Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
10/11/09
Friends
are forever telling me that I overthink movies or that I'm “too much of
a critic”. It is true that when you've put in the hours I have studying
story structure and film theory, it gets a lot harder to come out of a
movie shrugging your shoulders and saying “it was OK for what it was supposed
to be,” which seems to be the reaction many films are designed to elicit.
But there are compensations, not just in terms of the deeper appreciation
of good movies all that criticiness gives me, but the ability to enjoy
a movie like Jennifer's Body. As a commercial enterprise,
it's most noteworthy for what it follows, being Diablo Cody's first screenplay
since her Oscar win for Juno and Megan Fox's first
starring role after another hit Transformers movie. As a movie,
it's ambitious as can be, and I think just about every scene works in some
way while it's unspooling. But as a whole, the scary, heartfelt and
cynically satirical elements work against each other, resulting in a movie
that will leave most viewers shrugging and saying “It sucked.” But
I was fascinated by those messy, ill-fitting pieces, some of which affected
me more strongly than the elements of many better movies. Jennifer's
Body is a movie you'll need to overthink to enjoy.
Needy
Lesnicky (Amanda Seyfried) narrates from a mental hospital. She's
a “kicker”, a vicious patient who attacks anyone who gets close.
But Needy wasn't always like this, she tells us. We flash back to
a time when she and Jennifer Check (Megan Fox) had been BFFs since childhood.
Needy's boyfriend Chip (Johnny Simmons) doesn't approve of the Jennifer-heavy
friendship, but over his objections the high school girls head out to a
local “club” (OK, it's a bar) to watch a Big City Band called Low Shoulder
perform. Jennifer's hoping for the full groupie experience, and lead
singer Nikolai Wolf (Adam Brody) sizes her up as just the sort of virgin
he's looking for. During their performance, the band sets fire to
the bar and once Needy and Jennifer escape the carnage, they scoop the
later up and whisk her off in their van. The former heads home, where
Jennifer shows up covered in blood, vomiting up black goo. But the
next day at school, it's like nothing happened: in fact, The Most
Beautiful Girl in School is even more luminous than ever. A half-dozen
locals died in the bar fire, and a rumor that Low Shoulder “were heroes”
in the disaster has made them national stars overnight. After school,
Jennifer seduces a mourning member of the football team: a little
sex and a lot of cannibalism result. As Needy slowly figures out,
her best friend was sacrificed to the devil to grease the wheels of Low
Shoulder's success. But since she hasn't been a virgin since Jr.
High, Jennifer now walks the earth as a hungry demon who'll remain young
and beautiful just as long as she chows down on a boy every 30 days.
Given the way this movie started, there's good reason to believe Needy
and Jennifer might not be Best Friends... Forever.
I'm
a movie critic, not a psychiatrist (and an amateur one at that), so I won't
pretend to know why Cody's Jennifer's Body screenplay is so staggeringly
schizophrenic. But it's clear that she didn't leave anything that
interested her about this story out, and as a result the tale of Low Shoulder's
deal with The Devil and its' consequences for Jennifer and Needy has about
a half-dozen meanings, and they don't play well together. But they
do play well (in some cases, very well) separately, and the more willing
you are to step back and take each Jennifer's Body as its' own,
the happier you'll be.
First
and foremost, there's the Horror Metaphor for Broken Friendship, that way
someone you were once close to still looks and sounds the same, but seems
to have changed into something else on the inside. It's Needy and
Jennifer's friendship that is the movie's deepest and most interesting
element, because the film isn't afraid to make it less than ideal.
Jennifer should be in a different social strata than her long-time best
friend, and she's not afraid to use that fact as an excuse to dictate terms,
right down to insisting Needy dress in the way that best compliments Jennifer's
best features, as though her friend was a fashion accessory. For
her part, Needy's got some seriously complicated feelings about her BFF
that fall somewhere between hero worship and attraction. But while
this is probably not a relationship built to last, Seyfried and Fox do
a nice job of showing us that there is sincere affection at the heart of
it. Needy's befuddlement when Jennifer starts acting soulless and,
well, evil isn't just the usual “something's strange here, I'd better look
into it,” it's betrayal, not the least because the newly diabolical girl
she thought she knew seems to go out of her way to select victims who appeal
to her supposed friend. And in the end, when the plot circles back
to the inevitable showdown, there's real poignancy to the girls' final,
embattled moments together.
For
guys who don't really care about female bonding, there's movie #2, the
Black Widow Thriller. Early on, Jennifer is defined as a girl who's
not really into love or relationships but instead sees the reaction she
can get out of a man as a means to an end. As a human, those ends
are kinda small potatoes, a favor here and there, a dream of maybe riding
some guy's coat tails out of the tiny town of Devil's Kettle. But
as a demon, it's plainly and simply eating the guy alive. It's an
easy nightmare to sell; after all, what guy doesn't secretly fear what
he'd have to do to keep up with the girls who're Out of His League?
And the movie has some luck with it mostly thanks to Fox's all-in performance
in the attack scenes and some cagy shot choices by director Karyn Kusama
(who's following up the underrated sci-fi flop Aeon Flux) that put
us nose-to-nose with her at the victims' most vulnerable moments.
But in keeping with a traditional genre problem, it's hard for a horror
movie to get full empathetic mileage out of victims no matter what their
gender, and Kusama doesn't have as much luck as one might hope with the
scares. Jennifer's Body is ultimately too arch and thoughtful
to ever seem particularly primal.
So
that brings us to Movie #3, the Social Satire. And it's a good one,
because Cody isn't afraid to say aloud what many of us have been thinking
for a few years now: post-Oprah, post-9/11, the country has grown
addicted to second-hand tragedy. Nothing happened in Devil's Kettle
except that some people died in a fire started by some evil dudes, but
our need to graft meaning onto the meaningless of tragic death forces the
survivors into the role of Sainted Heroes for a national audience who can't
wait to pretend to feel their pain. And who better to be the faces
of the tragedy than a rock band that's ready with their own Official Song
of the Fire? That Low Shoulder's overnight fame and success is literally
a Gift from the Devil is as fitting as their hit single “Through the Trees”
is perfectly, banally inappropriate. JK Simmons has some funny scenes
as a teacher (who, for some reason, has a hook hand) who's forever playing
into their hands by striking a tone of ludicrous solemnity, and there's
a clever argument between Needy and one of her classmates (Valerie Tian)
who will hear nothing bad against the band because “we need them now more
than ever!” Low Shoulder themselves are a perfect bunch of shiftless
Indie Rock Salad Bar Satanists, falling back on a ritual they barely understand
because, well, it's tough for an Indie Rock band to break through these
days. Best among them is Brody, who totally redefines his nice-guy
image as one of the most casually evil screen characters I can recall.
Nikolai Wolf (if that is his real name) doesn't want much, just fame and
riches “like that guy in Maroon 5”, and it's not just that he doesn't mind
sacrificing an innocent girl (albeit not as innocent as he'd hoped) to
achieve this goal, he actually enjoys it. And anybody who's gonna
sing “867-5309 (Jenny)” to a girl named Jennifer while plunging a knife
through her heart has some serious comeuppance coming. If only the
movie could figure out what to do with Low Shoulder once they've set the
plot in motion. They keep resurfacing, even playing a concert at
the climax, but their integration with the general story is maddeningly
elusive. They never meet the monster they created, and Cody and
Kusama need to keep the cameras rolling through the end credits to finally
bring their subplot to a close.
There
are a lot more pieces rattling around in here as well, from Jennifer's
growing “Ugly, for her” when she doesn't feed to the Needy/Chip love story
(which chugs along adequately but only really comes alive during an amusingly
blunt sex scene) and an apparent psychic link between the girls that mostly
just allows Needy to put the puzzle together while there's so much else
going on around her. The biggest weakness of the script other than
its' general scattershot nature is that it can't pin down any kind of rules
to what Jennifer becomes. Is she alive or dead? Is Jennifer
actually in there, or is it just a demon wearing her body? Given
that the estrangement of her friendship with Needy is the movie's most
resonant concern, it's more than a small matter to know. Cody's dialog
is as whip-smart and clever as Juno fans will expect,
but that's not always an asset, sometimes undercutting the movie's more
sincere or horrific goals. And she makes a big mistake opening with
a wrap-around scene that tells us before we even meet them which of the
characters will live and which will die.
Helping
to keep the plates spinning are the really strong performances of the leads.
Seyfried never disappears beneath her goofy nerd look and convincingly
gets beaten into that “kicker” by the story's events. Those who saw
last fall's dreadful comedy How
to Lose Friends & Alienate People learned that Fox can do interesting
things with that certain manipulative iciness a woman who looks like she
does is allowed to get away with, but in a larger role here, she's also
able to show good comic timing and some nice hard-edged shadings as Jennifer's
situation grows more desperate near the end. While likability is
the best part of her most famous role as Transformers'
Mikaela Barnes, Fox's best notes at this stage in her career are mostly
dark.
As
you can probably tell, Jennifer's Body is a big ol' mess.
Horror fans won't get as many shocks or as much blood as they might hope
for, voyeurs won't see the kind of skin they associate with this sort of
story (sorry, no Megan Fox nude scene for you!). But as you can also
tell as I've written paragraph after paragraph about it, it's a mess that
really fascinated me, with enough material for at least 3 movies crammed
in desperate competition within its' 100-minute running time. Lots
of memorable stuff that doesn't quite jell, but sometimes good stuff is
at least as enjoyable as a good story. At least for those of us whole
like to overthink our movies. |
