! So she tells Hitty McRaperstein about it and he makes it all better. Later in the car he says: "God you're hot. So fuckin' hot. You don't know how much that turns me on." Yes. Hotness is a turn-on for me too. Meanwhile, the little girl sees her mom phase out her dad in favor of his younger, hunkier brother, a relationship that escalates into...well, the nicest thing we see a man do in this movie is push Parker out a window. There are always movies that challenge us to find sympathy with characters we find repellent. They usually do that by showing us how we can at least find sympathy with their struggles. Ever see The Woodsman? That movie could evoke sympathy for a convicted child molester, because it showed us his specific struggles. Staying out of trouble. Resisting unwanted, but persistent and powerful desires. Trying to establish or re-establish meaningful relationships. It's not really that tough, for filmmakers to find ways to humanize unlikeable characters without resorting to cheap, sentimental ploys. Here there are no cheap, sentimental ploys, but there are also no attempts to humanize its unlikeable character. She's a dead-eyed, humourless automaton who shows only the slightest sparks of life when getting felt up (or hit) by Mr. Bitchslap, not showing any detectable emotion while talking to her husband about the second affair he's found out about, or hearing from the family member she'd be most unsettled to hear from, or running for her life through the woods. She claims early on that she cannot be hurt, though she was pretty pissed at the blouse-ripper. So when we see what happens to her in the last quarter of the movie or so, I didn't feel one whit bad for her. Not in the slightest. The movie could've ended with her, naked on that bed, mouth open, eyes shut, and I'd be all like "Whatever lady. Hey, wanna try some crystal meth? First hit's free!" Apparently set in the US, Suspicious River nevertheless has that arty, lots-of-sex-but-no-eroticism Canadian thing all over it, which figures since it was filmed in Vancouver and has a lot of familiar faces if you've seen a lot of Canadian-made TV. It's also written and directed by Lynne Stopkewich, who made Kissed, that silly movie that actually tried to get us to believe a female necrophiliac. Kissed at least had a goofy, snicker-inducing airhead life to it, and didn't have any scenes where it rains for only one shot. This is not an improvement. I have to wonder if the book by Laura Kasischke on which this is based also tries bringing up a mild supernatural angle at the very end to save its heroine from certain death. (c) Brian J. Wright 2005 BACK TO THE S's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE |