The Object of My Affection

The premise — what if a woman and her gay male friend fell in love? — is imported from Stephen McCauley’s novel of a few years ago, yet The Object of My Affection feels like a synthesis of Chasing Amy (where the scenario was reversed) and In & Out (in which a well-liked teacher becomes confused about his sexuality). McCauley focused on the gay character, George (Paul Rudd); the movie’s scripter, Wendy Wasserstein, focuses on the bewildered Nina (Jennifer Aniston), who allows George to move in with her after his self-absorbed lover (Tim Daly) dumps him for some hunky student.

The shift in focus defuses what might have been fresh in the story. Instead of Nina being the Other who makes George’s life a mess of confusion, it’s George who’s the Other. Everything in the movie is seen in terms of how it affects Nina. I’m not saying Wendy Wasserstein isn’t a skilled writer. She is — when it comes to Nina. We feel Nina’s frustration, her yearning for independence, her dissatisfaction with her condescending boyfriend Vince (John Pankow). That’s partly due to the writing, which has been felt from the inside out, and partly due to Jennifer Aniston’s wistful performance.

George, however, is fairly opaque. His emotions aren’t dramatized; they’re told to us in speeches. Paul Rudd’s blandness in the role (he’s been more charming elsewhere) doesn’t help, either. George is a woman’s dream date: a handsome, sensitive man who won’t try anything sleazy. George hardly tries anything sleazy with men, either. For most of the movie he’s a poster boy for cuddly gay normality — softened to appeal to the homophobes in the audience. (It didn’t work at the show I attended. A peck on the mouth between George and a new lover provoked sounds of disgust from the teenagers around me. This is a good time to point out that I heard no retching when two women kissed in Wild Things. But I digress.)

At first glance, The Object of My Affection doesn’t seem to fit with director Nicholas Hytner’s other two films, The Madness of King George and The Crucible. Those were historical dramas based on plays. This is a modern romantic comedy-drama that feels like a play (the movie’s rhythm and pace are very slack). There is a theme running through the films: the impact that forbidden or “inappropriate” passions can have on an uncomprehending society. Yet Nina and George encounter almost no resistance (even the jilted Vince basically washes his hands of Nina). George doesn’t take any static from gay friends for getting chummy with a breeder. Nina seems to have no friends other than good old George.

What seemed like hyperbolic rhetoric in movies like Jungle Fever and Go Fish, where characters’ sex lives were subjected to political scrutiny by their friends, now seems like a better dramatic deal than what goes on in this movie. Which is to say, nothing much. Even Nina’s pregnancy feels inconsequential. Stand aside from the movie for a moment, look at it from a detached viewpoint, and what you see is a selfish woman who wants to have the best of all worlds — the baby, the non-threatening gay man waiting for her to decide that she wants him — and who comes close to ruining poor George’s life. The story could certainly have been told that way (and might have been in the novel, which I haven’t read). It sure isn’t told that way here. If it were, it would stop being a chick flick and start being an intelligent film for adults of all genders and sexual orientations. I’m sorry, should I not have expected a movie like that? I can be so naïve sometimes.

The Opposite of Sex

“I don’t have a heart of gold, and I don’t grow one later,” says Dedee Truitt (Christina Ricci), the protagonist of one of the year’s best movies, The Opposite of Sex. Like all smart villains, Dedee knows the best way to get us on her side is to talk to us via narration; we’re flattered that this liar and manipulator tells the truth to us and us alone. Think of Dedee as a Jerry Springer-era, teenage-vixen version of Richard III, and you’ll have one key to the movie, but not the only one.

The Opposite of Sex is a comedy about one volatile catalyst — Dedee — dropping into a group of dissimilar people and forcing them to discover their similarities. Of course, that isn’t Dedee’s aim; her focus is on money, and Christina Ricci’s somewhat two-dimensional style works for this single-minded tramp. Dedee has no depths to reveal — seduction and swindling are all there is to her. Yet something interesting happens. Even though Dedee keeps narrating, the movie’s emphasis shifts from her to the people whose lives she affects — something like the better scenes in To Die For, when we got to see the human cost of Nicole Kidman’s entertaining manipulations, their effect on the hapless kids she was seducing.

At the beginning, after Dedee’s rotten stepfather has died, she leaves home and lands on the doorstep of her half-brother Bill (Martin Donovan), a gentle gay teacher living with the handsome goofball Matt (Ivan Sergei). Dedee wastes no time seducing Matt and running away with him (along with a big chunk of Bill’s money). Bill takes off after them, accompanied by his sort-of sister-in-law — Lucia (Lisa Kudrow), whose brother, now dead of AIDS, was once Bill’s lover. As if Bill didn’t have enough to worry about, a sleazy little teen hipster (Johnny Galecki) is accusing Bill of molesting him.

As the movie goes on, the meaning of the title comes into focus. Bill and Lucia are essentially decent but also sexless in their own ways; Bill seems too nice and, well, vanilla to have much carnal appetite (that’s why the accusation against him is such a joke), while Lucia is a brittle, cynical woman who rolls her eyes at all the sexual Musical Chairs the characters play. These two form the moral spine of a movie that seems, at first glance, to be cheerfully amoral; even those who reject Dedee can hook into Bill and Lucia. Donovan, as always, has an easy and intelligent presence — we have faith in Bill’s ability to pull himself out of this mess. Kudrow gives the stand-out performance, proving she has more in her portfolio than Phoebe, Ursula, and Michele; Lucia isn’t a New Age ditz but a tightly wound, witty fellow teacher — the first truly adult woman Kudrow has played.

There are other twists and complications, which I’ll let you discover. The movie is a comedy, so everything clicks together nicely at the end, with all the characters where we want them to be. The Opposite of Sex is the directing debut of Don Roos, who previously wrote Single White Female and Boys on the Side; he starts with Dedee’s nastiness and then takes us deeper into human connections and motivations. In a way, Dedee emerges as something of a heroine: Her lies and betrayals force the more decent characters out of their ruts and into the world. They find themselves, while Dedee ends up in a shabby motel room with a gun-waving teen Jesus freak. The surprise of The Opposite of Sex is how compassionate it turns out to be, despite the acidic remarks of its narrator; it even has sympathy for Dedee herself, who wields all this manipulative power, yet is essentially powerless to be anything other than what she is.

The Butcher Boy

The Butcher Boy begins boldly, with lurid comic-book panels filling the screen under the opening credits. This economical grabber has two effects: it sets the stage for the movie’s unstable, violent fantasia, and it assures you that the director, Neil Jordan, knows exactly what he’s doing. Jordan has found a visual hook comparable to the first line of Patrick McCabe’s book (which the movie also uses, courtesy of the script by McCabe and Jordan): “When I was a young lad twenty or thirty or forty years ago I lived in a small town where they were all after me on account of what I done on Mrs Nugent.”

What exactly the young Irish protagonist Francie Brady (Eamonn Owens) did on Mrs. Nugent is covered in a casually horrible paragraph — an afterthought in a fever dream — and Jordan, like McCabe, is less interested in the crime itself than in the demented logic that leads to it. If you wanted to discount the novel and come up with a crass Hollywood analogy, you might call the movie A Clockwork Orange meets Heavenly Creatures. But then you’d miss what makes The Butcher Boy truly unsettling — the way it crosses, unnoticed, the line between garden-variety childhood tomfoolery and full-blown psychosis.

I invoked Heavenly Creatures for another reason: Eamonn Owens jumps out at you the way Kate Winslet did in her debut. Looking like a pint-size Terry Gilliam (he has the same cartoonish, mile-wide grin), Owens hurries from one mishap to the next, playing Francie with an animalistic exuberance that immediately puts us on his side — everyone else in this grim Irish town seems depressed and waterlogged. It takes a while before you realize that Francie is, as Eric Cartman might say, a very disturbed little boy.

The Butcher Boy presents Francie’s worldview as a toxic brew of pop culture, Cold War paranoia, class resentment, Catholicism, and deficient genes: his dad (Stephen Rea) is an alcoholic failed musician, his mom (Aisling O’Sullivan) a manic-depressive who takes “tablets” and bakes hundreds of sweets for a small party. The ill-fated Mrs. Nugent (Fiona Shaw, with a Dickensian stiff upper lip trembling in outrage) denounces Francie and family as “pigs,” an unfortunate analogy that only fuels Francie’s fire.

The film is narrated by an adult Francie (also played by Stephen Rea), chuckling fondly over his youthful pranks. As Francie’s actions get more violent, the narration remains jovial — it’s like A Christmas Story retold by a sociopath. (There are various darkly funny, and surely unintentional, parallels between the two movies — imagine Ralphie obsessed with butcher’s tools instead of a Red Ryder BB gun.) We want to follow Francie along, and though we dread what’s coming, a part of us wants it to happen — we want the catharsis, the ferocious end result of all this swirling Catholic/pig/slaughterhouse imagery. When it comes, it is flat and undramatic and unsatisfying, and is perhaps Neil Jordan’s crowning achievement as a director. The whole sensually heightened movie leads up to a murder that takes place mostly offscreen. An ingenious touch (and true to the novel): For Francie, the build-up and aftermath are much more exciting.

A lot of the publicity has centered on the casting of Sinéad O’Connor as the Virgin Mary — a decision, Jordan has insisted, that wasn’t meant to provoke controversy. In context, the casting makes perfect sense: the Virgin Mary who appears in Francie’s deranged visions and says things like “For fuck’s sake” wouldn’t have much use for a Pope anyway. She’s fighting for elbow room with a lot of other things in Francie’s head — his mind seems fractured into glitzy panels, like a page of a comic book. And Neil Jordan has assembled those fragments into a forceful and unforgettable ode to madness — a horror film in the truest sense.