Beautiful Girls
It struck me while watching this for the first time in years (it having been one of those movies I feel like I watched on a loop when I first bought it on VHS all those years ago) that it’s one of those movies I should actually hate considering how much I tend to fly off the handle when it comes to overly typical presentations of the genders – I mean, this is about the most typical it’s possible to be, perhaps exemplified by the wonderful scene where Rosie O’Donnell goes on a huge tirade against men in a grocery store, leaving two of the guys at the door bewildered, looking as though they may have actually taken in what she said, before they break the silence with, “So whaddya think?” “Nice tits?” “Great ass.”
Anyway, I don’t know why it never bugs me like a lot of similar movies, but it doesn’t. Maybe it’s just that I’ll let such stuff slide just the once and this is the instance I picked. It doesn’t really matter anyway. What never fails to make me smile in this movie is Natalie Portman – I might like her in this even more than I like her in Leon, it’s such an alternately beautiful, hilarious, and crushing character … like Uma Thurman is this hyperreal version of the “hot women” in the world, she’s the embodiment of the “disturbingly tempting teen” and though Scott Rosenberg’s screenplay occasionally grinds like nails on a blackboard with its mushiness, he never resorts to the clichés on her, and all the kooky lines that emmanate from her ring heartbreakingly true (“I’m 13 but I’m an old soul,” “If I’m not mistaken, you’ve come back here to the house of loneliness and tears … to come to some sort of decision about life … a life decision if you will,” “I like to mash snow. It gives me a tremendous feeling of self satisfaction,” “Alas, poor Romeo, we can’t do diddly,” the quotable lines are endless). The thing between her and Tim Hutton is just one of the sweetest “love” stories ever – I hate to say that it’s “Lolita done right” because “Lolita” was anything but wrong, lol (I mean in artistic terms) ... but it’s all in that scene by the ice-skaters, the whole thing about Hutton being Pooh to Portman’s Christopher Robin, it’s so well played. The perfect exchange between her and Michael Rapaport lol – “So you’re the little neighborhood Lolita,” “So you’re the alcoholic high school buddy shit-for-brains.” – sends you out giddy. If you haven’t seen it all these 12 years, make it a priority, ‘cos it’s adorable.