My First Mister Review
by Jonathan F. Richards (moviecritic AT prodigy DOT net)October 30th, 2001
MY FIRST MISTER
Rated R, 109 minutes
Directed by Christine Lahti
WHERE, WHEN
Now playing at the UA DeVargas
Jennifer (Leelee Sobieski) is a mess. Alienated, friendless, sullen, purpled-haired, tattooed, kohl-eyed, black-clad, pierced and be-ringed like a dime store St. Sebastian, she is half in love with death, a seventeen-year-old virgin whose sexuality is unresolved but anyway purely hypothetical. She sees dead people, and she likes them better than the other kind. Her mother (Carol Kane) is a relentlessly sunny stranger who sings along in the car to “I Enjoy Being a Girl” and chatterboxes in a nasal, girlish twitter. Her father (John Goodman) is an aging hippie slob, divorced from her mother and from Jennifer’s life. Her only safe haven is her room, where she watches “Partridge Family” reruns and writes lugubrious necromantic poetry that she sends out to the world through her window on the wings of paper airplanes.
Safer still would be a place of her own, where her mother couldn’t camp outside her bedroom chatting through the door. But this will require money, which will require a job. And this chain of circumstance brings her eventually to the mall, to a clothing store owned by Randall (Albert Brooks), a paunchy, nebbishy, lonely middle-aged man.
They’re an odd couple, and his first impulse is to tell her to get lost. “You’d scare away the customers,” he says, but there is something about her that appeals to something in him, and vice versa. “Dress me,” she challenges him. He does, and she complains with some justification that she looks like a Republican, but fortunately she doesn’t stay in those clothes throughout the movie. The point is, she changes. And he changes. And they grow to trust each other. That’s what this movie is about.
This is the feature directorial debut of actress Christine Lahti ("Chicago Hope"), who earned this gig by winning an Oscar for her short “Lieberman in Love”. She never figures out how to handle this one It’s a flirtatious movie. It flirts with sex, it flirts with character, it flirts with comedy and tragedy, it flirts with being good, but ultimately it never delivers. It’s coy, giggling with little camera tricks that digitally widen a bottom or fatten a lip, but these moments are sporadic and early and never enter the fabric of the picture. It shamelessly resorts to scenes that seem imagined from the end, not the beginning, scenes designed for a payoff effect, but that can claim no logic in the story – for example, a scandalous bit of mannequin arranging Jennifer puts in the store window that bears no resemblance to a thing that could really have happened under those circumstances.
Sobieski (“A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries”) is a good young actress, but here she needs a director with a deeper understanding of the character. She cleans up nice, and remarkably fast, and she uncovers reserves of manners and poise that we have no reason to believe were in there, and by the end she’s so damned sophisticated and elegant that she puts everyone else to shame. But it’s always a character being played, however cleverly. Brooks, on the other hand, penetrates Randall to the very soul, despite an inadequately developed storyline by screenwriter Jill Franklyn. She gives him some good lines, and Brooks makes the most of them, showing us a character who may be a loner and a loser but is not a jerk. But she makes his work hard for him with the direction in which she sends the story in the movie’s second half.
“My First Mister” is too in love with contrivances and cuteness to realize its potential. There is some promise in Franklyn’s screenplay, and there are signs of hope in Lahti’s directing. But having never quite found their way in the first half, they panic and make rookie mistakes with the second half, grasping for artifice and button-pushing to lock in cheap effects.
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