When a filmmaker is compelled to come out and make an apologist introduction to his film before it screens, warns you that, “you may need to give it twenty or thirty minutes” and cautions about the tone and kooky character, you know that’s probably not the greatest sign.
One minute you’re on top of the world in Hollywood, the next you’re yesterday’s forgotten trash. And from the highest of possible highs — an Oscar win for Milk,” his first produced screenplay — screenwriter-turned-feature filmmaker Dustin Lance Black, could be in for a rude awakening when the dust finally settles from the scattered reviews of his convoluted and aimless debut directorial gig, “What’s Wrong With Virginia.”
A witless and garbled drama — or wait, maybe a comedy too — that isn’t especially interesting, dramatic or funny, Black’s semi-autobiographical impotent mental illness picture is almost immediately tedious and mostly unremarkable, until deep into its second half when it morphs into something even worse: a wholly ill-conceived and unsalvageable mess that may have no shot at real distribution aside from the straight-to-DVD kind.
Tonally disjointed, thematically scattered, and never really committing to any one sensibility ‘Virginia,’ begins, ostensibly, as a drama with a dry and subterranean — but rarely clever — sense of humor and then eventually transforms around the 2/3 mark into a full-blown, excruciatingly lame comedic experience that doesn’t know when to say when. Its painful, almost two-hour running time, that feels more like two and a half hours of continuous endings and refusing-to-die denouements, also does it no favors.
Acting vaguely as a toothless satire and screed on small-town religious values and small-mindedness, the film is also part coming-of-age tale, part mental-illness picture, with a small, side dish of political lampooning, ‘Virginia’ is as clueless and unself-aware as its psychologically decaying protagonist. Sporting Southern Christian sensibilities — and the dark sexual underbelly that often comes with religious fervor — “What’s Wrong With Virginia,” is simply ineffective and messy. A jumbled amalgam of Black’s conservative Mormon upbringing in San Antonio, Texas, his family’s history with schizophrenia (no really) and a mentally disturbed aunt, ‘Virginia’ tries to cram so much into its compromised narrative, yet actually delivers little worthwhile commentary about any of its various subjects, and fails to create any characters you give a damn about.
Opening with an muddled introduction that is too obviously a portentous slice from the film’s conclusion,
Jennifer Connelly stars as the titular Virginia, a mentally unstable mother who seems to be slowly unraveling minute by minute. She’s having an affair with the local fetish-happy married Mormon Sheriff (Ed Harris) who’s about to run for public office.
There’s a confused tone set early on when a “Cops”-like TV arrest segment pops up seemingly out of nowhere, but Black commits greater sins by employing an aggressively dull, expository (plus mumbly and semi-intelligent) voice-over from the film’s true protagonist, Connelly’s illegitimate son Emmett (Aussie Harrison Gilbertson) which is supposed to set up the back story about his kooky mother and the worthless Southern tourist town they both desperately want to escape. Virginia and the Sheriff do a weekly, kinky hanky panky session (sometimes involving spanking and chains), the teenage Emmet — constantly embarrassed by his mother strange behaviour — is obsessed with finding his real father, and both of them dream of moving to San Francisco with Emmet’s aunt.
Complications arise everywhere, but no one single problem seems to be the thrust of the film, and therefore the narrative feels rudderless. Virginia is essentially diagnosed with lung cancer, but she’s convinced that she’s pregnant. Matters get stickier when Emmet starts to fall for the Sheriff’s daughter (Emma Roberts), while the Sheriff realizes his state senate run could be compromised as the boy is all too well aware of his affair, but there are far too many detours among these trails. Toby Jones plays the local boardwalk-based amusement park manager (where Virginia works) who, when he’s outed trying to solicit sex from a man in a park, threatens to block the Sheriff’s plan to paint the Ferris wheel red, white and blue. Amy Madigan stars as the religiously devoted, but starting-to-suspect Sheriff’s wife, Alex Frost as their police officer son and Yeardley Smith also co-stars, but no character is particularly compelling.
At some point, the picture’s humor devolves to levels of poorly executed melodramatic camp, and desperately starts reaching for laughs via comical attempts at violence. Convinced she is pregnant with the Sheriff’s child — she sticks a load of panty hose under her dresses to appear pregnant — Virginia pulls off the ruse for a limited amount of time and receives hush money payments which she thinks will allow her to move away. But when the checks stop coming, she gets her hands on a pistol and attempts a half-assed robbery. Meanwhile, Emmet is trying to run away with the Sheriff’s daughter to get married in Atlantic City and tries to pull off his own inept heist. Somehow this bizarre dramatic comedy ends in a hail of bullets and by the time the lead is fired, you’re too exhausted from the tired events to care let alone, god forbid, shed tears. And no editing room triage can rescue the picture either; when Black fully commits to that bizarre second half, well, there’s really no going back from there. The bed has been made and the director has to lie in it.
If it sounds confused, disordered and baffling, that’s because it certainly is. One could say it chokes on its ambitions, as it is seemingly attempting to say several things at once, but that’s really just being extremely generous. Odd and confounding, everything is wrong with ‘Virgina,’ a holistically botched effort that is something you’ll probably want to avoid, if indeed it ever reaches theaters. [D]