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Pondering the girl next door
The light at the end of the tunnel has a tendency to stay there for high school seniors in spring. Distant, nonspecific, almost illusory, the limbo between high school and "what's next" can make a little bit of mischief dangerously appealing, especially to a young sexually repressed overachiever. Remember that good ole end of the year saying "What are they going to do? Expel me on the last day of school?"
Mathew Kidman - get it? Kid-man - cannot answer the question: "The thing I'll remember most is:" for a quote line in his senior yearbook. The jocks, the geeks and the cool kids answer this sort of obituary in slow-motion montage, but Kidman is speechless. Kidman is a ghost who, because of a go-go-go life of overachievement, has forgotten to live his life. He drifts in slow-motion haze, soon meeting a girl who can help him graduate to some seriously risky business.
Okay, maybe I'm dreaming, praising this film like the big touchdown that won the state tournament, while in actuality I may have never been on the football team. But, for the first 20 minutes - 30 tops - "The Girl Next Door," is the best portrait of graduation vertigo since "Donnie Darko."
It then becomes the film you'd recognize from the trailers - a wacky sex romp, coming of age comedy - and careens into the median. But it's a beautiful disaster - perhaps the glamorous teen Romeo suicide - and it's still fun to watch.
Elisha Cuthbert as Kidman's vixen/muse is the only thing to watch when she grabs the screen by the balls and forces it to bend to her will. The "24" starlett holds her body like a pistol to Kidman's head and everyone in the theatre feels it. Every word is sex, every motion is pre-calibrated man-killer swagger, as fierce a terminatrix as Terminator 3's Kristanna Loken. She perfectly embodies - with her perfect body - the FHM, 17, Maxim image of teen sex: steamy, lusty and immaculate, as perfect and cold as a Photoshop-modified centerfold. She is a fantasy, to Kidman and to the audience, at least until a clumsy script interrupts this intimate... um, should we say pocket pool session? like Eugene Levy blundering into his son's room.
Only the wackiness of Timothy Olyphant as the pimp-producer-hustler and a scene of epic absurdity involving a parrot and a massive gold dildo can save the film from being anything more than another wrinkle in the sheets of bad pop culture. A "get laid or bust," flick mixed with the "don't sell yourself short girl, you can do it," runabout and some other stuff thrown in for good measure. However, as high school experiences go, maybe there is some value in finding the merit in an experience that is equal parts "What could have been" and "What was."
Don't Forget
The Minneapolis/St. Paul international Film Festival is in full swing with many must see features to come. For a complete list of showtimes and locations check the festival Web site at http://www.mnfilmarts.org/mspiff2004/.
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