73 out of 73 people found this review helpful.
Martin Donovan and Christina Ricci in The Opposite of Sex (LGBT W/O)
Date of Review: Jun 23, 2001
The Bottom Line: The Opposite of Sex is a movie that amuses you on the surface, then annoys you. You really have to work to get past the annoyances.
Summary
Christina Ricci plays a bitchy, bossy, scheming, and bigoted 16 year old, and the filmmakers try to figure out how to make us like her.
DeDee Truitt (Christina Ricci) is a tornado. A one-woman destructive force, she lies, steals, and cheats, all the while offering us her cynical, childish view of the world. That it is childish is understandable, as her moral age is around 2, where "If I want it, it's mine" is the guiding principle.
Maybe that's overly harsh. I do know 2 year old children with better morals.
Her physical age is 16 and she's not afraid to use her body to get what she wants. If depictions of a 16 year old engaging in casual manipulatively-inspired sex, smoking and drinking are not your bag, you might wish to give this one a pass. If you were to meet this sociopath in real life, you'd want to make sure you didn't turn your back on her. In a movie, at a distance, she's much easier to like, although she still managed to repel me. She's vulgar, too, and not in a nice way, but acidly, and negatively.
eplovejoy, when discussing Balsamic Dreams, a book about the baby boomer generation, writes "...most people assume we'll indulge any and even all of their shortcomings if they just show a little self-deprecating self-awareness". Perhaps this is what Don Roos, the writer and director of The Opposite of Sex had in mind in making Dedee so repellant, but self-aware. By making a pre-emptive strike against her character, are we then disarmed? Is it bad form to say "You're right! You suck"?
In the audio commentary track, on the DVD version of this movie, Roos explains that Dedee was his attempt to break one of the Hollywood conventions; that the lead character should be sympathetic. Success!
One of the other conventions that Roos flouts is in having Dedee, in a frequent voiceover, smooth over all the holes in the plot. Sometimes this talking to the camera works pretty good, such as in High Fidelity, or even Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Here, though, it's like someone making catty remarks in your ear while you're trying to watch the movie. It is occasionally clever, but I'd like the DVD to include a "non-commentary" track, devoid of Dedee overspeak, to see whether the movie stands on its own.
The Plot briefly summarized
Dedee, our delightful heroine, exits Louisiana with her one-balled boyfriend Randy on her way to Indiana to torment and abuse not only her half-brother Bill (portrayed with muted mildness by Martin Donovan, a veteran of Hal Hartley movies) but also his live-in boyfriend Matt (Ivan Sergei) and Bill's late lover's sister Lucia (LOOSH-ya)(played with hemmhorrhoidal perfection by Lisa Kudrow).
After meeting Matt (possibly catching him in the act of phone sex), she proceeds to seduce him (over time, of course, I don't want to give you the impression he's easy to "convert" from homosexuality), declare herself pregnant and run off with Matt and a bunch of Bill's money. Jason (Johnny Galecki, Darlene's sensitive boyfriend on Roseanne), (the guy that Matt was probably having phone sex with), confronts Bill about what he's "done" with Matt, and threatens to go public with an allegation that he (Bill) molested Jason when he was a student if he doesn't cough up Matt. Bill and Lucia chase after Matt and Dedee to Los Angeles in an attempt to clear Bill's name and set Dedee on the straight and narrow. Bill's late lover's ashes, a gun, a dead body, a coroner's report, a one-ball man, and nipple rings figure prominently in the ensuing chase/road/anti-buddy movie. Carl, from the Sherriff's department, (Lyle Lovett), doggedly trails along and tries to protect Bill and catch the romantic attention of Lucia.
The plot, ultimately, is not that important. There's really no reason for these people to be traipsing off across the country, as we don't really get to see much scenery along the way, and in no way are the towns all that important.
It's all about character.
Dedee says, as she's approaching Bill's massive house (inherited from Tom, his late lover), "If you think I?m just plucky, and scrappy and all I need is love, you?re in over your head. I don?t have a heart of gold and I don?t grow one later. But don?t worry, there?s other people a lot nicer coming up". This is true. One of these much nicer people is Bill, a mild-mannered high school teacher, quietly but openly gay, and openly phlegmatic. His unflappability is the source for a few chuckles, such as when he corrects the grammar of a cretin writing about him on the bathroom wall ("There's a sentence fragment here. What is it? How would you fix it?").
He exhibits the patience of a saint, or at least the resignation of a martyr, when suffering the punishment of the attention of Tom's sister, Lucia. Lucia is more than Dedee's match in acidity, having years of experience in cowing her students. But Lucia's vulnerability is in her essentially empty life. She's spent her time pining after her gay brother, and after he passed away, worrying about Bill. In the audio commentary, Roos emphasizes that neither he nor Kudrow wanted Lucia to be a "fag hag", which I understand is a woman who hangs around gay men, because they are gay. To me, Lucia just seemed especially bitter. But funny. ("I have a death wish too, but I direct it towards others")
Who do you love, and why?
The pitiful chase scenes, gratuitous but not graphic violence and grating voiceover serve to distract from what are genuinely interesting themes: What is the purpose of sex? Why do people still want to enter into relationships when there are so many downsides and the potential consequences are heartbreak and loneliness? Are you kidding yourself if you try to make every physical relationship something more? These are universal questions, not exclusive to heterosexual or homosexual relationships.
To be fair to Dedee and her character (I'm experiencing some pangs of guilt for not liking her very much), she does appear to have a revelation near the close of the picture that puts her on the road towards enlightenment on these issues. Whether this revelation is consistent with the ungenerous Dedee that we've seen previously is open to debate.
The movie asks: Is sex really necessary? Other than immediate gratification, what's the point? I have to give credit to Roos for having a purpose in making The Opposite of Sex. The questions he asks, masked though they are by intentionally irritating elements, are still important. I just wish I didn't have to put up with Dedee to see how the film resolves them. Perhaps there's a message here as well. As the catalyst for Bill's re-engagement with the human race, after sleepwalking ever since Tom's death, Dedee is actually doing him a favour. Dedee is doing everyone a favour, by putting into place the circumstances by which everyone's lives are changed. Hmmm. I suppose we can't choose our catalysts. Maybe I like her now.
A character that inspires this sort of ambivalence is a novelty, and The Opposite of Sex is worth seeing just for that reason.
Things I didn't like about The Opposite of Sex
- Aligning religious folk with whackos. Hasn't religion been used as a straw man a few too many times?
- The lightness with which false accusations against teachers are treated. Bill is a victim of Jason's horrible false accusations, and suffers for it. Once Jason decides to recant, he goes the other way and makes false accusations against the school board. Is this any better? Oh well, all's well that end's well, right?
- The DVD audio commentary with Don Roos. I've never heard so much whining! I can't remember a single scene that Roos was happy with. There was always something wrong. The actors didn't give a good enough performance, or there wasn't money to do it right, or it was always raining, etc etc. Give it a rest and tell me something interesting.
The upshot
Barely recommended
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This review is a contribution to a write-off that is running concurrent with the annual celebration of LGBT culture and resistance. The write-off was organized by ed_grover and Stephen_Murray.
Argonut created our Web Page, which has links to all participants and is located at: http://mynook.com/writeoff/?WID=1 Please join us in reading the entries of the fine writers listed below:
AdaDavis, Bleuchance, ed_grover, eplovejoy, erik_kosberg, frazzledspice, hadassahchana , hashal, Howard_ Creech, hvojr, jiahong, jkkelley, juliette, kamau, kuuleimomi, lernerj, lustylady, Macondo, mangiotto, Mr.Eyore, MrsNormanMaine, MuseMelpomene, NFP, naphtalia, nobody_knows, pageclot, phineaskc, prettyinpink, psychovant , ricardo_ramos, Sordid-1, Sloucho, solleks, Stephen_Murray, telynor, tlimjoco, and Wovengold
