Fumbled story blunts satire’s barbs
Film tackles serious human issues, but moments of offbeat humour seem out of place
VIRGINIA
Starring: Jennifer Connelly, Ed Harris, Emma Roberts. Director: by Dustin Lance Black PG: violence, coarse language, sexual content Running time: 112 minutes Rating:
There is no greater source of dramatic tension than a crazy mother.
Trained to believe in the matriarch as model of primal nourishment and perpetual martyrdom, when this image of perfection is marred by mental illness or an inability to truly empathize, it leaves a hole that we’re desperate to patch.
It’s a subconscious source of stress, and when mined correctly, it can elevate even mediocre material.
That said, while Virginia blasts apart the bedrock of family dynamics, it fails to exploit the motherlode to any great effect.
An ambitious piece of quirk that takes aim at Mormonism as well as ingrained sexual hypocrisy within the American political system, Virginia has some elephantine targets in its sights.
Satire that stretches the side of a barn is easy to hit, but it’s awfully difficult to deliver a death blow without excellent aim, precise skills and endless confidence. Otherwise, you end up with a painfully slow bleed and a great big mess.
Virginia definitely falls on the messier side of the dramatic balance sheet. The narrative directorial debut from Milk screenwriter and former Mormon Dustin Lance Black, Virginia feels like a long- brewing piece of payback from an outsider desperate to tell his own sob story.
It also feels a little soapy as it opens with a psychotic mom learning that she may have a terminal illness.
Virginia ( Jennifer Connelly) has been in and out of psychiatric care ever since she torched a house back in her salad days, but now that she has a teenage son on the verge of being a man, she’s trying to pull her act together.
The only obstacle standing in the way of Virginia’s past and potential future is Dick Tipton ( Ed Harris), the local Mormon sheriff. Dick has been using Virginia as his private sex slave ever since he saved her from the asylum.
The two have a long- standing arrangement that allows the lawman to indulge his kinkier fantasies without compromising the physical sanctity of his loyal wife ( Amy Madigan), who is now so lonely, she contemplates killing herself with a dry cleaner’s garment bag.
At this point, one may want to stand two steps back and ask: Is this funny satire, a grotesque send- up of America’s homegrown religion, or just plain veiled misogyny masquerading as underdog chic?
The same way Lars Von Trier tries to tell us he’s truly emancipated and cares about women, yet tortures them sexually in every film, Black seems to set Virginia up as the unlikely heroine, yet spends every scene constructing her eventual martyrdom.
Because Connelly has cunning dramatic reach, she is able to single- handedly override the fire burning at her feet and the ropes holding her to the stake.
She doesn’t do this by demonstrating her well- scripted heart of gold. She makes us care, and brings the film some well- earned gravitas by making us see and feel the panic and confusion of mental illness.
Virginia is sick, and while some of her symptoms result in “hilarious” misadventures and the odd bout of accidental retribution, Connelly ensures we see her as more than a half- formed comic device with a saintly trajectory.
By the final desperate scenes, when she utters the proof of her maternal commitment, we realize this movie is pure tragedy — despite its sad indulgence in offbeat comedy.
Every time Black tries to make this movie funny, it’s just awkward because the human stakes are so high and the humour isn’t sharp enough.
Virginia actually feels like killing a lamb with a hatchet — a messy and inhumane slaughter of ideology and character carried out to please some higher presence, which in this case would seem to be the intellectual elite.
Mormons emerge as hapless twits or plotting hypocrites obsessed with power, and after the second underwear joke, it all feels tired.
A pastiche of Victorian cliché, fallen woman pity and misplaced sarcasm, Virginia just doesn’t have enough heart to pull off the big dramatic challenge.
Perhaps it was cathartic for Black to make this movie, but for those of us left to watch, Virginia’s haymaker punches at the status quo feel desperate without being smart, and if there’s one thing the nutbar matriarch deserves, it’s a little respect for being intelligent enough to see through the lies and denial the rest of us swallow without question.