Hey folks, Harry here with another sure fire winner from Miramax, cough cough cough... I've heard pretty divided opinions about this film ever since Sundance, and Miramax isn't planning on releasing this till November, so they could be working on its problems to fix what ails it, but this sounds like a lot of problems in this sucker.... So we'll see. For now, here's Dr Solar....
I took the Blue Car for a drive and it crashed!
Hey Harry, Dr Solar here with another review of a local test screening in New York. This time a new Miramax flick that the testers were comparing to American Beauty and In The Bedroom. Yeah right.
The Blue Car is, innocently enough, the story of Meg, an 18-year old outcast (emphasized in the publicity materials) high school student who lives with her mother and younger sister, Lily, after being abandoned by their father several years earlier. The film opens with Lily narrating the scene where her father drops her and her sister off at their home in his, what else, blue car just before driving off into the distance, almost, never to be seen again. Actually it is more a crappy blue chevy nova.
Meg is befriended by her high school AP English teacher, Mr Auster (who oddly resembles my dentist) who sees the potential in Meg and sets off tutoring her in poetry during his lunch breaks so that she can enter a contest and win. He tells her to reach deeper within herself. Her poem ostentatiously is called "Blue Car." He even leaves a chocolate car wrapped in blue tin foil for her.
All the while, Meg's home life is in chaos. The mother, a dead ringer for a young Stockard Channing, works all day and goes to school at night. What she is studying and why are never explained. The mother is allegedly an alcoholic according to the publicity materials I was given, but we never see it in the film. The closest scene is one where she is passed out on her bed wearing a slip, and there are used tissues and an empty bottle of valium nearby. She had just been turned down for a job that she had been anticipating to get. Not like we didn't see the obvious plot device coming.
Meg's sister is also pretty disturbed herself. Early in the film, she takes a pair of scissors and makes deep cuts in her foot. It apparently has happened before because Meg tells her that she can't keep doing it. Lily proceeds to go on a hunger strike during one of the film's lighter moments where, when the mother insists Meg make her eat, Meg keeps her at the table in front of an uneaten peanut butter and jelly sandwhich by aiming a toy gun at her. Lily soon becomes facinated by angels upon hearing about them from the priest during a mass. She insists that she is an angel. This all comes soon after she discovers a picture of herself as a small child dressed in an angel costume with her father giving her a loving hug. Soon thereafter her hunger strike begins to turn more serious, and, after holy communion, she lifts up her arms mimicking the crucified Jesus, whom she is looking at, and collapses. They! feed her intravenously at the hospital where she complains that the food is keeping her from growing her wings. The mother later tells Meg that Lily threw herself out of the window in the psychiatric ward where she had been placed by the doctors.
Things continue to go from bad to worse for Meg. She does indeed win the preliminaries of the poetry contest, but the finals are in Tampa, Florida during Spring Break. Her teacher offers to ask the school for help in funding her trip, but she insists that her family can pay for it. Well, I think they couldn't. Although her mother says she doesn't have the money, Meg attempts to take it out of her own savings account but is thwarted when the teller he informs her that any withdrawals must be cosigned by her mother. Whom she doesn't even bother to ask to co-sign. Things go from bad to worse as she's fired from her job for stealing, Lily commits suicide, and there is a confrontation with her mother that ends with her getting slapped in the face and leaving altogether. Meg dramatically tosses her house keys into a coin dish near the door on her way out.
Near salvation occurs when she is staying with her friend's family and meets her friend's brother. The friend incidentally looks like a clone of the lead actress from Welcome to the Dollhouse. Anyway, the brother is a comic diversion. He is addicted to prescription drugs, and has Meg steal them for him from a local drugstore while pretending to be picking up an order for someone else. He talks about how if you do something bad, you need to then do something good to even things out. Like steal something, and then give food to a homeless person. He promises to drive Meg to Florida for the poetry contest. A contest which becomes increasingly trite as more and more tragedy befalls her. Well, instead of taking her to Florida, he breaks parole and steals all of his families' valuables and disappears.
Now, where is the teacher in all of this? Prior to the film's climax, he appears sporadically comforting Meg as she leaves work early to cry in his arms. Meg watches him play a touch football game with his son and friends from a distance while peering into his backyard. He shows support for her, caring, and even reads a page from his "novel" to her which he keeps beside him always in a leather bound book. He even turns down an advance by Meg where she tenderly kisses his neck in a supportive hug.
The climax of the film turns alot of this on its head. She steals her mother's engagement ring, pawns it along with her jacket and bike for $75, and takes a bus to Florida. She has no money so she buys a coke and eats fries left on a table in a restaurant. She sleeps on the beach. Eventually she runs into Mr Auster and his wife and teenage son. We learn earlier in a clinical manner from Mr Auster that he lost his four-year old son some years earlier. Well, the mother is an alcoholic, and tells Meg that poem is pronounced poe-em.
Her teacher offers to walk her home, and then begins kissing her on the beach. No tongue. They go to a hotel room in which it is never explained whose hotel room because he leaves. And she is sleeping on the beach. And to add further insult to an audience who may be willing to believe that she eventually got a place, he asks if he can still walk her home. Anyway, he clumsily makes love to her. Well, he has sex like Robert Romanus does to Jennifer Jason Leigh in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Awkward and quick.
Meg becomes upset, and, while Auster is in the shower, she looks at his novel only to find it nothing more than a blank notebook with a quote by an author as the part he had read aloud to her. Knowing that the creepy teacher is a phony, she write a new poem at an all night diner about their affair, and reads that one at the contest dedicating it to him to make it all the more obvious.
She throws that poem in the ocean, makes up with her mother, and even calls her father. Her father comes by in his "blue car" and takes her to live with him. All is now happy.
In the publicity materials we are promised a torrid, yet tragic, love affair between an emotionally suffering young girl and her teacher who must come to grips with his own feelings of loss. Blue Car is nothing more than an ABC After School Special. Girl loses dad, girl is seduced by teacher.
This film is bad on so many levels that it is not possible to document them all in a single review. First of all, this film is unintentionally funny. This was meant to be a serious drama, but the audience kept laughing throughout. For example, I cracked up during the scene where Meg is told that Lily jumped out of her window in her room at the psychiatric unit. What psychiatric unit, located on an upper level, has windows that can open? *doh*
Another problem is that the the audience's identification with, and sympathy for, Meg is never established. Meg's narration of the father's abandonment of his children undercuts the scene. The relationships between Meg and her mother, her teacher, and her sister are never developed. The film goes about taking this teenage girl, and subjecting her to continuous tragedy and humiliation for two hours for no apparent reason. I did not see how she is changed by all of these events in the final act. The film is merely just trying to get a reaction from the audience. I do not consider that drama.
There are also too many characters in this film for what it is. There is no need to have a scene establishing that the teacher has a son. There is some guy named Don having dinner with the girls and their mother who we never are told what his relationship to this family is. Furthermore, he's never seen again. Meg has a job with a boss who appears in two scenes. One where he is kind and understanding, and another where he is aggressive and uncaring. The brother of Meg's friend is funny, but his entire part of the movie is superfluous. It does not drive the story forward. They really needed to stick with the four principle characters and establish and develop their relationships. It is about Meg, her teacher, her mother, her sister, and her father who is conspicuous by his absence. They needed to tell us clearly what this poetry contest means to her. They needed to decide whether Mr Auter is really falling ! in love with Meg, or just using her for his own sexual gratification. Is the mother good or bad? Is the father who has left them good or bad? Is even Meg good or bad? Just take a stand on these characters' motivations.
Finally, my biggest complaint with the story is its ending. The father comes back and is the savior! All after one phone call from Meg. He is the reason these characters are all so screwed up! His abandonment is the fuel that drives the conflict. How can he then come back and be the savior? It makes the whole previous two hours seem pointless. Oh, and he comes back in the same crappy blue chevy nova.
If the blue car comes to your theater, it is best to just let it drive by.
Dr Solar
