Bret Easton Ellis returns with another less than stellar piece of cinematic underachievement.
"Oh. My. God. I. Am. So. Bored." |
The
Curse of Downers Grove hastily announces itself as a sort
of supernatural thriller about a small town cursed by a series of bizarre
events leading towards unexplained deaths in teenagers. Both the title and the premise are misleading
with respect to what the film really is, a continued exercise in American Psycho author Bret Easton
Ellis’ nihilistic outlook on relationships and social dynamics.
The setup is your typical teen thriller
concerning high school girl Chrissie Swanson (Bella Heathcote) who finds
herself stalked by a cokehead football player named Chuck (Kevin Zegers) and
his posse of jocks. Chrissie, through
voiceover narration, is about as sure of whether or not the increasing
harassment purported by Chuck and his gang is the work of human or inhuman
forces as the film itself. In other
words, the film can’t make up its mind whether it wants to be about urban
legends or a standard stalker thriller and ultimately only succeeds in one
area. The real question is, will this
redeem Bret Easton Ellis from his involvement in Paul Schrader’s The Canyons?
Largely, the answer is yes although I have no idea what
the whole thing has to do with curses. When
it’s just about a junkie obsessive who fixates on making Chrissie’s daily life
a living Hell, it works really well with far better acting and focus than
Schrader’s film. Bella Heathcote, soon
to star in Nicolas Winding Refn’s The
Neon Demon makes Chrissie into a plucky and resourceful heroine who is more
concerned for the safety of those around her than her own. Kevin Zegers is especially effective, making
the muscle head antagonist neurotic, irrational and dangerous. What would a Bret Easton Ellis villain be
without a cocaine habit? Did I mention
Tom Arnold cameos as Chuck’s abusive and domineering father? Was he aiming for Rodney Dangerfield’s
dramatic turn in Natural Born Killers? In any event, for much of The Curse of Downers Grove I was
reminded of the collegiate antics of the infinitely better The Rules of Attraction with Ellis’ usual obsessions on display
including but not limited to sociopathy, predatory stares, ennui, narcissism,
drug addiction and momentary extreme violence.
Loosely based on the novel Downers
Grove by Michael Hornburg, it would appear the source material was much closer
to a coming of age tale of adolescence before Easton Ellis tipped the story
over towards his dejected outlook of over privileged teens.
"How do I keep ending up in these movies?" |
Watching The
Curse of Downers Grove, I found myself caring a great deal about Chrissie’s
fear and anxiety over her unwanted stalker and annoyed the film kept inserting
notions of the supernatural. The
standard thriller worked perfectly fine and held my attention even when it
rushed towards its conclusion and the amount of mischievous vandalism and
harassment Chuck gets away with seemed ludicrous at times. You have to wonder why the film needed all
these hyperkinetic subliminal edits suggesting demonic forces were at
work. Why, to better suit the title,
which begs the question why call it The
Curse of Downers Grove in the first place?
Although Chrissie can’t help but wonder how much of the small town urban
legend is playing into her misfortune, it comes off as ultimately irrelevant in
the scheme of things. Yes I feared for
Chrissie but not for the reasons the film seemed to suggest. It was enough she had a creepy stalker
proceeding to invade her every waking moment.
Did it really need to try and evoke the supernatural, too?
SCORE
-Andrew Kotwicki