Violet & Daisy genre-bending juvenilia
Film about two teen girls who kill for a living is stilted and adolescent
A lot of acting talent is squandered in Violet & Daisy, a sort of postmodern coming-of-age story about two teenage girls who kill people for a living then play patty-cake as they plan their next hit.
They work to a score of yearning pop hits — Angel of the Morning, for instance, as the girls, dressed as nuns delivering pizza, massacre a group of men with weapons hidden in the boxes.
It’s an attempt at irony (the skinny girl holding big guns, the way they pop their bubble gum as they fire, the whole nuns-with-pizza thing) that plays as if it was taken from Baby’s First Book of Postmodernism.
The girls are Violet (Alexis Bledel of Gilmore Girls) and Daisy (Saoirse Ronan of everything else, but we’ll just mention Atonement and Hanna), whose floral names are just another irritant.
They’re shallow adolescents and fans of the mythical pop singer Barbie Sunday who agree to one last job so they can get the money to buy Barbie Sunday dresses (“Let them know you mean business in the boardroom or the disco,” say the ads.) The dresses, they believe, will change their lives.
Affectless, glib and frankly ridiculous — Who are these girls? How did they get into the assassination business? — Vi and Dai get their next assignment. They have to kill an unnamed man who lives alone and who seems to welcome their armed visit. As they discuss how they’ll shoot him, he puts on an apron and goes into the kitchen to bake oatmeal cookies.
“We’re here to kill you,” they with a fingernail file,” Daisy says of a famed killer, a line that captures the screenplay’s clunky humour and its tin ear. Who calls it a fingernail file?
It’s preposterous, of course, but this is also part of its après-Tarantino esthetic, at least until Fletcher softens near the end and the movie turns into a father-and-daughter melodrama.
It’s hard to say if the tinkly piano, as a character writes a letter to his child, is meant to be sincerely moving or is a parody.
Either way, it’s like a file — a fingernail file, naturally — across your nerves. tell him.
“Then there’s no misunderstanding at all,” he says.
The target is played by the late James Gandolfini in a performance that’s about as gentle and persuasive as it can be, under the circumstances (that is, it makes no sense.) Gandolfini left a more fitting memorial — his delicate turn in the romance Enough Said.
At this stage, Violet & Daisy becomes a sort of three-handed play, with brief interruptions as Violet goes out to buy more bullets. Violet & Daisy was written and directed by Geoffrey Fletcher, who won an Oscar for his adaptation of the film Precious. Here he created a piece of genre-bending juvenilia in which heroines playing dress-up try to sound clever but emerge as stilted and adolescent.
“He once killed three ninjas