Another Day In Paradise

by Cindy Fuchs

Paradise Lost: Woods and Griffith in the tired Another Day in Paradise.

Larry Clark's Another Day in Paradise is—no surprise—brazen about its interest in young bodies. Whether the filmmaker himself is into them or not is irrelevant (and he's made varying comments on the subject in the past, beginning when he was photographing them and continuing through the release of his previous film, the controversial Kids). However, from the first frame, the film is plainly preoccupied with nubile, smooth, undeveloped forms. There is a hint of metaphor in this fascination, a sense that the real issue has to do with youth's promise. The two central kids in Another Day are victims of incompetent and ill-intentioned adults, but they exhibit an admirable resilience, at least for a few minutes.

This tenacity gives the kids more substance than your average CK One model. But it's filtered through Clark's sometimes creepy sensibility; it's like he gets off on the kids' fears and violence. The camera introduces Bobbie (Vincent Kartheiser) with a close-up of his torso, teasing you with a moving, caressing kind of shot that takes your eye to his pubic hair, then breaks off. In bed with his girl, Rosie (Natasha Gregson Wagner), Bobbie wakes up, heads off to work. That is, he pads off in his sneakers to the local high school where he plans to bust open a vending machine and steal the stash of coins.

The camera follows Bobbie as he prowls and zigzags down the street and into the building. He's in mid-heist when a guard shows up and the scene erupts into bloody mayhem. Enraged by the guy's existence as much as the fact that he's interrupted the "job," Bobbie is energized enough by that anger that he escapes after being severely beaten. Soon after, he's back home in bed, being nursed by Rosie and his "Uncle" Mel (James Woods, as living dead as ever). Mel's prescription includes rest and heroin, and he seems all set to move on. But the relationship between the elder junkie and the younger is just starting.

Mel, a small-time thief who still thinks he's gonna make the big score, is scoping for a kid to do some dirty work, crawling through air shafts and such. He decides that Bobbie's perfect for the job, mainly because the kid is starstruck and dopey enough to do it. Mel and his long-time junkie girlfriend Sid (Melanie Griffith, in her strongest performance since Night Moves) sort of adopt Bobbie and Rosie. The newly formed family takes off on a road trip, and the adults impress the kids by buying them new clothes and getting them roaring drunk at some skeezy club. They steal a lot of drugs, then sell the product out of a yuckola motel room to yuckola murderous clients. Shit goes wrong, guns are fired and suddenly what might have been some deviant parenting looks completely monstrous.

You knew this violation was going on before, of course, but you might have imagined that Bobbie and Rosie were going to get wise or escape or something. Given that it's James Woods in charge, though, the turn to full-blown horror, the sheer brutality of Mel's world-view (briefly glimpsed in his treatment of Sid, for instance) is less than shocking (he plays worms like no one else). Sid's a victim who goes along because she sees no options, Bobbie's a victim waiting, perhaps, to become a worm. And Rosie. She's a cross between Juliette Lewis in Kalifornia and Chloë Sevigny in Clark's own Kids, fragile, trusting, desperately hopeful.

The most cruel assaults on Rosie take place offscreen, which means that you envision their luridness beyond what even Clark could cook up. The thing is, if Clark's images are often stunning, his moralizing and storytelling remain ungainly. Harmony Korine's script for Kids had clunky spots too, but this film (written by Christopher Landon and Stephen Chin) is both smoother and clumsier, cornball and engagingly rough. Even if you do see it coming, the turn to climactic violence is still creepy and sentimental, neither of which is particularly good.

Where Kids was surprising because the title characters were so mean and careless without any visible adult supervision, the new movie is more into indictments, none very new. It's the same old point: When adults fuck up, they wind up with fucked-up kids.