*
Cast: Melanie Griffith, Lucas Black, David Morse, Rod Steiger
Director: Antonio Banderas
Rating: M
Running Time:104 mins
Opens: Now showing
Review: Peter Calder
It's hard to concentrate on a performance conducted by an actress who appears to have her face pressed against plate glass. Like it or not, Melanie Griffith's collagen-inflated lips leave little room on screen for anything else in the "directorial debut" of her partner Antonio Banderas.
The story, told through the eyes of a backwoods boy named Peejoe (Black), is about his eccentric Aunt Lucille (Griffith), who turns up with the freshly severed head of her abusive husband in a Tupperware container on the front seat and drops off her large brood before heading off to Hollywood where she dreams of starring in Bewitched.
Meanwhile (it's 1965) local blacks try to desegregate the swimming pool. This civil rights subplot is presumably intended to echo Lucille's search for personal freedom but the two storylines are never integrated and indeed the juxtaposition of comedy and drama is so jarring it's practically offensive.
Anyway, the race-fight story with its bad sheriff (a leering Meat Loaf) and good judge (Rod Steiger hams it up appallingly) is hokey and cliched.
The story, written by Mark Childress from his own novel, is like badly recycled Truman Capote. Its narrator announces pregnantly that "from the day Aunt Lucille showed up, nothing was ever the same" and the flirty and Lucille wraps her cracker-barrel drawl around portentous observations such as, "You only get one life; you can't sit around waiting for your next one to start".
Griffith's performance is creditably energetic and Banderas, who worked in his native Spain with the great Almodovar before becoming California beefsteak, displays flashes of sublime visual inventivenesss (he fades memorably from a boy floating in a pool to Hollywood palms reflected in a limo's paintwork).
But nothing is enough to disguise the whole affair's rather bored and studied stylishness. It's way too weird but in the end it's just not crazy enough.
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