A Dirty Shame
by Les PhillipsVincent Canby once wrote that John Waters can make a dinette set look funny simply because it's a dinette set. The opening shot of A Dirty Shame proves that he can make a middle-class neighborhood look downright hilarious, simply because it's a middle-class neighborhood. Waters' new film takes place in the present, but many of his characters are still living in the Fifties, and the first hundred seconds of A Dirty Shame satirize that decade more effectively than a hundred minutes of Far From Heaven ever hoped to do.
Far From Heaven thought that Hartford was a state of mind, but John Waters knows that there's no place like the veritable, palpable Baltimore, the hometown he's never left. Yet, in a different way, A Dirty Shame proves that Waters can go home again -- back to filth, or perhaps Filth.
The first half of the film is his best work ever, in large part because of its gleefully scatological energy, not really seen in his work since Desperate Living. A Dirty Shame flaunts a seven-year-old's delight in dirty words, a 14-year-old's obsession with body parts and orifices, and more lascivious energy than a troop of crazed Cub Scouts. This is also a technically accomplished film. The first forty-five minutes moves fast, with a precision in cutting and camerawork I've never seen from Waters. So really this is John Waters' first screwball comedy, the kind that doesn't let you think about how stupid everything really is, for very long. I have not heard an audience laugh so hard and so long in a movie theater in a long time.
Reviewers with larger readerships than mine have already given away much of the plot of A Dirty Shame, as well as many of the best jokes.
Tracy Ullman plays Sylvia Skittles, a conservative blue-collar housewife who is transformed into a sex addict by a concussion. (A half hour or so into the film, it becomes clear that every resident of Baltimore is either a sex addict or a prude. The picture could do with fewer concussions.) Sylvia's high-school age daughter Caprice (Selma Blair) is a former exotic dancer who worked under the stage name Ursula Udders, now forcibly retired by court order and serving out her house arrest in Mom and Dad's attic.
Johnny Knoxville plays Ray-Ray the sex addict messiah. You will meet other characters named Paw-Paw, Marge the Neuter, Loose Linda, Tony the Tickler, and a few others I'd rather not list here. Most of the actors in Waters' early films who weren't old high school comrades, like Divine, were amateurs, recruited in sleazy waterfront bars and God knows where else. The actors who populate A Dirty Shame seem to be professionals, but they look rather like the motley crew of moral degenerates who worked for Waters in the Seventies, and that's crucial to the film's credibility.
There is very little actual sex in this film, as sex is generally conceived, but there sure is a lot of lust, and no one has ever succumbed to middle-aged heat in quite the way that Tracy Ullman does here. She is, not to put too fine a point on it, brilliant and engaging. At times Sylvia's mania does become unwholesome --
bursting into the living rooms of families you've never met so that you can demand sexual favors seems a bit untoward. Still, Ullman makes Sylvia so likable that you really want her to get what she wants, or, at least, what she needs.
A Dirty Shame has many brilliant jokes and set pieces, but I'll mention just one: Tracy Ullman's nymphomaniac version of the hokey-pokey, performed in a nursing home rec-room. If, for some reason, you buy a ticket to A Dirty Shame and conclude after ten minutes that this film is not for you, do not leave. Stay for the hokey-pokey. Divine himself could not have executed this scene better. In fact, Divine, much as he might have wanted to, could not have done this scene at all.
The last half of the picture is not, by any means, Waters' best work. There is going too far, and then there is going too far, and then there is John Waters unable to let go of his idée fixé. More and more people get knocked on the head. There is a great deal of, shall we say, activity, and the camera gets very excited as well. Amidst all this excitement, the plot, such as it is, runs out of control. In fact, this is one of the most exhausting 88-minute films ever made, and it's not necessarily a good kind of exhaustion.
Still, you get Patricia Hearst as the lead speaker at a Sex Addicts Anonymous meeting, and the great Mink Stole as Marge the Neuter (in Pink Flamingos, she sucked toes). Jean Hill has a small role as an angry, virtuous housewife (in Desperate Living, she murdered her employer by sitting on his face). Mary Vivian Pearce, a player in virtually every Waters film, is easily missed (she plays someone labeled "Nonjudgmental Sex
Addict"). Waters' loyalty to the surviving members of his old stock company is typical of his essential warm-heartedness. So is the soundtrack, with its amazing collection of cheesy and sleazy pop songs.
A Dirty Shame is a banquet, and, by the time it's done, none of the poor suckers are starving.
Not for all tastes, to be sure.
My Life Without Me contains one unique bit of unfulfilled promise. It won't matter to most viewers, but it matters to me, so I'll lead with it. A man (Mark Ruffalo) meets a woman (Sarah Polley) in a laundromat, rather adores her, lets her leave with his coat, because she's cold.
The coat contains his copy of George Eliot's Middlemarch -- it's a paperback edition -- with his phone number written on the title page. It's even a real phone number with a real British Columbia area code, not one of those silly "555" things that always appears in studio pictures. All right-thinking people know that Middlemarch is the greatest novel in English. I have never seen it used or alluded to in a film.
And then, it isn't used here either. We never hear about Middlemarch again. Perhaps some other version of the script tried to make it significant within the scope of the film. Then again, Ann (Polley) is terminally ill, with only two months to live, and a solid reading of Middlemarch would probably take up one of those two months. But at least her new boyfriend would have wanted her to read Middlemarch, if she had more time...
My Life Without Me is a low-budget, naturalistic, emphatically Canadian film about a dying young mother who works as a janitor and lives in a trailer park, directed by Isabel Coixet -- tentatively to incompetently, with nothing like the narrative or imaginative scope necessary to fully encompass the topic. But it's worthwhile. When the camera simply sits back, or stays in close focus, it reveals some really authentic emotional confrontations. The acting is excellent and unpretentious. Moments that might have seemed clichéd seem very real.
I'd like to move for some official OED redefinition of the word cliché and its derivatives. If you're moved, it's not cliché. To me, cliché implies worn, received, devoid of its original potency. Bits of My Life Without Me --
Ann recording the next 10 to 12 birthday messages for each of her two small daughters, Ann bestowing acts of random kindness on her co-workers and neighbors, Anne reflecting on all the things she never had a chance to do -- are scarcely original, but they're made fresh and true here.
In The Sweet Hereafter, Sarah Polley seemed too smart for the rest of the town (a sense that is heightened if you happen to have read Ms. Polley's cranky, intelligent, highly political letters to the editor), and at first that seems true here too. You can't believe that this well-spoken, alert young woman has landed in a trailer park. After a half hour, the essential democracy of the film reminds you that anyone can end up in a trailer park, with the wrong luck. Scott Speedman, known mostly for playing golden-boy preppies, plays a golden, sweet-natured loser here. Ann loves him; as she dies, she faces the anguish of knowing that he's really just a boy, and that she's leaving him alone.
Ruffalo is outstanding as Ann's lover -- fumbling, smoldering, head over heels. The great Amanda Plummer is wasted in a small role. Everyone should go out and rent Butterfly Kiss to see how great Amanda Plummer is.
I'm glad the direction, intended to be natural, is merely rough. It gives the world of the film more credibility.
©2004 Les Phillips
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