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The Rules of Attraction
***
Cinema
Reviews - Week of April 4, 2003
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 18. USA.
110 minutes. Written and directed by Roger Avary; based on the novel by Bret
Easton Ellis. Starring James Van Der Beek, Shannyn Sossamon, Ian Somerhalder,
Kip Pardue, Clifton Collins Jr, Eric Stoltz, Faye Dunaway, Swoosie
Kurtz.
"The Rules of Attraction" follows
a bunch of kids across a wealthy New England college campus. They don't actually
do much college, but they're for sure collecting life experience. There's
a drug dealer conspiring against everyone, including, in effect, himself.
A girl who loses her virginity while passed out and covered in vomit -- before
that, she'd been saving herself for Victor, a guy she had never met and who
is on a long vacation across Europe. Hanging around on the sidelines is a
gay kid who has lots of empty affairs, and dreams of being a lover to the
drug dealer. Serving as decoration are a lot more non-stop screwed-up, drugged-up
partygoers and one member of staff, who isn't there to offer advice, but
smirks, feeds the young girls drugs and gets, you know,
favours.
It's a bleak vision, and from what I've seen of
university, not a particularly accurate one. But its events formed a brilliant
and truthful book by Bret Easton Ellis, who told his story through long passages
of rambling thoughts by each main character. Because the characters crossed
over into each other's tales, the book had insight into the way perceptions
of situations can be radically different depending on what obsessions were
eating up particular people's minds, and gestures can be interpreted based
on what we're trying to see instead of what is actually going on. In the
world of Ellis, people are smart but empty -- they see things that are happening
but take them wrongly, blowing up their implications through delusion, paranoia
or coked-out detachment. They know lots about academic subjects, pop music
and campus politics, and they let it all drift through their heads and phoney
conversations with a knowing, uncaring,
been-there-done-that-and-it-all-means-nothing nihilism. Reading an Ellis
book is fascinating but depressing; he knows a lot about certain kinds of
human minds, and basically tells us that they're for shit.
As a novel, "The Rules of Attraction" was penetrating
for its views on how interaction is not the same thing as communication,
and how values can become a blurry haze once people go off on that crazy
journey of becoming students. The movie seems less aware of human nature,
and more an attack on specific behaviour. There are voice-overs in which
the characters tell us what they are thinking, but not very much about their
conflicting takes on the same things, and lots about who they love or hate,
and the last batches of narcotics they consumed, and gory details of their
sexual encounters.
This may only be a slight shift in emphasis, because
pretty much everything that was in the book is in the film. But it makes
a difference. Hardly anything has been transplanted from page to screen that
is possible to identify with on any level; the less detail the film chooses
to offer, the less it stays in the rhythm of its characters' minds, and the
more it reflects the broad outlines of their personalities, which are simply
reprehensible. "The Rules of Attraction" hates its characters, and is so
determined to make that clear that it leaves no room for interpretation.
It is a dark, wild display of depravity, and even its moments of black comedy
play like slaps to the heads of the saps onscreen.
On its own level, though, "The Rules of Attraction"
works. The writer and director is Roger Avary, an email correspondent of
mine in my early teens, who I haven't heard from in a while but continue
to find a fascinating guy. Being the co-writer of "Pulp Fiction", everyone
got curious about what he would do on his own, and his directorial debut
was a stylish and arresting heist movie called "Killing Zoe" -- underrated
at the time, worth checking out. And then he announced he would tackle this
project, one of those books that everyone said was unadaptable, with good
reason. While his conceptual attitude to the material might not be the best
one, the specifics of his production are thrilling. Avary has good instincts
about where to put the camera to make something unsettling even when nothing
is happening, and he fills the frame with colour outlined by darkness, creating
a strong sense of activity undercut by an air of worthlessness. And diving
into the book's difficult structure as if it's no challenge at all, his movie
flashes back and forward, employs split-screens and literally rewinds and
starts playing again when switching its location.
The actors don't inhabit Avary's vision so much
as get swept up in its negativity. They have the thankless task of standing
there to be offensive puppets, yet live up to it remarkably well. James Van
Der Beek, who plays the geeky hero of the TV show "Dawson's Creek", is the
drug dealer, Sean Bateman. He stands firm but ill at ease, sometimes smiles
but rarely moves his eyes, and speaks in a voice that recites the motions
of human conversation with precision but no conviction. It's such a startling
embodiment of an evil character that I didn't even think of Van Der Beek
as playing against type until I got out of the cinema and remembered who
I had been watching. Shannyn Sossamon, as the sexually frustrated Lauren,
has a similar effect; her slouching to the side and speaking with a bedtime
moan is not new, except she normally makes it seem like a spunky personal
style, and here we get a feeling of someone drained, confused and
desperate.
"The Rules of Attraction" is a curious film, in
that it misses opportunities in a lot of ways and stays effective as a whole.
There is so much going on, filmed with such style, that I found it hard to
stop being fascinated. And as with "American Psycho", the last movie from
a book by Ellis, the filmmakers deserve credit for bothering to try at all
-- it takes guts to adapt material so extreme in nature and complicated in
structure. Calling this anything less than a good movie would be like criticising
someone for climbing Everest because they didn't take decent enough
photos.
COPYRIGHT©
2003 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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