Chomping at the Bit

Jess Weixler wants to examine Teeth.

by Sam Adams

I CHEW CHEW CHOOSE YOU: Weixler with an unsuspecting suitor. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Jess Weixler has had a year since Teeth's Sundance premiere to watch it with all kinds of audiences, and the reactions have been all over the place. But she has noticed a constant. "People start laughing," she says. "And then they get uncomfortable and realize what they're laughing at."

Teeth makes a lot of people uncomfortable. Weixler plays Dawn, a perky suburban teenager who is the star of her high school's abstinence program. Proudly sporting her promise ring, Dawn is a tireless motivational speaker for "saving it." But strange things are happening to Dawn's body — especially, you know, down there. When an innocent dip in a secluded grotto turns into Dawn's first, and unwanted, sexual encounter, she finds out that her nether regions have a distinctly carnivorous bent.

Needless to say, Weixler was put off by Teeth's script the first time she read it, although less because of its content than due to the number of sex scenes. But talking with writer-director Mitchell Lichtenstein (whose father is pop art painter Roy), she understood that he wanted to make a dark comedy and not a campy splatterfest.

As they worked with the script, another layer started to emerge. They began to see Dawn not just as a comic realization of the ancient, repressive myth, but as a kind of superhero, struggling with a power she cannot yet control. Rapists and pushy gynecologists feel the bite, but when Dawn finally finds a boy she wants to have sex with, her genital incisors let him pass unchomped. "She has this anatomical uniqueness," Weixler says, "and she has to learn how to use it for good."

Special powers aside, Weixler imagined Dawn as a typical teenager, whose body is changing in ways she is ill-equipped to understand. "I think everybody understands what it's like to be a child and then grow into a sexual being," she says. "She's especially closed off because she's part of this abstinence group. For me, the film is saying that if people don't educate themselves, the emotions are going to overwhelm them."

Tapping into the emotions under the movie's over-the-top story and deftly managing its swings from horror to comedy, Weixler delivers a performance of unexpected depth, enough for her to win the Best Actress prize at Sundance last year.

"I think, in a way, it can be a one-joke movie," she says. "But it's the story. The joke isn't that complicated. The story is."

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Teeth opens Friday at Ritz at the Bourse. See Sam Adams' review on adjacent page.