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Overall Rating
  Awesome: 29.49%
Worth A Look: 35.9%
Average: 14.74%
Pretty Bad: 9.62%
Total Crap: 10.26%
12 reviews, 84 user ratings
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| Virgin Suicides, The |
by Erik Childress
"Hardly the Best Suicide Comedy"
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After an attempted suicide by a young girl her doctor asks her why she is there. She has not possibly lived long enough to experience the tragedies of life. She says he has no idea what it’s like to be a 13-year old girl. Thus starts what hopes to be a promising examination of the pressures revolving around being a teenager. Unfortunately, the directorial debut of Francis Ford’s daughter, Sofia Coppola, underwhelms us by barely scratching the surface.The film uses one narrator as the collective presence of five boys in the neighborhood (whom we barely meet) who witness the events that transpired during that period in the seventies when a whole family of children took their own lives. Psychological studies for years have told us that girls have more problems thrust upon them in their growing years than boys do, but this film narrows it down to two things – parents and boys. Boy, what a revelation.
James Woods and Kathleen Turner play the parents of the doomed children as a nerdy math teacher and a religiously domineering mother. Kirsten Dunst gets singled out as the more rebellious sister after the youngest sister jumps out a window and impales herself on a fence, leaving her corpse resembling a floating angel. Not much is made of the three other sisters, all anonymous pretty faces, with no real personality or dimension to any of them. To suggest that Dunst’s character is a representation of all the sisters (or all girls, for that matter) is ridiculous since her questionable behavior is the only behavior we’re allowed to witness.
To suggest that any film dealing with suicide, especially by young people, should have a clear-cut explanation like the unmasking of a killer is absurd. But by not giving us any understanding of the people who do, we are forced to ask an even more brutal question – who cares? Is it a tragedy when bad people take themselves out of this world? Probably not – except maybe to that person’s family. So, how do we know when a good person dies unless we know them. The sister’s lives couldn’t have been nearly as bad as the mentally challenged kid who doesn’t know that he’s being made fun of right to his face. If their horrendous lives consisted only of strict, but decent, parents, menstrual cycles, and being treated poorly by boys (My God – The Horror! The Horror!), then the large percentage of women in this country who toughed it out and didn’t kill themselves must be real troopers. How did they ever survive?
If The Virgin Suicides is supposed to be a dark comedy, then it only got the “dark” right. There is almost nothing funny to be found here except for some nice mannerisms in Woods’ well-toned and restrained performance. By the time a late scene shows an upper-class party where asphyxiation is the theme and the guests wear gas masks and thumb their nose at suicidal tendencies, it’s too late and comes out of left field since the first 90 minutes failed to show anything funny or ironic about the tragedy that surrounds its characters.This is not this century’s version of Heathers, a film which somehow found the humor and ridiculousness of suicide during the teenage years. The Virgin Suicides is another film where symbolism rules over narrative and where the narrator talks to us like the voice of an audiobook telling us everything yet nothing at all.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=3859&reviewer=198
originally posted: 04/27/00 11:51:34
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USA
21-Apr-2000 (R)
UK
N/A (15)
Australia
10-Aug-2000 (MA)
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