Are You With Us?: The Virgin Suicides
By Ryan Mazie
August 12, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Filled with as many metaphors as a little girl’s diary, The Virgin Suicides takes place in Michigan circa 1975 in a town that looks idyllic, but underneath the skin of the nicely groomed girls and boys that reside there are raging hormones that are never satiated. The film focuses on a group of neighborhood boys ranging in age presumably from 13 to 17, the same ages as the five blond and buxom Lisbon daughters they are obsessed with. However, what drives their obsession for the girls is their seemingly out of thin air suicides, an event for the boys that “changed them for life.” The peaceful outside and fractured inside spoof the same era portrayed by the robotic Stepford Wives for its conventions that ultimately lead to the last-word of the title. Playing out like a crime show with its story told backwards backwards, knowing the end at the beginning, you would expect to know more as you go along with intricate twists and turns. But there never is any real revelation and that is where the film left me in the dark, in addition to dividing critics and audiences alike.
The first suicide is of the youngest daughter, Cecilia, who has a failed attempt at the beginning of the film, slitting her wrists in the tub. When the psychiatrist asks Cecilia why, she snappily retorts, “Obviously, Doctor, you have never been a 13-year-old girl.” Displaying the film's infrequent bursts of dark humor, this is sadly about as much of an answer as we get. After Celia's death, the Lisbon’s strict Christian mother and father put the girls on a virtual house arrest, cutting off all outside communications and influences, which leads up to the suicide of the other four girls.
The real explanation comes from the mysterious male narrator, who I was led to assume was collective voice of the group of boys, trying to find a reason for the suicide. We see the boys spy on the girls from their next door window and steal from their garbage to try to find meaningful scraps to piece together what lead up to the suicides. However, nothing really is meaningful and maybe that is the whole point - that my gender is really oblivious to our female counterparts, so much so that the group of boys could not really even see the Lisbon girls slowly slipping away from them before ultimately going away. However, the lack of character detail makes the girls' actions not very mystical at all, but fairly trite and predictable.
Even though there are five girls, the one focused on most is the second-youngest, Lux, played excellently by Peter “Spider-Man” Parker’s girlfriend Kirsten Dunst. Lux, who I see as the most interesting character, is hardly a virgin by the time of suicide, having sex on her rooftop so much that the boys spying even make popcorn for the almost nightly event. Lux is the most dynamic of the cross-bearing daughters given that she is not afraid of life outside of her parents' rules. She's also the clear leader of the pack. Lux is the center of attraction for the school’s football star and self-declared heartthrob, Tripp Fontaine. We get introduced to Tripp with a nod to one of my favorite comedies, The Graduate, with him floating in a pool during a hilarious montage of his girl-having ways. Their short romance is what leads to the domino effect of the suicides after Tripp convinces the uptight parents to let the girls attend Homecoming. But a broken curfew later leads to the house lockdown. And I thought my parents were tough.
So what do you do if you are the offspring of an iconic director trying to make a mark on the same industry with a last name so famous it is as synonymous with movies as Hollywood? You take a risk and show some guts. That is exactly what Sofia Coppola did when she decided to direct and adapt the screenplay. While I think that when adapting a book it should be as close to the source material as possible, Coppola might have done better straying away a bit in terms of tone and style. While the dark humor might have one expect that this is Mean Girls, instead of having a "being hit by a bus" suicide, the tinges of comedy are too infrequent to seem natural and the sometimes hokey camerawork ruins the pacing of a scene for a misfired attempt at humor. For example, we not only hear but also see that Lux actually writes her crushes names on her underwear thanks to “X-ray vision.”
Where Coppola does succeed is at intimate moments with scenes involving just a few characters and dialogue, able to include the viewer as a member of the conversation, instead of an observer watching. I appreciated the intimacy given the literally dire thematic material involved. In a country where over 60% of teens seriously contemplate suicide, 9% have attempted it at least once and it is the 11th leading cause of death for all Americans (according to the Centers for Disease Control), The Virgin Suicides grim tale is definitely with us now more than ever for its thoughtful yet emotionally lacking look into the subject that both sexes can appreciate, thanks to the gender-perspective narrating.
Virgin has seemingly slipped through the cracks, after the much better teen-suicide, based-on-a-book, dark-humored drama of 1999, Girl, Interrupted, won over audiences and accolades. However, what keeps this film out of the retail store dollar bin is the great performances Coppola wrings from her lead actors. Dunst, an actress who always brings a little something extra to a role, holds the screen against her five other sisters, being vulnerable on the inside while a “stone fox” on the outside. The film also introduced early-2000s it-boy Josh Hartnett, who isn’t given much to do but flirt, yet he gives some of the films funniest moments, like when asking his gay father's advice on picking up a girl – a needless scene but one that breaks up the tension. Kathleen Turner (in one of her last roles on the big screen before fully focusing on stage work) and James Woods steal scenes as the girls buttoned-up overly bearing Christian parents who confine the girls. Where Coppola fails in the screenplay is giving her characters depth, something that if done could have easily given Turner and Woods chances at an Oscar, an award that has eluded both of them in their lengthy careers. Coppola has made a lengthy career path for herself, receiving box office and critical success with the first installment of Bill Murray’s “manopause” period of films, Lost In Translation, winning her an Oscar for best writing. In 2006 she re-teamed with Dunst, having her play the titular role in Marie Antoinette, in the overly artistic and indulgent, somewhat fictional account of the well-known historical figure.
Making its debut at Cannes and playing the film festival circuit, The Virgin Suicides was picked up by the now defunct Paramount Classics (aka Paramount Vantage), a distributor that never seemed to get box office returns. The film was their fifth release and first minor success. Budgeted at a surprisingly low $6 million given the finished and expansive look to the film, it wound up with a so-so $4.9 million ($7.2 million adjusted to 2010 dollars) and about the same in foreign grosses. With the off-putting title, the film was mismarketed as a Heathers-esque adult drama while it is more in tune with the sexual and religious awakening of Carrie but without the supernatural powers and no pigs harmed in the making. Strangely released at the end of April and starting out in 18 theaters with a fairly high venue average, by the time it slowly reached 275 theaters, it was unsuccessful at maintaining that momentum.
Poetically told, The Virgin Suicides, tricks the audience at the end by having us realize that we haven’t really learnt any more then what we started with. This type of story-telling is not for everyone, but the end result is still haunting and maybe this is what Coppola wanted to accomplish. Women are a haunting creatures – shot by the female eye, the wondrous shots of the sun through leaves (a trademark of Coppola) and other sun-kissed shots (even the poster for the film is of a sun-blurred Dunst) add a bit of femininity to the male narration. Men are not meant to understand women and their doings and being told from a male perspective, that is exactly what happens. But told with snappy dark humor, creativity, tender warmth and confusion, it is the closest that any of us guys might ever get to be in their shoes.
1/2 stars
Verdict: With Us