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Also this issue: Preschool Confidential Screen Picks |
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July 5-11, 2002
movies
 Blond ambition: Christina Ricci (second from right) hits the dye bottle in Pumpkin. |
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Directed by Anthony Abrams and Adam Larson Broder
An MGM release
Opens Friday at Ritz Theaters
Christina Ricci has recently been on a public confessions kick. Turns out that she survived not only making Mermaids with Cher and Winona Ryder, but also a traumatic childhood, anorexia, a season of Ally McBeal, along with other common E! True Hollywood Story-style horrors. Her movie choices, by contrast, are refreshingly unusual: Vincent Gallo’s creepy Buffalo ’66, Tim Burton’s eccentric Sleepy Hollow and Don Roos’ brilliant The Opposite of Sex.
Ricci's latest strange choice is Pumpkin, which she also co-produced. Directed by Anthony Abrams and Adam Larson Broder (who teamed to write the story for 1998's equally unclever Dead Man on Campus), Pumpkin ostensibly satirizes college melodrama-comedies, but never quite finds a coherent tone or, for that matter, very interesting targets for its jokes.
Ricci plays Carolyn, the only blond in Alpha Omega Pi, her sorority at Southern California State University. Apparently, this difference signals her capacity to think herself free of the herd, which includes head sister Julie (Marisa Coughlan, whose appearance in a film might be the kiss of death, given previous picks like Super Troopers, Freddy Got Fingered and Gossip) and grumpy Jeanine (Dominique Swain). Desperate to beat their rivals, Tri-Omega, for Sorority of the Year (or some such thing), AOP decide to mentor young male athletes prepping for the "Challenged Games."
At first the girls are all ewwwy about the venture, Jeanine going so far as to scream and run off in a panic when she first meets her mentee. Though Carolyn is also repulsed by her charge, Pumpkin Romanoff (Hank Harris), she tries her best to seem receptive, barely containing her disgust while teaching him to toss a discus and to kick a soccer ball. After a couple of meetings and passing encouragement from her tennis-star boyfriend Kent (Sam Ball, who has a jaw that looks like Bruce Campbell's plus a Dudley Do-Right prosthetic -- amazing), Carolyn starts to think that Pumpkin can see into her soul. She attributes this ability to his having suffered pain, which she, of course, has not.
Carolyn imagines that experiencing pain will make her deep, and to help her out, the rest of the film has her suffering a lot of it. Though Pumpkin's well-intentioned mother (long-suffering Brenda Blethyn) tries halfheartedly to keep her son away from the girl she comes to see as a "whore," it's clear that Carolyn's sense of destiny will prevail. And if her "development" takes her down a few roads she doesn't anticipate, you can see them coming a mile away. What's less easy to predict is how and where the film is headed, emotionally and politically. As Carolyn endures (even actively pursues) one devastation after another -- loss of her boyfriend, her sorority membership, her friends, her self-esteem -- Pumpkin's point becomes increasingly harder to see.
While the movie makes fun of all kinds of prejudices (as the sorority girls endeavor to rush "diversity" quota-fillers, or struggle with their fears of the "challenged" boys), it encourages viewers to laugh at the targets of prejudice, much like the Farrelly brothers' movies tend to. (Remember Ben Stiller chucking Frisbees at his "challenged" partner's head.) So Pumpkin's efforts to stand up from his wheelchair, lift weights or play soccer are made to look simultaneously "heroic" and offered as moments for viewers' self-conscious laughter. You pay for your pleasure, but you still get it. Sort of.
Pumpkin looks like it wants to be provocative and contrary, but its gibes and so-called "risks" are run of the mill. It includes several "incorrect" images and jokes -- but descends more often to broad lobs --at air-headed sorority girls; a self-loving poetry teacher (Harry Lennix); Carolyn's hideously rich, ignorant and selfish mother Chippy (Lisa Banes); Kent and his one-dimensional, studly teammates. The ill-fated, lantern-jawed Kent does catch the brunt of the film's cruelty, as his sense of shame when Carolyn chooses to bed a "retard" over him leads to an incredibly hysterical highway drive, complete with cliff and screeching brakes, all leading him to become a "better person." (To its credit, the film here includes a moment of musical-score overstatement that rivals a Douglas Sirk melodrama.)
But aside from such brief lunacies and Ricci's straight-faced performance, Pumpkin mostly settles for jokes that you've already seen overkilled elsewhere. The aggressive "bad taste" and gotcha humor, plainly conjured with the intent to appall or surprise, are finally not so transgressive as they are mainstream and common. Carolyn's journey takes her rolling over the feelings of various friends and acquaintances -- not least of all Pumpkin, whom she abuses, ostensibly unintentionally, again and again. The movie appears to be making fun of making fun of "retards," "gimps," frat boys, egomaniacs, et al. But the "making" part is too strained, the "fun" part too stale.
