Z/Web

This was a surprisingly good film. I didn’t know anything about it. I guess I’d added it to my Netflix queue at some point, but when it arrived I couldn’t remember anything. It turned out to be a coming of age film set in a private girls school. Our narrator is the shy Mouse (real name Mary), arriving at the school for her first time away from home, still struggling to recover from her mother’s death three years earlier. Her two roommates, Victoria and Paulie, are wild and crazy, the opposite of her, and she finds them fascinating. But when romance goes awry, the lonely Paulie goes crazy: she’s lost the only love of her life. The film tries a little too hard to be shocking and wild, but it’s got a great intellectual core. It’s at its best in the simpler scenes between mouse and the gardener (the terrific Graham Greene), where they talk in riddles and jokes about Serious Things. Like when they first meet and Mouse asks if she can help him garden — she used to help her mother and enjoyed it — and when he asks her name she replies, “It’s in transition,” a brilliant way to express that she’s migrating away from her Mouse nickname to something better. That’s one of the best scenes I’ve ever seen on film. It’s astonishing. Simple words, simple facial expressions, loads of meaning. Great stuff. If the rest of the film was up to that standard, this would be a masterpiece. Granted the cast is fantastic. All relatively unknown, Canadian actresses (the film is Canadian), but beautiful and amazingly good. Mouse is played by Mischa Barton, who looks like a smaller version of Sarah Michelle Geller. Jessica Pare and Piper Perabo are her roommates. Excellent.

Director: Jonathan Demme

I wasn’t that crazy about the original, but then by the time I saw it I’d seen the same plot about fifty times in various TV shows. This film is decently done — it’s not a frame-for-frame remake but modernized and made relevant — but there’s no heart. I didn’t really care about the characters: they were all stereotypes. There are some excellent performances and the direction is good, but at the end I was asking “Why?” Why did they bother to do that? Why did I bother to see it? Is the problem of mind-controlled politicians really something I need worry about? The bottom line: well done but not worth the bother.