One destructive lady

CRAZY/BEAUTIFUL (ADEQUATE) Cert 12,100 mins

AS the split-title suggests, here's a film that can't quite make up its mind whether its heroine is to be spurned or envied, but offers a multiple choice in the teen-romance genre. It opens with Kirsten Dunst working out a community-service sentence for shoplifting by picking up trash on the California beach. It soon turns out she's a prize piece of trash herself, but rich, white and spoilt, playing "badaaaas cool" at school, and, according to her Congressman dad (Bruce Davison), a "persona non grata with every psychiatrist on the East Side". In Hollywood's eyes, of course, such minus marks are simply a high commendation for teenage empathy.

A straight-A Mexican-American boy (Jay Hernandez), who rises before the sun to catch the bus to the posh school whose benefits Dunst disdains, has the poor judgment to let her pick him up, too. Soon "Blondie", as her T-shirt proclaims for the benefit of the dimwits in the cinema, is undermining the dark-complexioned Latino's determination to win a place in Anapolis and go on to be a Navy pilot.

It is no criticism of Dunst, who plays the fille fatale role with the irresponsible sexuality of an infantile heartbreaker; but all her character is really doing throughout director John Stockwell's movie is racial slumming. She gets her kicks out of patronising a disadvantaged kid and ruining his chance in life.

It's not a very likeable performance, however pertly Dunst marches into the bathroom of her parents' ritzy home in just her panties and, under the sullen eye of their Mexican maid, brazenly helps herself to a condom for the underequipped Hernandez. Wasp girls rule OK, is what this is saying.

Crazy/Beautiful may prove a popular little picture. But if so, it's only because the Cert 12 audiences it's aimed at haven't yet acquired any values of their own, or have had what values they do possess so eroded by Hollywood's seductiveness that they're unwilling - or unable - to be judgmental about the girl's destructiveness and see her for the tramp she is.

What alone makes the film palatable is the unexpected candour of Dunst's dad, and Bruce Davison's playing of him, as a man whose assessment of his child as a mental case with the propensities of a Pacific Palisades Circe to turn guys into pigs exactly squares with the facts, and thereby evinces sympathy - for him.

Copyright 2001
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.