Poor Sap Publishing

[The following essay was conceived for an issue of The Latent Image. The issue's theme was "one-hit wonders."]

Sororities hardly need movies; they satirize themselves. To a cynic, the rituals, semi-religious spirit, and privileged lifestyle of Greek living seem self-parodic. A.O. Scott, in his review of writer/co-director Adam Larson Broder’s first, and to this day only, film, Pumpkin, refers to Alpha Omega Pi, the movie’s main sorority, as “pre-satirized,” and he’s right. One wants to describe the performances in Pumpkin as affected, exaggerative, but Broder could just as easily have meant for his film’s characters to appear as though they’re playing it straight.

The title character of Pumpkin (Hank Harris) is a wheelchair-bound competitor in the “Challenged Games,” who falls in love with Carolyn McDuffy (Christina Ricci), an upper-class, white co-ed, with her beach-blonde locks finely curled in waves at the ends, who has been assigned to help him train, as part of her sorority’s community service. The choice to work with “Challenged” athletes was made by head sister Julie (Marisa Coughlan) who wears a wide, contrived smile nearly as often as her eyes are open. As Julie sees it, if Alpha Omega Pi wants to win “Sorority of the Year” (S.O.Y.), thereby defeating the neighboring Tri Omegas, whose members Julie labels “mastodons,” noting that not one of the predominantly blonde sisters stands less than 5’8”, it would be in the their best interest to choose an easily pitiable charitable cause. The situation is complicated when Carolyn starts to return Pumpkin’s feelings of romantic affection, breaking the sorority’s rules of mentor-athlete interaction (both written and unwritten, contractual and social) and effectively severing ties with her all-American beau, Kent (Sam Ball).

Any condensed account of Pumpkin’s plot is bound to inspire tired sighs. The easily-offended movie-goer will possibly remark on the poor taste of playing disabled athletes’s physical and emotional struggles for cheap laughs. Comedy-lovers should rightly be wary of a premise that so easily could have resulted in an insultingly unfunny film. Thankfully, Pumpkin is not morally reprehensible. Nor is it devoid of smart humor, occasionally infused with high-minded ideas. It satirizes in mostly broad (sometimes deplorably broad), but sporadically nuanced strokes, and it’s well worth watching for its peculiarities, its flaws even, which in the end amount to a film like few others.

After a short and rather somber sequence, shot in close-up, of Pumpkin preparing to practice throwing discus, the opening credits roll against a vaguely dirge-like, string-laden tune that, especially later in the film, recalls Clint Mansell’s overblown compositions for the films of Darren Aronofsky. As the score broods in the scene in which Carolyn and Pumpkin are introduced, we’re led to believe that for Carolyn the horrors of working with this particular community are equal to those faced by the heroin-addicted characters from Requiem for A Dream. Yet the humor early on doesn’t suggest a tone of terror. Initially, we’re shown the artificiality of the sister’s interactions, in addition to their flagrant racism (Julie and her sisters search among the incoming rushees for the semester’s “diversity girls,” which include a Filipina with “really light skin and cute Caucasian features”) and absurdity (the rushees feast on “sausages of all ethnicities and sizes” at an outdoor event, following an inexplicable, erotically-charged hula dance performance by Carolyn and her fellow “jungle dancers” [?], tropical only in costume) at work within the system. In great satirical fashion, right away Pumpkin’s tone is a bit muddled, inflecting its audience’s response to the work with slight discomfort.

In many respects, Pumpkin strongly follows formula. When one learns that Carolyn has enrolled in a poetry workshop, one imagines that there will be a voice-over poetry recitation toward the film’s close. (There is.) As Pumpkin grows physically stronger, one wonders whether he’ll triumphantly win gold at the “Challenged Games.” (He does.) In its last twenty minutes, the movie seems rushing toward an ending that will suggest that, sometimes, happiness and love can be found in the most unlikely of places. (Uh-huh.)

But it’s the breaks from convention that make Pumpkin a significantly overlooked movie. Most memorably, in one sequence Carolyn arranges a blind date between Pumpkin and Cici (Melissa McCarthy), an overweight classmate of Carolyn’s who, when their professor offered the banal dictum that “poetry comes from what’s inside of you,” raised her hand to dryly, darkly, and hilariously ask, “What do you do if everything inside you is ugly?” We learn later that she workshopped a poem about “suffering and being alone.” Carolyn, with her boyfriend Kent, take Pumpkin and Cici to a sun-coated West Coast beach. Realizing the severity of Pumpkin’s condition (immobile, near-mute), Cici flees the date. An argument breaks out between Pumpkin and her boyfriend:

KENT

What were you thinking? You really hurt her feeling fixing her up with… him.

 PUMPKIN

What about his feelings?

 KENT

His feelings, too!

It’s an unexpectedly unsettling scene that’s played less for laughs than it is for unease. The ethical complexity of the blind date’s arrangement, and its emotional consequences, is a frankly refreshing feature to find in a collegiate-based comedy, as is the apparent irony, earlier in the film, when Julie chastises Carolyn for voicing her concern that associating with the “Challenged Athletes” might hurt the sorority’s image (clearly a self-serving judgment), without recognizing that she herself, in her relations with the handicapped athletes, is no less motivated by the guiding forces of personal achievement and popularity (S.O.Y.).

Another area of the film that smartly conflates humor with serious pain is Pumpkin’s relationship with his mother (Brenda Blethyn). Throughout the first half of the film, Mrs. Romanoff seems a considerate, positive influence on Pumpkin’s young adult life. Despite having a maid, one gathers that the Romanoffs rest on a far lower rung on the social ladder than the McDuffys. (There’s a great cut between Carolyn and her bigoted mother at a five-star restaurant, and Mrs. Romanoff with Pumpkin at McDonald’s.) As Pumpkin progresses, though, developing a strange connection with Carolyn and, miraculously, not only walking but, by the film’s finish, running, Mrs. Romanoff regresses. She develops a drinking problem, is constantly seen with an empty glass in hand, and encourages Pumpkin to not have such lofty, hopeful impressions of the world. She forbids Pumpkin from seeing Carolyn and implies that he shouldn’t expect much from life, a severe attitude that seems in direct opposition to his best interests and his happiness. Without physical or emotional inhibition, Pumpkin becomes a larger problem for Mrs. Romanoff; he becomes someone that needs fixing on even more levels than was initially the case, which she has difficulty coming to terms with.

After Carolyn realizes her true feelings for Pumpkin, the film flies gloriously off the rails. The second half of Pumpkin includes: a visit by Carolyn to the university’s psychologist, one of the movie’s best ancillary characters; a supposed suicide attempt, filmed in a lampooning cold blood light, wherein a character tries to overdose on several over-the-counter medications, such as Nyquil; an incredible fist-fight between Pumpkin and Kent, complete with crowd control; a truly spectacular car crash (followed by a scene that contains the film’s best gag); and, of course, the climactic “Challenged Games.”

Pumpkin is not a movie to make complete sense of as soon as the credits start to roll. It is an unusual synthesis of silliness and heart that fans and detractors alike will have trouble, initially, making sense of at all. Broder cleverly chose to designate his “Challenged” main character with a name that always doubles as a term of endearment, though no one – besides his mother, and later Carolyn – ever means it in that comforting sense. For the most part, though, one doesn’t think of viewing Pumpkin as an emotional experience. This is not one of the movie’s failures; in fact, it points to one of its strengths. So much of a viewer’s response to Pumpkin’s comedy and story depends on the viewer’s sense of morals, ethics, rightness and wrongness. The viewer’s active self-consciousness occasionally obstructs their emotional engagement with the film. It’s that rare comedy that will make you wonder when it’s OK to laugh, and what your response reflects about yourself, as a fan of film and as a person. It’s banal but truthful to remark that the happily-ever-after endings typified by films representative of the formula-based comedy genre are debased by critics for their unbelievability, their rejection of reality and its complexity, its disorderliness. Pumpkin’s ostensibly cheery ending is as open to this criticism as any mainstream “romantic comedy,” a label that could strangely but accurately apply to Broder’s independent film, but because its subject matter deals deliberately with certain social taboos, namely the profound social division between the mentally handicapped and those who self-righteously volunteer to offer them assistance, it inspires a follow-up question not often considered. That would never happen in real life, one thinks. But why not?

Critical reaction to Pumpkin upon its theatrical release was mixed. It had the bad fortune to be released on the heels of Legally Blonde, whose protagonist Carolyn was frequently unfavorably compared to, as well as Storytelling, a Todd Solondz feature which dealt with similar subject matter in, arguably, a more artful and focused manner. Peter Travers, in Rolling Stone, bemoaned Pumpkin’s admittedly laughable pat, tidy resolution, claiming that “complex characters” were reduced to “sitcom stooges,” calling the film an “opportunity missed.” In The Village Voice, Dennis Lim complained that most of the film “[took] aim at fish in a barrel (Greek-system cruelty, suburban hypocrisy),” but found some enjoyment in the “dimly reckless” direction the film took in its final act. Roger Ebert gave it a complimentary review (***1/2) and acknowledged its daring, self-mockery, and the commentary it seemed to make on “the political correctness of other movies in its campus genre.” At the box office, Pumpkin earned a meager $308,552. In its entire domestic run.

The most common criticism against the film is that it doesn’t know quite what it wants to be. Throughout the picture, you think that it’s satirizing the type of sentimental movie-of-the-week films shown on the Hallmark Network, and it is, but by the end, it seems to have morphed into one itself, with its unsurprising plot progression, and its staid visual aesthetic, aping, perhaps, the unremarkable style of made-for-TV productions. It appears to have finally become that which it set out to harshly critique. The decision to end Pumpkin on such a falsely clean and heartfelt note may have been made for a couple extratextual reasons. It might have been written as a safeguard against criticism from organizations like The Special Olympics. A bleaker ending might have also been avoided for practical purposes; a script with a more brutal ending may never have materialized into a feature film. While the ending that exists may leave one feeling that Broder didn’t push far enough, (e.g. that he didn’t justly punish his characters for their mercilessness), it manages to, in its obvious, knowing insincerity, bring a brilliant conclusion to Pumpkin’s story. There’s even a curious final line and fourth-wall-break that, if you find it effective at all, will inspire you to reconsider the entire film.

None of this is to suggest that Pumpkin is high art, nor that it’s a Great Film, only that it has a quiet intelligence that deserves wider recognition. It is simply an enjoyable comic send-up of social mobility and stigmas, about the differences between true and self-interested compassion, with a few very memorable moments. There’s a montage set to Belle and Sebastian’s “Stars of Track and Field” that may well have been the inspiration for the entire project, and fans of the twee band (as well as the group’s most vehement critics) will find the sequence exemplary of unforgettable filmmaking. Pumpkin pokes fun at the sorority system, indisputably an easy target, but it also seems to dismantle the myth of exceptionalism, suggesting that neither Carolyn nor Pumpkin are “special” in any significant way, if not physically then at least spiritually, humanistically. Pumpkin likely won’t change your worldview; it might not even make you reconsider the space kindness occupies in your heart. It may perhaps, though, make you wish that Broder, wherever off the grid he is today, would pick up his pen and set his satirizing sights on something, anything, again.

Inspired by David Edelstein’s thoughtful review of Tree of Life, I watched Terrence Malick’s first feature film, Badlands, tonight.

I have always considered Malick a deeply religious filmmaker. I think it has something to do with his use of the sun, particularly its early and dying light. Malick’s compositions overwhelm. His characters are more often than not secondary to the scenery. They catch light in the most arresting ways. The meditative quality of his images is probably what he’s most known for. Another of Malick’s defining characteristics as a filmmaker is his interest in violence, man’s defenselessness against it. He seems ardently reverential for the natural world, and fearful of man’s natural state of being. This, too, lends his films an almost biblical tone, similar to that of Cormac McCarthy’s writing.

On first viewing, what struck me most (besides, obviously, Malick’s imagery) was how greatly Badlands seemed inspired by Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. There’s one scene early in the film where Sheen and Spacek walk lazily down a suburban road. In style and appearance, it closely mirrors a famous sequence between Jean-Paul Belmondo and Herald Tribune-selling Jean Seberg. In Breathless, Jean-Paul Belmondo’s character stops contemplatively before a photograph of Humphrey Bogart, an icon of American cool. He runs a finger over his lips, and it’s like a prayer. Martin Sheen’s character in Badlands is told he resembles James Dean, a likeness he cultivates with his affectless swagger. Dean’s raw emotional expressiveness is absent from Sheen’s performance, though, which points to the two movies’s biggest similarity: the main characters of both Breathless and Badlands seem distrusting of their own feelings, and divorced from their emotional epicenters. Moments of intense violence, murders, are treated laconically. Futures don’t seem considered. “Fun” is prized over lasting connection. It’d be hedonistic if the characters seemed capable of pleasure.

Badlands is moving without being remotely personal, which is quite an achievement. Malick creates a visual language with the film, which becomes his primary means of expression as an artist. His observational camera forces you to pay close attention to the movie’s world, its physicality, and, in that first or last heavenly light, its spirituality.