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'Career Girls' fizzles
From Reviewer Paul Tatara
(CNN) -- I thought Mike Leigh's family drama "Secrets and Lies" was the best film of 1996, and this is saying something when you consider I've never before enjoyed his brand of wandering, jabbering cynicism.
In a way, all of Leigh's films are bold experiments; his screenwriting technique is (as far as I know) unique in the history of commercial cinema. He casts his actors before there's even a script, explains to them who their characters are supposed to be, then sits back and lets them improvise.
Eventually, a story unfolds. Then, and only then, does he sit down and write a screenplay. This approach worked like gangbusters for "Secrets and Lies," but if Leigh is still experimenting, his new film "Career Girls" is a decided failure.
It's not hard to imagine that group improvisation of a movie script is something that's either going to work or it isn't. Screenwriters do basically the same thing when writing on their own, but they can keep the shape of a story locked in their minds as they allow their spontaneous inventions to guide and shade the writing.
A bunch of actors (and a director) working together are bound to come up with some insightful moments, but, unless they're very lucky, they can just as easily wind up with a talky, poorly-structured mess.
Career Girls movie trailer. (Courtesy October films)
2.7M/68 sec. QuickTime movie
That's "Career Girls."
Women relive maladjusted past
Katrin Cartlidge and Lynda Steadman play Hannah and Annie (a nod to Woody Allen?), two former college roommates in their early 30s who are getting together for the first time in six years. They seem to be relatively adjusted adults, but we know better. The movie flashes back and forth from their college days to the present, revealing that when they were in school, they were about as maladjusted as you can be and still manage to make it out the front door in the morning.
Full movie trailer
The movie is split between these two worlds, and the success of the scenes is just as equally divided. The current-day story, in which Hannah and Annie try to come to some sort of peace settlement over what they put each other through in college, is often very funny and quite moving. The stuff back at the old alma mater, though, simply concerns itself with a series of grating character quirks.
It's difficult to understand how these two very talented actresses could be so on-the-money in one part of the story, and so completely off-the-mark in another. I certainly won't be able to convey, without your actually seeing them, just how screwed up Hannah and Annie are in their younger days.
Ticks painful to watch
Steadman imbues Annie with just about every herky-jerky physical tic known to man. To begin with, she's so horrified with the proposition of living an actual life, she's developed a psychosomatic case of dermatitis that (as Hannah says) makes the right side of her face look like she's been "doing a tango with a cheese grater."
Annie also avoids eye contact at all times, twitches and jerks her head around like a spooked sparrow, and stammers uncontrollably every time she tries to speak.
Cartlidge's Hannah is a verbally aggressive wacko who talks a mile-a-minute and uses her hand as a little puppet whenever she has to say something that's going to be a little bit too true. These college scenes, with the exception of one nice sequence in which the girls chat up an equally disturbed classmate of Hannah's (well-played by Joe Tucker), feel more like an extended, exceptionally cruel dorm argument.
Everyone just bitches and twitches while Leigh lines the soundtrack with every song recorded by The Cure before 1988.
I kept breathing a sigh of relief every time the story flashed forward again, and we were able to spend some time with the now-simmering women. I have to say, though, it's a tad difficult to believe that the quivering wrecks we were watching could possibly turn into sharply dressed business women within the span of six years.
A series of ridiculous coincidences
One great scene involves an apartment-hunting expedition for Annie. Hannah trails along as they check out one exceptional flat that's currently occupied by a lecherous, dope-smoking drunk. His attempts to seduce them have little to do with the plot, but they're funny, and the scene contains the movie's sharpest line: As she gazes out the window at the city below, Annie caustically opines, "I suppose on a clear day you can see the class struggle from here."
This scene is followed by three absolutely ridiculous coincidences in which the women stumble across an old beau who once broke their hearts, as well as the an old roommate and the previously mentioned chum played by Tucker.
This is plain old bad, and Leigh knows it. He makes sure both women state several times how amazing it is that they're suddenly seeing all these people that they haven't laid eyes on in years (within minutes of each other, I might add), but, uh-uh. That ain't gonna cut it. A single screenwriter would have cut it immediately. Editing isn't always an option, though, when five or six people are inventing the story as if it's a free-form dance. Too many cooks.
Leigh cranks out work at a rate that's matched in our popular culture only by Neil Young (of all people). He's a truly gifted director, and another film will be coming down the pike soon. "Career Girls" doesn't sizzle. It fizzles. I sure hope he drags Cartlidge and Steadman along with him when he moves to higher ground.
"Career Girls" contains profanity, nudity, a sex scene, and an unsightly skin ailment. The generic score is co-written by Marianne-Jean Baptiste, who co-starred in "Secrets and Lies." Rated R. 87 minutes.
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