Holy Smoke, dir. Jane Campion
This is a very strange movie, combining some real ambitions with downright sloppy self indulgence, and while its suspect heart eventually proves to be somewhere near the right place, its disregard for the intelligence and experience of its audience betrays a major directorial miscalculation. The movie is ambitious in its hinting about the possibility that romantic love may not be the only kind worth having, but then self-indulgent in abandoning this more interesting line of speculation for purposes of promoting what seems like a romantic conflict whose chief raison d'etre is that Jane Campion wants to show us how women can (and perhaps should) win the private battles they have with men and be heroic in the bargain.
I say self-indulgent because Campion fails to give the female in this conflict (Ruth, played with admirable passion and headstrong grace by Kate Winslet) a real opponent, and the conditions under which they come into conflict are themselves suspect from the moment the troubles start. Women win these battles all the time, and heroically, and it is long since unnecessary for artists to go out of their way to make this point again for us. In this, Campion is no better than Spielberg reworking well-worn emotions about the Second World War, and she insults her audience in pretending that we need Campion to make this triumph of womanhood seem possible. Yet, if this is not her purpose, why make PJ, the cult victim deprogrammer hired by Ruth's family to extricate her psyche from the spell cast by an Indian guru she meets on a coming-of-age trip to India, so weak? He is a strange character, equally given to quoting the Bhagadvad Gita and trailer park banalities about love. And not only is his talk unbalanced between high and low ambitions, his behavior is too (he is coming to save the psyche of a young woman, but also, judging from his actions once he arrives, happy to mix in the occasional adulterous action when conditions, and his inclinations, coincide). And he is not convincing as the cult exiter he claims to be. One begins to wonder how he ever succeeded 189 times before in the 3-day deprogramming process if he can't do better than he does in dealing with Ruth, who clearly has him outmatched from the start of their ordeal. In the end he is the one who is deprogrammed, of course, but there is nothing but a cartoon vision of manhood on display once we go looking for the grounds of his frailty, and by then, we no longer are asking why someone specializing in psychic imbalances is so obviously untutored in their own.
A serious storyteller bent on discussing men and women and their relations to each other must bother to let us know why they are coming together, why they are drawn to each other, why they have troubled by what they find, and so on. Campion's answers to all of these questions, as they apply to the cult deprogrammer, are laughably thin. While she gives us a very interesting and rich picture (though incomplete) of what has brought the young woman to this impasse, Campion seems to confirm my suspicion from her earlier films that she is not able to portray men realistically. Perhaps she has no interest in doing so, but it is a handicap here. Harvey Keitel has the chops to portray an intelligent and accomplished male who nonetheless gets himself into absurd and vulnerable situations (cf. "Head Above Water"), but for reasons that must lie in Campion's feminist mystique, he is not permitted to be a complete person. Yet her subject matter requires one. That she proves to have affection for both the broken man and the heroine she employs to break him is small comfort for those of us who can see the much more truthful and powerful story that could be told through these wonderfully intimate and raw emotional scenes Campion shows herself capable of creating over and again in the last half of Holy Smoke. The influence of ideas is too strong in this movie, and it is out of place in a story about people on the edge of themselves. While she had in her hands the makings of a movie as powerful as Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, she ended up with a confusing mass of disoriented emotion leading nowhere.
This is a very strange movie, combining some real ambitions with downright sloppy self indulgence, and while its suspect heart eventually proves to be somewhere near the right place, its disregard for the intelligence and experience of its audience betrays a major directorial miscalculation. The movie is ambitious in its hinting about the possibility that romantic love may not be the only kind worth having, but then self-indulgent in abandoning this more interesting line of speculation for purposes of promoting what seems like a romantic conflict whose chief raison d'etre is that Jane Campion wants to show us how women can (and perhaps should) win the private battles they have with men and be heroic in the bargain.
I say self-indulgent because Campion fails to give the female in this conflict (Ruth, played with admirable passion and headstrong grace by Kate Winslet) a real opponent, and the conditions under which they come into conflict are themselves suspect from the moment the troubles start. Women win these battles all the time, and heroically, and it is long since unnecessary for artists to go out of their way to make this point again for us. In this, Campion is no better than Spielberg reworking well-worn emotions about the Second World War, and she insults her audience in pretending that we need Campion to make this triumph of womanhood seem possible. Yet, if this is not her purpose, why make PJ, the cult victim deprogrammer hired by Ruth's family to extricate her psyche from the spell cast by an Indian guru she meets on a coming-of-age trip to India, so weak? He is a strange character, equally given to quoting the Bhagadvad Gita and trailer park banalities about love. And not only is his talk unbalanced between high and low ambitions, his behavior is too (he is coming to save the psyche of a young woman, but also, judging from his actions once he arrives, happy to mix in the occasional adulterous action when conditions, and his inclinations, coincide). And he is not convincing as the cult exiter he claims to be. One begins to wonder how he ever succeeded 189 times before in the 3-day deprogramming process if he can't do better than he does in dealing with Ruth, who clearly has him outmatched from the start of their ordeal. In the end he is the one who is deprogrammed, of course, but there is nothing but a cartoon vision of manhood on display once we go looking for the grounds of his frailty, and by then, we no longer are asking why someone specializing in psychic imbalances is so obviously untutored in their own.
A serious storyteller bent on discussing men and women and their relations to each other must bother to let us know why they are coming together, why they are drawn to each other, why they have troubled by what they find, and so on. Campion's answers to all of these questions, as they apply to the cult deprogrammer, are laughably thin. While she gives us a very interesting and rich picture (though incomplete) of what has brought the young woman to this impasse, Campion seems to confirm my suspicion from her earlier films that she is not able to portray men realistically. Perhaps she has no interest in doing so, but it is a handicap here. Harvey Keitel has the chops to portray an intelligent and accomplished male who nonetheless gets himself into absurd and vulnerable situations (cf. "Head Above Water"), but for reasons that must lie in Campion's feminist mystique, he is not permitted to be a complete person. Yet her subject matter requires one. That she proves to have affection for both the broken man and the heroine she employs to break him is small comfort for those of us who can see the much more truthful and powerful story that could be told through these wonderfully intimate and raw emotional scenes Campion shows herself capable of creating over and again in the last half of Holy Smoke. The influence of ideas is too strong in this movie, and it is out of place in a story about people on the edge of themselves. While she had in her hands the makings of a movie as powerful as Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, she ended up with a confusing mass of disoriented emotion leading nowhere.