Mid-1970s Detroit: 5 beautiful, blonde sisters are all but cloistered in their home, kept safe and sheltered by their strict, religious parents. A group of neighbourhood boys become obsessed with these rarely-seen girls, and their intensity and curiosity is only heightened when the youngest sister, just 13, commits suicide.
One of those boys, now grown up and middle aged, recounts the story for us – is he a reliable narrator? He can only piece together the story with the rare glimpses they got from the outside. Even among his friends, he admits, they still argue about what exactly happened. But it says something that they still talk about it in such detail all these years later. It’s a morbid fascination that comes to include us.
Writer-director Sofia Coppola (based on Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel) loves to hide what her leading ladies are thinking, but they never remain as mysterious as in The Virgin Suicides, where the sisters are unknowable not by choice, but by the restrictive actions of their parents. In fact, they are desperate to communicate with the world, and in the 1970s, given all the barriers around them, this was in games of telephone, hand-written notes, even a lamp flicked on and off – morse code, perhaps.
The movie is ostensibly about the sisters (the next-youngest, Lux, played by Kirsten Dunst, especially), but the story really belongs to and is told by the people – the boys and the men – on the outside, trying and failing to make sense of it all. This sense of the outside looking in is often visually represented through Coppola’s shots of the house outside. We peek in through the windows, through cracks of the front door. When a little girl is taken away by ambulance, all the neighbours gather on their front lawns to watch. The cinematic voyeurism only magnifies what the characters do on screen. Short scenes in living rooms and beauty salons assure us that gossip is as rampant among adults as the teenagers who can’t stop watching, even through a telescope, if that’s what it takes. And when one boy, on the cusp of manhood really (Josh Hartnett), finally achieves the impossible and sleeps with the unattainable Lux, she wakes up the next morning to find him gone. He’s left her because once he’s pierced the soapy bubble of her elusiveness and mystique, he finds that she is, in fact, an ordinary girl, and is no longer interested. The sisters’ mythos has largely been constructed by others and is ironically fueled by the strictness of their parents.
This is a tragic story, one that manages not to have heroes or villains, simply victims and witnesses. The boys, in their youth and inexperience, are never held accountable, nor even judged. And the girls remain aloof, forever lost, reduced to a mere absence, a wistful grief.
threatening, heck the landscape is vaguely threatening, but her uncle Teardrop (John Hawkes) is outwardly threatening, and let’s take a moment to remember that it’s his SEVENTEEN year old niece we’re talking about. Everyone’s a little nervous about the specter of her father and nobody’s above slitting the throat of a teenage girl if it means upholding the code of silence that seems to permeate local culture.
that no one at Hallmark was literate enough to get a good read on even the Cole’s notes of Pride and Prejudice. Of course, I would never want hipster George hooking up with bawdy Elizabeth, so I guess I can’t complain too heartily. Now I know that readers of Assholes Watching Movies are, on average, about a kabillion times more astute than what passes for programming executives over at Hallmark, so if you’re at all familiar with Austen’s work, then you know some serious bumps and misunderstandings are coming the way of Miss Bennett and her beau Darcy. Why, the small-town holiday festival itself is at stake!
But visually – well, even now, 20 years on, it’s unlike anything you’ve seen. While the heaven-scapes are vivid and sometimes downright magical, it may be the visions of hell that haunt you. Robin Williams tiptoes through a carpet of faces – anguished people buried up to their necks, barely more than the holes necessary for breathing left exposed. The faces are pale and full of yearning. It’s awful – and it’s really awful when there’s nowhere for him to walk but over them.
Tilda Swinton plays Kevin’s mom, Eva. Eva always struggled to bond with Kevin, who cried incessantly around her but was rather sweet with others. Can a baby deliberately antagonize his own mother? As a child, Kevin finds ways to blackmail his mother into getting his way. When Eva and husband Franklin (John C. Reilly) have a second child, accidents escalate and Eva becomes fearful of Kevin while his father can always excuse his behaviour. This fundamental disagreement puts a strain on their marriage. As a teenager, Kevin (Ezra Miller) commits a massacre at his high school, murdering many students. Eva transforms her life to support him in prison.
ASSHOLES WATCHING MOVIES 