Born Innocent
Warning: I totally messed this review up, lol. I semi-wrote it while watching the movie, as I often do, and then I found out I still had a lot more to say. I ended up with a huge mess that appeared on my site for all of 2 seconds last night till I re-read it and withdrew it. I’ve tried my best to salvage what I had, but it’s still really just a ton of babble that will be more use to me in the future than it is for anyone else in the here and now 
You’ve been warned.
“You lied.”
“Big deal.”
“I don’t know what to do now.”
“What’s the difference.”
I kinda knew I’d like this, that it’d be better than it appeared (that being as a trashy sexploitation video nasty), because all the other substandard-looking Linda Blair movies that I’ve seen (*Sarah T*, Hell Night, I’m sure there’s one or two others that aren’t coming to me) have been made substantially better just by her mere presence – hell, I almost even watched that S Club 7 series that had her in … might still one day. I think she’s amazing, both on and off screen (even if I couldn’t help chuckling that time she told everyone to spay and neuter their pets in a webchat a few years back and that whole “Animal testing makes my head spin,” thing – I mean, this is Regan McNeil we’re talking about, people!)
Anyway I was quickly even more pleasantly surprised than I expected early on as I realised how much it oddly resembles Girl, Interrupted ... at least in the beginning. It’s close to the same era, of course, and the locations (juvie hall rather than mental hospital, but hey, for the purposes of the movies, “what’s the difference”), even some of the dialogue – the style of the dialogue, at least – is freakily familiar and I’d recommend this movie to any fan of that one.
Part of the movie’s success is in leaving open the question of whether Blair’s character is as innocent as the title suggests. The girls she meets in juvie certainly believe so, and they’re quick to rough her up. But we don’t see anything of her before checking in with the courts. She’s in the situation we find her because she’s a constant runaway – but why she’s always running away is mostly held from us. Her parents aren’t a help, that’s for sure. Just watching Blair go through the indignity of imprisonment and strip searches, constantly wondering why her parents aren’t there, is almost unbearable, let alone the infamous rape scene that comes later.
It all comes down to the fact that whatever got her into this system of rehabilitation isn’t at issue – she’s born innocent, as the title says, into this system. Her “offense” is neither here nor there, something of a McGuffin, in fact. There’s even a shot prior to the breaking point of the rape of Blair, swinging on a swing, looking every bit the little girl she was at the beginning of The Exorcist – just in case you miss the point. If this all sounds very cheesy, that’s because it is. But I really liked the simplicity of this one.
The last 10 minutes or so are terrifically downbeat – from the funeral scene (“She … Screamed!”) to the final exchange I quoted at the beginning of this review, the whole thing just reminds me of that scene in Girl, Interrupted where Whoopi Goldberg tells Winona Ryder, “and you’re just throwin’ it away.” That’s really what this movie is all about – a kid throwing it all away simply ‘cos there’s nobody around her to give her a reason not to – and the worst part is maybe there really isn’t one. It’s really a kind of lament for the many kids “the system” lets down. By system, that’s in the broadest sense, that classic Seventies sense – this movie is an indictment of the Entire Freakin’ System, Man … and the saddest thing is that in places it’s still just as relevant today as it was when the movie was made. Maybe it’s inevitable that some people just don’t make it, survival of the fittest and all that … doesn’t make it any less sad.
It’s rare for a movie to leave me this shattered – I wanna know what happened in the end – I wanna know that Blair’s character found herself again. The way her soul empties through the duration of this movie, up to that final protest at the funeral, shouting out for her friend like no one ever did for her, it’s just awful. There’s a second strip search towards the end of the movie and the contrast between her blank uncaring demeanor at being naked in front of other people and her being completely humiliated at the start of the movie is probably more painful than any of the more violent scenes in the movie. That’s the moment you know she’s gone. Her blank face at the end reminds me of Michelle Pfeiffer at the end of White Oleander or Steve Zahn at the end of Riding in Cars with Boys. I don’t think anything in movies pains me more than seeing people get broken down and quite literally emptied this way.
It’s no great specimen of cinema, and I’m probably building it up more than it deserves ‘cos it just hit me at the right time and it really and truly got to me. But at the very least, the movie makes me wish that at least TV movies could still be this good and bold and personal and, well, at least semi- cinematic by virtue of their sheer rawness. Lose the slickness – it won’t last. And if you think Linda Blair was somehow wasted in pretty much everything she did on the back of The Exorcist, I really recommend checking out movies like this and Sarah T: Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic. Performance-wise, I haven’t seen her put a foot wrong yet – no not even in Exorcist II. Also, I won’t go so far as to say the score for this movie is exactly “great” ... but it deserves mentioning. I personally can’t get enough of these cheesy, rushed, cheap pre-synth Seventies scores. This one reminded me a lot of Christian Gaubert’s score for The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (okay, bad comparison, that was uber-synthy, lol) and it actually does tug at the heart strings from time to time.