Rules of Attraction Review
by Jon Popick (jpopick AT sick-boy DOT com)October 11th, 2002
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The suits over at the WB network must be staggering around their offices in shock. Roger Avary's adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis's The Rules of Attraction takes two of the net's biggest stars - Dawson's Creek's James Van Der Beek and 7th Heaven's Jessica Biel - and uses them in family-friendly scenes involving coke-snorting, masturbation, an orgy and hot same-sex action. And that's to say nothing of their scenes together (next up: Gilmore Girls' Alexis Bledel shoves a Pepsi bottle up her ass and gets bukkaked in Tuck Everlasting). You can tell how badly Van Der Beek wants to shed his Dawson Leary persona, because this is his second straight NC-17-to-R ratings debacle featuring boy-on-boy love, following Todd Solondz's Storytelling (though the gay stuff here is only a fraction of what appears in the book)
The good news for Van Der Beek is that he's good in Attraction. Very good, even. I pretty much forgot all about Dawson Leary (a pussy with a big forehead), as Van Der Beek completely became Sean Bateman (a total fucking psycho with a big forehead - and the younger brother of Ellis's American Psycho antihero). His character might be the least interesting of the three leads (there's four, if you believe Attraction's mainstream poster - the more obscure version is the Kama Sutra for stuffed animals), but he gets the most screen time and logs in the most damaging performance.
His Sean is a drug-dealing lothario at Camden College in New England, and in his first scene we watch him lie to a blonde coed to get her into the sack and he realizes, while humping the dickens out of her, that it's the first time he's had sex sober in a very long time. The setting is the college's End-of-the-World Party (there are several more, including the Pre-Saturday-Night-Party Party and the Dressed-To-Get-Screwed Party), where Sean had planned on meeting the virginal Lauren (Shannyn Sossamon, 40 Days and 40 Nights), but scampered off with his blonde cutie when he saw Lauren disappear into a bedroom with another boy. Meanwhile, Paul (Ian Somerhalder, Life As a House), who came to hang out with Sean, tries to put the moves on a frat brother and nearly gets his ass kicked.
The party, which actually happens at the end of the story (everything else is a flashback), is the crux of Attraction. And it works because it gives us a vague idea of what each of the three characters are up to before zapping us into the past: Paul likes Sean; Sean likes Lauren; Lauren likes Victor (Kip Pardue, Driven), who is away in Europe; Lauren and Tom used to be an item. Attraction isn't so much a regular linear story as it is a bunch of crazy stuff that happens (Warning: The book begins and ends in mid-sentence). Think of it as a glossy, well-lit Gregg Araki film set in New England.
Attraction is almost pretentious, but I think that has more to do with Ellis than Avary, the latter of whom is Quentin Tarantino's former writing partner. Avary kind of vanished after the success of Reservoir Dogs, True Romance and the Oscar-winning Pulp Fiction, along with the relative thud of Killing Zoe, his directorial debut and only effort sans Tarantino. Here he throws a lot of different and interesting techniques at the screen. Most of the over-the-top cinematic trickery is kind of flashy, but it seemed to work very well. The opening scene, which is rewound and played back from the three different perspectives, definitely sets the mood, while the split-screen-into-one-shot of Sean and Lauren walking down the hall toward each other was brilliant. The pièce de résistance is a hyper-edited (by first-timer Sharon Rutter) look at Victor's entire European vacation, which encapsulates several weeks into about 70 seconds.
While I will commend the directorial style 'til the cows come home, Attraction's story didn't do much for me. Okay, it's about spoiled kids with no direction, no goals and no future - we've seen that all before. Attr action mostly seems like it's out to shock, from the multiple suicide attempts to the professor (Eric Stoltz) who demands fellatio from his female students. If anything, it should cause a drastic decline in college attendance, as parents of teenagers will likely be chaining their kids up in the basement after seeing this.
1:50 - R for strong sexual content, drug use, language and violent images
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