Saints And Soldiers Review
by Harvey S. Karten (harveycritic AT cs DOT com)October 9th, 2003
DIE MOMMIE DIE
Reviewed by: Harvey S. Karten
Grade: B
Sundance Channel/Aviator Films
Directed by: Mark Rucker
Written by: Charles Busch from his staged piece
Cast: Charles Busch, Natasha Lyonne, Jason Priestley, Frances Conroy, Philip Baker Hall, Stark Sands, Nora Dunn Screened at: Review 2, NYC, 10/8/03
Were the melodramas and glamour pieces of the 1940's, 1950's and 1960's really that bad? Yes and no. Your judgments of them depends on your age. If you made weekly excursions to your local movie theater at that time, particularly before TV began entering American homes in the 1950's, your conversations were filled with glowing judgments of performers like Lana Turner, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Susan Haywood. Your emotions might have been particularly charged by the roof-raising performances of Brooklyn-born Rita Hayworth as a temptress in "Blood and Sand," or sparkling as the dance partner of Fred Astaire in "You Were Never Lovelier;' or of Bette Davis's best performance in "All About Eve," about an aging star who takes in an adoring fan-- a cynical look at life around the theater. Though these stars often played temptresses, the forties and fifties were innocent times when the Hollywood code mandated that a man and woman in bed needed to have one foot each on the floor at all times.
The corny melodramas of times past need no parody today, yet in debut director Mark Rucker's "Die Mommie Die," Charles Busch has enough fun in his signature role as a drag queen that we in the audience can't fail to share in both his satirical takes and his homage to film styles of times past.
Mr. Busch, a veteran writer and star of theatrical productions like "Shanghai Moon," "Vampire Lesbians of Sodom" (which played on New York's off-Broadway scene for five years), and "The Tale of the Allergist's Wife," makes a mighty attractive female in "Die Mommie Die!," one of the four films selected by the Sundance Institute to play exclusively at New York's Loews 34th Street theater. The pic combines melodrama with themes like envy, incest, and adultery, with Busch playing the role straight while the ensemble around him deliberately emphasize the stiffness of actors of times past with eye-popping surprises including a twist you won't see coming.
Though Busch is in virtually every scene in the role of over- the-hill diva Angela Arden, her projection as a man in drag is not the one-joke affair that you might think. In fact, once you get accustomed to the shtick, you could well treat Mr. Busch as a good-looking gal indeed and go with the flow as he sends up past eras in film making. Angela is the mother of Edith (Natasha Lyonne) and Lance (Stark Sands), husband of over- the-hill producer Sol Sussman (Philip Baker Hall), employee of cleaning woman Bootsie (Frances Conroy), and lover of gigolo- tennis pro Tony Parker (Jason Priestley). When
Sol discovers the adulterous affair of his wife, he goes ballistic, pushing Angela into a plot to kill her husband with an arsenic- laced suppository. She is hated by her daughter Edith who has an Electra-like attachment to her dad and by her son, who is slow in the head because of his mother's pill-popping during pregnancy. Sexual mixes-and-matches abound, as AC/DC Tony takes occasional time off from his affair with Angela to dilly-dally with Angela's son, Lance.
If the plot reminds you ever-so-faintly of the Greek tragedy, The Oresteia Trilogy wherein Clytemnestra murders her husband Agamemmnon and takes a lover, thus horrifying her children Orestes and Electra, you probably got an A in Classic Tragedy 101.
What's good about this film is that nobody in the cast winks at the audience as though to say, "Aren't we having fun?" All play their roles straight, except for Jason Priestley (whom you remember as the object of fascination of an older adult in "Love and Death on Long Island"), who overemphasizes his deliberately wooden dialogue. This is Mr. Busch's movie, and his delightfully attractive Angela considering his/her age and gender is a treat albeit not one that is hysterically funny.
There's good work here from Michael Bottari and Ronald Case's costuming of gowns, plenty of which adorn Busch's body, and for cinematographer Kelly Evans, who captures the ambiance of the old Hollywood movies particularly in tossing in black-and-white clips of the oldies.
Not Yet Rated . 94 minutes.(c) 2003 by Harvey Karten at
[email protected]
More on 'Saints And Soldiers'...
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
