The Virgin Suicides

No, I did not go to this movie because I’m a dirty, horny old man. Well, maybe a little bit (I’m not old, anyway), but I really did want to see if Sofia Coppola could direct better than she can act. Believe me, she can.

This is the story of five teenage sisters in 1975. Celicia (Hanna R. Hall–little Jenny from Forrest Gump) is the youngest. At the beginning of the movie she tries to kill herself, but she’s found just in time to save her life. Her parents (James Woods and Kathleen Turner) can’t quite figure out why. But the psychiatrist (Danny DeVito in a very short role) who talks with Celicia knows that she doesn’t have enough contact with boys her own age.

So the Lisbons have a party with boys and everything. Unfortunately, the kids don’t really hit it off, so Celicia quietly goes upstairs and throws herself out the window. This time she succeeds. (She apparently hit a gate with spikes on it, but she looked like she was floating. I didn’t get the gate part until they were pulling the thing out of the ground.)

The rest of the movie goes through how her older sisters get through their parents’ (especially Mom’s) overbearing rules. Lux (Kirsten Dunst) is the only one we really get to know. She is a little hornball. They have a couple of guys over for dinner and she plays footsie with them. She turns the guys at school on (go figure). She gets the No Dating rule broken.

That’s when things get really bad. Trip Fontaine (Josh Hartnett from The Faculty) falls for Lux mainly because she doesn’t show any interest in him. (He’s the stud of the school.) Trip talks to Dad, who is also the high school math teacher, and gets him to talk Mrs. Witch into letting him and some of the guys take the girls to the Homecoming Dance. Dad’s one of the chaperones, so nothing can happen, right? Well, Lux stays out all night with her new friend and gets all of the girls stuck in the house for the rest of their lives. No more school. No more boys. No more rock and roll. No more life. Things go downhill for all of them after that and it builds to a final act of rebellion that no one in the town will ever forget.

Meanwhile there’s a group of guys who live really close to the girls are falling in love with them, but they know that they’ll never really get to know them because of their parents.

Basically it’s a really dark coming of age movie. It’s narrated by one of the guys (Jonathan Tucker from Mr. Music and Sleepers, Anthony DeSimone from Sofia’s first short Lick The Star, and a few other kids that I don’t know) across the street many years later (Giovanni Ribisi). Occasionally we see Trip as a grown up, but we really don’t know what happened to any of the kids. We just know that they all grow up in ways that kids never should in the year that the movie covers.

I’ve read a lot about this movie telling us exactly what it’s like to be a teenage girl. Now, like the doctor at the beginning of the film, I’ve never been a teenage girl, but I’m not really sure that I learned anything about them from the movie. Maybe if they had read more of Celicia’s diary… But the movie is from the boy’s point of view. We see some of the girls’ daily lives and it does feel like it was directed by someone who knew what they were talking about, but there really wasn’t much to the girls as characters. They were basically objects of affection for the school.

Strangely, tough, this worked. The point wasn’t to tell us how it feels to be a young girl, it was to tell us how it feels to be a young person. It showed us how kids deal with death. Yes, they are saddened by it, but they can’t really show it. And if they choose to kill themselves, you’re not always going to see signs in their eyes. Sometimes it will come at a time when it seems like they are setting themselves free from whatever it is that would cause them to take their own lives. And those kids that you barely know? They have a huge impact on your life. Only one person committed suicide while I was in high school and I didn’t really know him. He was just another guy in one of my classes. But I’ll remember him forever because he didn’t seem like the type of guy who was so upset with life that he would deprive himself of it. I don’t know why he did it. I guess no one really does.

In this case, though, we know why the suicide happens. Kathleen Turner is the most overbearing, egotistical mother in recent film memory. And you thought your parents were overprotective. As time goes on you learn to hate her more than her kids probably ever could. James Woods, on the other hand, is just weak. He can’t stand up to his wife. He’s a milquetoast in the worst sense of the word. He’s just as much to blame as Mom is, but it’s harder to hate him because, dammit, he tries.

These two actors, of course, tower over their younger co-stars, but the rest do very well, too. Kirsten Dunst is perfect as the lusty little girl who everyone wants, but no one wants to defile. But did we expect her to be anything but perfect? She’s a very good actress. And not too bad to look at, either. Josh Hartnett, who keeps threatening to become a real actor, does very well as the young man who is so confused by his feelings for Luz that he thinks that he might be wrong about them. Only when he grows up does he realize that he may have really loved her…or does he? Maybe he’s just rationalizing what he did. My only problem with him is the fact that, with the long hair of the 70s, he looks a little too much like his Faculty co-star, Clea DuVall. Not as cute, though.

Sofia’s direction alternates between dead serious (the scenes with the girls stuck in their house) to near parody of the times (Trip strutting the halls to the strains of Heart’s “Magic Man”). It all works very well. Even when Luz’s eyes literally twinkle we feel like that’s what they would do if we were really looking at her. I say we let Ms. Coppola keep directing only if she promises to never act again.

Kudos on the music choice, too. From ELO’s “Strange Magic” to 10cc’s “I’m Not In Love” every song seemed to fit the scene that it was scoring. And Air did a great job on keeping the actual score in the period.

So Sofia Coppola puts a great directorial debut out. Not perfect. Maybe a little too distant, but very good nonetheless. Go see it, but don’t expect easy answers. Or a happy movie.

Watch for Scott Glenn in a small role,too.