Many faces of Eve

Noel Vera

The tagline of Marc Munden's "Miranda" goes "smartsexydangerous…"
which is about as clever as the movie gets. Christina Ricci plays
the eponymous character while John Simms, a BBC TV veteran, plays
Frank, the bored-with-his-life librarian who falls in love with
Miranda the moment she sets foot inside his library.

What follows is the kind of understated romantic comedy British
cinema does fairly competently, spiced up with a muted version of
the kind of hot-colored, dark-shadowed visual style combined with
bright pop-music soundtrack young-turk British filmmakers (Guy
Richie and Danny Boyle come to mind) like to put in their work.
Ricci, being a fairly well-known Hollywood star, gets top billing
(her involvement probably helped obtain the funding for this
project), but this is really Frank's movie and Simms goes about his
role quite well, whether hungrily ogling Miranda's shirted breasts,
or narrating the increasingly unlikely events in his life in a sort
of wondering, half-dismayed manner. His carefully detailed reaction
to every move Miranda makes, culminating in his falling into bed
with her, is what makes this early part of the film so amusing; it's
the story of the geek that made good, the dork whose fondest dreams
have come true yet he still can't quite bring himself to believe in
it. What makes Frank so appealing is the conceit that given such a
situation, the geek or dork would rise to the occasion, that he
wouldn't commit some sexual or social faux pas that would drive away
the object of his desire. Frank is every dork's fantasy of being at
heart a sweet romantic, every dork's heartfelt belief that his
secret caramel core would be sufficient to win the girl he loves.
This is the stuff of which minor romantic comedy classics are made.

Too bad Munden (directing from a screenplay by Rob Young) couldn't
sustain the fantasy. He throws in a dark past--turns out Miranda has
a shady background, complete with Christian (John Hurt), her by
turns pimp, impresario, and mastermind; and Nailor (Kyle
MacLachlan), a financially powerful sociopath--that's more colorful
than convincing. It helps, somewhat, that Hurt, when not playing
masochistic sufferers ("The Elephant Man," "1984"), is excellent at
playing mysteriously decadent Europeans, and that MacLachlan's
character seems to be an extension--an older version, so to speak--
of the career-defining role he played years ago, the young man
seduced by sex and violence in "Blue Velvet" (Nailor could be a
darker variation of Frank, something the filmmakers fail to play
up). The resonance and skill these two bring to the picture isn't
enough, however; the movie makes a half-hearted turn into territory
previously covered by Jonathan Demme's "Something Wild" and David
Lynch's "Blue Velvet," and becomes yet another parable of an
innocent sucked in over his head by a femme fatale. Munden and
Young, unfortunately, aren't Demme and Lynch, and their slight
little film suffers as a consequence.

Demme has (or had, at least in his early work) the ability to bring
out the eccentricity and appeal of nearly all his characters, from
main lead to smallest supporting role; in "Something Wild" his femme
fatale Audrey (played by little-girl-voiced Melanie Griffith) was by
turns funny, sexy, and by film's end not a little sad, considering
the life she's led (and which Demme so deftly sketches for us
throughout the course of his film); opposite her is Ray (Ray
Liotta), her terrifyingly violent former husband--"Miranda" badly
needs someone as scary as Ray, to goose things up, galvanize
proceedings a little.

Lynch's film gives us a stylized, even idealized vision of small-
town life, then flips the bright surface over to show us the
underside, seething with sexual sadism and subconscious horror. His
femme fatale Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini), is one of the darkest
victims ever shown on screen: brutally corrupted the same time she's
pathetically vulnerable, she's like a rape victim as an object of
desire; Lynch's villain Frank (Dennis Hopper), Dorothy's rapist, is
the monster that gives the film its irrational dark power.
MacLachlan in "Miranda," by way of comparison (please skip to the
next paragraph if you plan to see the movie), remains what he was
when the film began, a faintly promising, fairly amusing menace
(though it's alarming to observe how much MacLachlan has aged--the
hanging jowls, the baggy eyes--and still remains somehow boyish,
immature; a sagging Peter Pan who refuses to grow up in his head).

Cristina Ricci isn't the obvious choice to play Miranda--she has the
figure, but perhaps not the apparent beauty or surface allure. She
does grow into the role--she has the mysterious reserve you remember
when she played Wednesday in the Addams Family movies, and the
requisite enthusiasm and lack of inhibitions when naked in bed with
Frank. As she shows her different sides to Frank--some true, some
false, some apparently true that later turn out false--she has the
kind of eerie aplomb to carry off her apparently self-contradictory,
possibly underwritten character successfully.

"Miranda" isn't an especially bad film, or even a mediocre one; you
can appreciate the skill with which it was made, the same time you
appreciate the--I don't know how to put it--lack of passion, or
failure of imagination that keeps this film from being anything more
than simply "decently made" or "interesting." The cast--appealing
Simms, mysterious Ricci, always amusing Hurt, alarmingly aged
MacLachlan--add much to the film's pleasures, but ultimately don't
help it transcend the niche it has made for itself. Not bad, but not
particularly memorable.

(First printed in Businessworld, July 18, 2003)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)