- The Observer, Sunday January 28 2001
Pay It Forward (124 mins, 12) Directed by Mimi Leder; starring Kevin Spacey, Helen Hunt, Haley Joel Osment
Woman on Top (92 mins, 15) Directed by Fina Torres; starring Penelope Cruz, Murilo Benicio, Harold Perrineau Jr
The Low Down (96 mins, 18) Directed by Jamie Thraves; starring Aidan Gillen, Kate Ashfield
Dead Babies (105 mins, 18) Directed by William Marsh; starring Paul Bettany, Kate Carmichael, Hayley Carr
Mimi Leder's Pay It Forward is rather like a volcano designed by a confectioner. It begins with an engaging explosion followed by a nonstop lava flow of sentimental syrup that engulfs the audience. In the opening scene, a reporter is distraught when his old car is destroyed while he's covering a crime story one rainy night in Los Angeles. Suddenly, a middle-aged guy out walking his dog gives him a brand new Jaguar. Who is this eccentric benefactor? A madman? A fairy godfather? Apparently he's just a rich lawyer who's agreed to 'pay it forward' (as opposed to 'pay it back') to three chosen beneficiaries in response to a kindness received from a stranger.
We flash back four months to discover that the 'pay it forward' movement began with Trevor (Haley Joel Osment from The Sixth Sense ), an 11-year-old schoolboy in Las Vegas. Sensitive Trevor has a recovering alcoholic mother (Helen Hunt), who works her heart out as a waitress in a go-go bar, and an abusive, absentee father. He's come up with his altruistic scheme in response to an assignment from his new social studies teacher, Eugene Simonet (Kevin Spacey). The teacher has set as a class project: 'Think of an idea to change the world - and then try to put it into action.'
Simonet is a verbally precise control freak, a loner traumatised by an incident in youth that has left his face so disfigured that people supposedly recoil from him, though his face doesn't look much worse than the pitted skin of Richard Burton, James Woods or Geoffrey Rush. What he's like, of course, is anti-social Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets, who just needs the love of a sensible, down-to-earth waitress such as Helen Hunt (reprising her down-to-earth waitress act) with a troubled son to restore his humanity.
Little goes unexploited in this trite film, but what goes unexplored is the notion of an altruistic scheme that might transform the world having its origins in that hellhole and number one ecological disaster, Las Vegas. One can imagine George W. Bush liking this film because it embodies his idea of a world so transformed by charitable deeds that no taxes need be levied and no constraints placed on venial conduct.
Made in English by the Venezuelan director Fina Torres, Woman on Top is a whimsical exercise in magic unrealism starring the beautiful Spanish actress, Penelope Cruz, as Isabella, an inspired cook from northern Brazil. Suffering since childhood from motion sickness, Isabella must always be in the driver's seat, whether having sex or steering a car. This propels her macho husband into adultery to assert himself, in revenge for which she moves to San Francisco to stay with her black transvestite childhood friend (Harold Perrineau Jr), a type of confidant as socially de rigueur nowadays as a personal trainer or a nail technician. Before you can say Nigella Lawson, Isabella has become the toast of San Francisco, followed by a flock of drooling men and hosting a TV cookery show that equates food with sex. Meanwhile, as a result of an insult to the sea god, the fish in her home town have disappeared, the family restaurant has closed, and only magic can restore things. But in this world of Latin American kitsch, that's neither Bahia nor there.
Finally, two British films about the lives of twentysomethings by first-time writer-directors. The better of the pair is Jamie Thraves's The Low Down, a virtually plotless tale of a few days in the drifting lives of a group of young people with what they regard as temporary jobs, still living like students in ill-furnished flats in north London. Three of the men, once contemporaries at art school, run a little firm making comic papier-mché props for TV game shows; one of the women works for an estate agent.
Constantly wreathed in a fog of cigarette smoke, they're inarticulate, feckless and unreliable. Their principal source of humour is impersonating movie stars (usually De Niro). Their minds, when not befuddled by booze, are coping with hangovers, and they're untainted by knowledge. When the pivotal character (Aidan Gillen) finds himself playing squash with a politics lecturer, he says that he'd always wanted to get into socialism but never knew which books to read.
They are not my idea of good company, but Thraves doesn't patronise them as he takes a candid, vérité-style look at their lives. They are sad sleepwalkers, decent enough in their way, and it's difficult to think of what there is in Blair's Britain, or what there might be in Hague's, to stir them into action. Still, they are cherishable, caring innocents in comparison with the repellent collection assembled in William Marsh's Dead Babies.
This is a version of Martin Amis's 1974 juvenile shocker updated to the early twenty-first century, and it comes over as a cross between The Mousetrap and an anglicisation by Adrian Mole of The 120 Days of Sodom. An obnoxious group of well-heeled English layabouts are joined by three Americans at a country mansion belonging to an upper-class twit obsessed with his bad teeth. They've gathered for a polymorphous, perverse orgy fuelled by unfeasible quantities of alcohol and vast quantities of drugs, and it is revealed that one of their number is a psychopathic murderer allied to an international organisation of nihilists, with homicidal designs on fellow guests.
Most of them die, and none too soon. Despite the nudity, the couplings and the outlandish conversation, it's a tentative, tepid affair, boring and incoherent. It's so bad that I could well believe that the director's final cut had been stolen and that he'd had to reconstruct his film from discarded first takes.
