Review of Rid of Me

There are good bad movies (as favored by the likes of Juno and Quentin Tarantino) and bad good movies like this one. I won't spoil the opening scene, a flashforward, except to say that we see two young women with their carts in a grocery store, one kind of punky, the other kind of preppy; the punky one accosts the preppy and does something pretty creepy that makes the preppy scream. The punky one walks away with a satisfied smile, and you may find it hard to stop watching after that. (Full disclosure: my wife found it all too easy…) Katie O'Grady does just fine as Meris, a sweet, self-contained young woman (though we recognize her as the punky girl from the opening scene), nervous as a whippet, who can't catch a break from her husband's high-school buds and their mean-girl wives when they relocate from California to his hometown in Oregon. When husband Mitch's old girlfriend (played, in a bit of overdetermined casting, by busty 6' cabaret singer Storm Large) turns up, the die is cast. "I hate alternative lifestyle people," says one of the film's minor characters, a prissy clerk in a candy store, but surely such people are the only conceivable audience for this film. After Mitch does what's expected, Meris tries out a new bizarro-world identity as an over-age riot grrrl, then slowly gropes her way back to where she once belonged. Writer-director James Westby seems more comfortable writing dialogue for the manager of an all-vinyl record store, say, than for a biker or a freak grrrl or an IT guy with a wife, a lawn and a dog, and the script gets very shaky at times. There's a flimsy subplot, for example, in which Meris makes friends with a Middle Eastern–looking couple with a cute baby, then shuns them after Mitch's dufus posse starts jabbering about "sand (N words)" with "Al Qaeda connections." You'd think that at that point Meris would be delighted to find a few friends of her own who weren't hostile jackasses. (And till then, btw, I'd assumed the woman with the baby was supposed to be Israeli.) To sum up, then, it's not "A Letter from Three Wives" or "Annie Hall," but "Rid of Me" is still good, harmless streaming Netflix fun, and there's a fine soundtrack; the cultist South Asian rock (Cambodian in this case) from the 60s seemed like a bit of a rip from "Ghost World" but at least that's stealing from the best.