Reese Witherspoon had to come from somewhere, so why not a high school socialite world remake of Dangerous Liaisons, with monied prep school Manhattanites in the roles of French courtesans?

The picture is neither adept enough to be engaging or camp enough to be funny. It also includes a cringe-inducing courtship between Ryan Phillipe (as Valmont) and Witherspoon. Phillipe, tasked to deflower the chaste Witherspoon (she is the daughter of the headmaster), becomes “totally infatuated” with her. Why? Because she makes him laugh. How? Because during a car ride, she made faces at him by sticking her tongue out and screwing her nose up and using her fingers on the top of her head to simulate the look of a lunatic/horned beast.

Oof.

Hollywood conceits come in many forms. In the Denzel Washington/John Lithgow film Ricochet, the screenwriter presumes he can replicate the idiom of the inner city. There is a scene with Washington, as the good black man who “made it out” and Ice T, as the bad drug lord who is still “in.” Their exchange is gussied up Shaft. The screenwriter even concluded the film with Washington saying “You can kiss my black ass!”

The screenwriter of Ricochet?

So, Hollywood’s sense of urban culture is lacking. But you’d think it would have a better handle on places closer to its heart, like suburbia. Think again. Hollywood sees the suburbs as a vast wasteland, a place for vacuity and the spawning of disgruntled screenwriters. Hollywood’s grasp on Maple and Main is no more firm than its grasp on “the ‘hood.”

Which brings me to American Beauty, a false film of suburban decay. Kevin Spacey has a midlife crisis, though it really isn’t a true midlife crisis, because he is married to Annette Bening, and she is so cartoonishly gruesome that Spacey’s crisis seems less a subject of introspection than one of survival. Bening approaches her character as Martha Stewart on methampehtamine (and that’s the joke – get it? – because Martha Stewart is so insidious). She is so outlandish that any acting out on the part of her husband and daughter seems ho hum. And then there is the tranquilized housewife neighbor, and the homophobic (or is he?) Marine neighbor, and the disaffected, let-down teens. You’ve seen it all too many times to be touched.

What is good about the film? A few things. It ends tidy. Spacey plays decidedly above the material (though, being the only empathetic character, he is difficult to judge because you beg for his return during every one of his absences).

But what is bad is really quite awful. The characters are abused rather than drawn. The use of Bening as Mothra the Suburban Scene Eating Hydra not only minimizes most character reaction, but it seems cruel.

Bening is so demonized and dehumanized – all for the illumination of Spacey – that you pity her.

Erin Brockovich. A gaseous, trite star-vehicle wherein Julia Roberts gets to play working class via trashy clothing and a foul mouth. In essence, she reprises her wardrobe from Pretty Woman. But she’s a good gal underneath that rough exterior, a moll bruised by bad men, and a mother who neglects her children only to tend to the people who really need her – Californians who have been poisoned by Pacific Gas & Electric and their evil design to put chromium into their groundwater.

Like Don Quixote dressed for a red light district, Julia teaches us she is smarter than lawyers, heart is what matters, she can get anywhere with a little cleavage, and, everybody who ever crosses Erin Brockovich is a tight, humorless, prig who has underestimated her pluckiness, to their ultimate misfortune.

Naturally, the PG&E people are faceless, stupid drones, who Erin confronts and morally upbraids in a settlement meeting; her co-counsel is the tightest, most frigid of shrews, who Erin bests with her superior knowledge of the case file (and the inelegantly communicated fact that Erin is not frigid); her boss is an addled schmo who is a much better man with the likes of Erin in his corner; her coworkers are mean, fat cows who envy Erin for her lean legs and prominent breasts; and everyone else is just in the sway of her estimable bosom, brawn and benificence.

And the victims, yea God, the victims. Stephen Soderbergh lards this experience with 5 or 6 sit-downs during which Erin learns yet again how many children have been lost, how many tumors have cropped up, and how many chemotherapies have been delivered, so she can empathize and show us all why she does what she does.

These working class hero tales almost always fail because Hollywood demands the canonization of the little folk. Contrast Erin Brockovich and its falsity with A Civil Action, where the little folk still remain humble and stoic (it has Kathleen Quinlan, who has trademarked humble and stoic), but at least we get to see the hubris and idiocy of their lawyer, John Travolta.

The best part?

In real life, Brockovich’s beau (played in the film by Aaron Eckhart), along with one of her ex-husbands, attempted to extort money from her after she hit it big. And those poisoned by PG&E? Many of them (650 in all) are suing their lawyers because their slice of the pie ($333 million) was not, to their mind, large enough. And Brockovich herself is currently investigating the mysterious illness causing facial tics and verbal outbursts that started among 12 teenagers in Le Roy, N.Y.

God I love the little people.

The End of the Affair. Ralph Fiennes plays the same brooding, angry, obsessed pain-in-the-ass pathetico he played in The English Patient, only
this time, he’s mooning over the icy Julianne Moore, not the icy Kristin Scott Thomas. Neil Jordan’s film is as grim as WWII era England, Moore nudity is regular but oddly uninspiring, and Stephen Rea steals the picture with his stoic yet growing turn as Moore’s cuckolded yet loving husband. Still, we are stuck with the disturbed Fiennes bemoaning the loss of his love over and
over and over again.