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Roles of distraction
The adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis's "Rules of Attraction" suffers as its characters' antisocial tendencies are separated from their 1980s context and left dangling as empty gestures.
By KRISTINA FELICIANO
Offoffoff.com
"The Rules of Attraction" captures college life through
the eyes of the precociously world-weary, but it's not
much more than a glossy portrait of excess.
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| | | RULES OF ATTRACTION | Directed by: Roger Avary.
Cast: James Van Der Beek, Ian Somerhalder, Shannyn Sossamon, Jessica Biel, Kip Pardue, Thomas Ian Nicholas, Kate Bosworth, Fred Savage, Eric Stoltz, Clifton Collins Jr., Faye Dunaway, Swoosie Kurtz..
Related links: Official site |
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The students at Camden College are wealthy,
good-looking, and unable to connect with anything or
anyone but their own disaffection. Fortunately for
this self-absorbed group, they have a lot of time to
ponder their loneliness and the absurdity of
existence. Life on their handsome New England campus
is defined not by class schedules but by soirees with
nihilistic names like The End of the World. They spend
their time getting ready for parties (buying drugs,
thinking of whom they'd like to seduce, and so on),
partying (doing the drugs, seducing or being rebuffed
by the person), and recovering from the repercussions
of same. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Of course, this being an adaptation of a Bret Easton
Ellis book, it is the end of the world, and no one
feels fine. These kids are disenchanted, despite their
access to opportunity and money. Or maybe they're
disenchanted because they are so privileged. This is
where director Roger Avary ("Killing Zoe") is unclear.
He chose to remove "Rules" from its conspicuous
consumption, greed-is-good 1980s setting and leave it
unmoored timewise, to the film's detriment. The 1980s
were not incidental to these characters, who in this
movie come off as youthfully narcissistic at best and
spoiled, melodramatic brats at worst.
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| Sure, they're not great role
models and are hardly inspiring as parents. But that
old "my mother never loved me" chestnut is not a
sufficient statement on which to hang a film. | |
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James Van Der Beek is Sean Bateman, a campus drug
dealer and hardened lonelyheart who thinks of women in
terms of their fuckability. Until, that is, he meets
Lauren Hynde (the waifishly beautiful Shannyn
Sossamon). She's a virgin, she's smart, she's nice,
and to him she represents purity, something he eagerly
desires — though it's hard to relate to that desire when
his glumness seems to be entirely of his own making.
He's no John Bender, his corollary in "The Breakfast
Club," a far more insightful commercial film about
alienated kids. Bender teaches his peers (and us)
about himself by acting out a typical exchange with
father: The old man tells him he's stupid and puts out
a cigarette on his arm. If that weren't enough, the
principal essentially calls Bender a loser and a waste
of humanity. No wonder the kid's angry and rebellious.
The closest we get to this kind of context in "Rules" is
a brief scene with Faye Dunaway and Swoosie Kurtz as
parents of, in this order, Paul Denton, a handsome
bisexual who can't get no satisfaction, and his
ex-lover Dick, who drinks Jack Daniel's from the
bottle. (Jay Baruchel has a good time whooping it up
in the part.) Dunaway and Kurtz are carefully
preserved, expensively dressed, and highly medicated
on both pills and booze. Sure, they're not great role
models and are hardly inspiring as parents. But that
old "my mother never loved me" chestnut is not a
sufficient statement on which to hang a film (not if
you're trying to make the point in one scene, anyway),
nor is it a particularly interesting reflection of a
class of people. In fact, it's boringly glib.
What "Rules" lacks in substance it makes up for in
style. Avary presents each student's point of view by
literally rewinding key sequences and starting them
over from the next person's perspective. It's a groovy
trick, with top-notch photography to boot. The
performances are strong too. Van Der Beek is
especially good as Bateman, channeling an
unpredictable rage that is genuinely frightening. This
is a guy who, when a suicide attempt fails, settles
for strategically smearing his face with fake blood
and sprawling corpse-like on his dorm-room bed — and
laughs demonically when the object of affection
discovers him.
Van Der Beek is crisply, coldly determined; he seems
unstoppable and at times nearly inhuman — not unlike his
character's brother, Patrick Bateman, whom Christian
Bale embodied so intensely in Mary Harron's stunning
adaptation of Ellis' "American Psycho." That director's
keen way would have made "Rules" much more than the
slice of upscale "American Pie" that it is.
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OCTOBER 26, 2002
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Reader comments on Rules of Attraction:
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