APRIL 18, 2008 - VOL. 1, ISSUE 11

The Virgin Suicides and Drugstore Cowboy could both be considered breakout films for their respective filmmakers.

Well, I don't think that's enough to tell you how I saw these films. The Netflix queue reads like an archive of my whims of a year ago. Films I expressed the smallest interest in take that long to creep to the top of the list, and by then it's impossible to remember why I put them there. I can make a game out of guessing from whom I heard of a title, or what genre or filmmaker I happened to be exploring on some day in question. Two movies will arrive in succession, usually with some hidden thread linking them. It is like being in a film studies class where the teacher screens a double feature illustrating some esoteric commonality, except the only professor is myself a year younger and there is no prologue telling me what to look out for.

The Virgin Suicides and Drugstore Cowboy both arrived in my mailbox on the same day. Reading the synopsis for any information except the title and running time spoils the game. Neither title meant anything concrete to me—I, for some reason, associated Drugstore Cowboy with Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers and so was expecting a comparable visceral visual experience; and The Virgin Suicides immediately conjured up vague images of suburbia.

I turned out to be right on that latter point. The Virgin Suicides presents the messy tableau of the self-destruction of a family of beautiful girls, all set against the saccharine backdrop of 1970s Michigan suburban landscape. A narrator guides us through its boyhood group's infatuation with the four blonde Venuses of the Lisbon family, headed by a xenophobic mother and wilting father. The story introduces itself with two suicide attempts, first failed and then successful, of the family's fifth and youngest daughter. Everything flashes by incoherently in the film's rush to get to its second act; it's almost as if the storyteller cared and understood less about poor Cecilia than her family did. We hear a few snippets of stock neighborhood gossip, but the treatment is superficial.

The film seems to find its groove as the family settles into a new dynamic (but how would we know how different, when we are given so little to contrast it with?) and the four remaining girls are furtively courted by high school boys. But it's not an easy groove; again, it feels as though the needle is skipping across the surface of the platter throughout the remainder of the film. The most enigmatic and beautiful of the Lisbon girls, Lux, played by Kirsten Dunst, is sought after by the outsider and equally beautiful Trip, played by Josh Hartnett. The boy, unused to a girl who doesn't throw herself at him, undertakes a careful and deliberate orchestration of obtaining permission for a homecoming dance date, ending in a passionate, teenaged consecration on a lonesome nighttime football field.

If this novella within the film could have been the entire film, I would have been satisfied. In it, the filmmaker's light and subtle style works excellently at evoking an experience of adolescence (even if the actors possessed the unrealistically mature attractiveness that they do). When Lux, whom we have seen so little of except in angelic portraiture, wakes up alone on that football field, hopelessly past curfew, her dawn taxi ride home contains that all-too-familiar space between a bad lesson learned and systematic, institutional, superfluous consequence.

But then there's the business of the rest of what happens. The remaining unappetizing chunk of gristle on this steak is chewed on as the mother sequesters the girls in reactionary fear, smothering them inside the home until they eventually all commit suicide. The siren-sung group of boys tries to reach out to the mysterious locked-up maidens, but it's too late: the film has already spent its emotional capital. For the rest of the movie, we are simply expected to already understand all the nuances of the ensuing tragedy and angst and reverie. Not that it's especially difficult to figure out—it's all rather inevitable—but the audacity of the hollow, meaningless evocation left me with a sour taste. I tried desperately to explain this by finding fault with the story itself, to find some human or emotional aspect that was missing, but I had to begrudgingly concede that all my expectations were met. It could only be, then, the halfhearted reliance on vague imagery; the charmless hope of the film that by going through the motions it could achieve satisfying singularity.

The credits rolled, and (as I'm sure anyone already knows) Sofia Coppola's name floated by. It wasn't surprising, because the film inexorably tied to her, Lost in Translation, elicited many of the same grievances from audiences. In those situations, though, Ms Coppola's style may have worked a little better: only dealing with a handful of characters (Lisbon daughters number two, three, and four simply merge into a hazy aggregate); in a bizarre, otherworldly city that simultaneously demands and defies explanation. It was a story that lent itself to artful suggestion and diaphaneity.

So, looking back, perhaps I was curious on that day I queued this film along with Drugstore Cowboy about each auteur's formative efforts. Gus Van Sant has also had an honest, similarly hit-or-miss career, creating films that simply work or don't. My Own Private Idaho versus Psycho; or you could go with one of his third-party candidates, like the too-sweet Finding Forrester.

Drugstore Cowboy reminded me very much of the book You Can't Win, a spare and plainspoken autobiography of a man who lived in the clandestine hobo jungles of early twentieth century America. The film, complementarily, is the captured stream of events of a pill-popping junkie's waning weeks robbing pharmacies and maintaining a constant high. You Can't Win, published in 1923, helped inform the beat generation of the secrets of the American underclass, and it was the writer William S. Burroughs' favorite book (he referenced its style in his 1953 book Junkie). Burroughs makes a cameo appearance in Drugstore Cowboy as a contentedly drug-addicted priest living in a flophouse, making explicit here his influence on Mr. Van Sant and completing this amazing loop in my mind.

These influences create the sharpest distinction with The Virgin Suicides; where that film is oblique and gratuitously coy and cocky, Drugstore Cowboy is honest, ingenuous, and upfront. Again, we are treated to an opening narration as the film opens on Matt Dillon's Bob speeding to a hospital in the back of an ambulance. But instead of waxing lyrical on the romanticism of teenaged obsession, it's a straightforward introduction: "I am a junkie." It's not in the self-pitying or self-aggrandizing way that a person would tell you in order to make you feel a certain way about him—you imagine this could be how Bob introduces himself to strangers, the same as someone else might say where they work. It's not meant to be a stylistic contrast between a deceptively simple statement and a chaotic visual panopticon (Trainspotting comes to mind), but it sets the tone for the rest of the film so that you can trust the story to give you the straight truth in an only slightly schmaltzy way.

Bob runs a little drugstore-robbing crew with his girlfriend, Dianne, played by Kelly Lynch. Dianne is probably one of the most interesting drug addicts in movies. Her life with Bob is unstable, to be certain, and she's hopelessly under the power of narcotics, but she still manages to radiate a comfortable sexiness, and her love for Bob is real, tactile, and unquestionable. Don't confuse that love with a neediness, or a mere dependency; one scene finds her receiving a reproachful but affectionate, magnificent lecture from Bob's mother that solidifies the deep bond and history between the two junkies.

It all goes to the charm of this film: its genuineness; its honesty; its humanness. Why become obsessed with the mere imagery of tragedy and grief and change, a la The Virgin Suicides, when you can simply present it faithfully and let it have a small but powerful, lingering, effect? The thread of change from beginning to end is elegant. We see Bob steal drugs, do drugs, get tired of drugs, go straight——we see all the changes happen very clearly, we understand all the transitions. Then, the entire movie contains itself into the final line of narration as Bob rides in the back of that ambulance: "I was still alive. Hope they can keep me alive." That's the whole movie, in ten words. Everything that comes before it is the evidence, the nuggets of information that let us know just how important that hope is. That change in Bob's outlook is subtle, and really only sinks in a few minutes after the black screen of the ending. But it stays with you when you realize just how crucial it is.

I think the thing that endears me to some great artists is their fallibility. For every Drugstore Cowboy, there may be an Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. What's the fun in following an artist if they don't fail miserably once in a while? It simply makes their masterpieces even more thrilling. Sofia Coppola may not have enough of a library of work to discern a lot of meaningful patterns, but it has to mean something when the first widely-distributed effort is crippled by irritating flaws, and an obsession with the spectacle over the careful understanding of past influences.