Review: Pretty Persuasion

I really liked Pretty Persuasion - well, most of it, anyway, until about two-thirds of the way into the film. Up until that point it was a sharp, lively film, punctuated by excellent performances from Evan Rachel Wood (Thirteen), Ron Livingston (Office Space) and  the ever-reliable James Woods, who manages to make an extremely unlikable character, almost (but not quite) likeable. The film, helmed by music video director Marco Siega from an excellent script by Skander Halim (from whom I would expect to see more good things, based on this effort), started out as a really funny, dark comedy.

Kimberly Joyce (Wood, in a strong performance) is a 15-year-old student at an exclusive private high school in Beverly Hills. From your first glimpse of Kimberly, you know she is not your ordinary teenager. Wry, scary-smart, and wickedly sexy, Kimberly is a girl in control of her life and those around her.

Kimberly targets new immigrant Randa (newcomer Adi Schnall) from the first day of school. She takes Randa under her wing, in her superficially friendly but condescending way, and proceeds to shape Randa to her purposes. To her best friend Brittany (Elisabeth Harnois, who does a great job playing a character more than a decade younger than she is in real life), she's hardly much nicer, letting slip about Brittany's masturbation habits and other secrets. Brittany is dating Kimberly's ex-boyfriend, but Kimberly would never let a boy come in between her and a girlfriend, would she?

Kimberly persuades Brittany and Randa, to join forces with her in a plot to ruin their teacher, Mr. Anderson (Livingston), by claiming he molested them. Why? To jumpstart her and Brittany's acting careers, of course. What better reason could there be to sully a man's reputation and ruin his career? Of course, with Kimberly, there may be an even deeper, more sinister motive for everything, too. In the world of Kimberly Joyce, though, manipulating people and ruining lives is all in a day's work.

Kimberly and Brittany prance around school in their schoolgirl uniforms, aware of their sexuality, teasing their male teachers, especially Mr. Anderson and his friend, Roger Nicholl (Danny Comden) who direly warns Anderson, "You wanna know why she's going to ruin you? 'Cause she knows that you can't do anything about it, that's why. I mean, forget math, English,  science. For them, high school is all about cockteasing 101, and I've got news for you - those two are on the honor role."

And yet, Mr. Anderson can't seem to help his desires. The great irony of the film is that the very desire that Mr. Anderson fights is what Kimberly uses to plot his demise, even though he never acts on it - in reality, at least.  He brings his wife Gail (Selma Blair, packing a big wallop into a small role) home a short gray skirt for a gift. She notices that it looks a lot like the skirts the girls at the school wear, and decides to play the bad, sexy schoolgirl for her husband. She even reads a sexy note he gives her, about being bad and needing to be punished.

What forces of nature shaped such a sadistic monster out of a 15-year-old girl? When we meet her father, Mr. Joyce (Woods), we start to get an idea. Foul-mouthed, chain-smoking, pill-popping, alcohol-guzzling, and totally self-absorbed, Mr. Joyce is the kind of parent who makes your own parents look like saints, whatever their faults. Does he have any feelings for his daughter at all? For that matter, does he have feelings? When you look at Kimberly's father, you start to get an inkling how this narcissistic, repugnant parent might produce an offspring who teeters on the fine line between megalomaniac and sociopath.  Whether Kimberly actually crosses that line, you'll have to decide for yourself.

Toward the end of the movie, Kimberly says a line that you hear in the trailer: "It's like the whole world is an orchestra,  and I'm the conductor". This pretty much sums up Kimberly Joyce - she has to be one of the most unlikable characters in the history of film, and yet, you can't help watching her to see what she'll do next. Even sexy, scheming TV news reporter Emily  (Jane Krakowski), who thinks she's going to manipulate the events surrounding Kimberly to catapult herself to the next rung on the career ladder, finds herself a pawn in Kimberly's game.

Pretty Persuasion is not your typical teen comedy, not by a long shot. This is not the kind of film you would see Hillary Duff vying to star in. It's an edgy social commentary wrapped in a story about privileged high school girls and the lengths one of them goes to, to control the events and people around her and to exact revenge in the most underhanded and incredibly  labyrinthine way one could imagine. The film accomplishes this, mostly, with a finely tuned, biting, dark edge of humor softening the blows. And then, suddenly, this sharply written dark comedy takes an inexplicable turn into preachy social commentary and pure dark tragedy that completely changes the mood of the film. Maybe you'll like this, maybe you won't; for me, it very nearly buzz-killed the entire film for me. I liked the rest of the movie so much, though, that I was able to get over it.

Pretty Persuasion is a unique and well-written film; it's reminiscent, in a way, of two of my favorite movies ever, Heathers, a great dark comedy (with a much lighter ending than this film - not that I'm saying that's entirely a good thing), and Election, with Reese Witherspoon's conniving Tracey Flick (who, I'm afraid, would get her butt kicked by Kimberly Joyce in a showdown of great teenage bitches). Pretty Persuasion has a slightly darker tone than both those movies, though, and in the end, Kimberly Joyce is painted as pretty much irredeemably bad.

Although I didn't care for the turn the film took in the end, overall it was far better than the vast majority of the dreck being slushed out of the Hollywood script trough lately. We need more films like Pretty Persuasion, The Chumscrubber and  Broken Flowers, to drown out the inanity of films like Stealth and The Dukes of Hazard. Go see Pretty Persuasion for yourself, get to know Kimberly Joyce in all her evilness and vainglory, and I guarantee, whether you like the ending or not,  you'll still be happier than if you'd spent nine bucks to see Jessica Simpson prance around in a bikini.