One of the saddest experiences is encountering a movie that has almost all the right things to be successful. It has all the ingredients, perhaps all the right perspectives, but not the requisite skills to bring it to a coherence that pierces. This is one of those movies, and its apt that is about characters whose lives are in the same uncooked limbo.
About the actors. The men in this all went on to greater careers, essentially doing the characters they do here. The women. Well, their careers have all been stuck, and yet they do at least as well here.
One of these is Alica Witt. She was sort a special icon for a while after her remarkable one line in Lynch's otherwise disastrous "Dune." Lynch was so smitten that when Sting did Figgis' first movie, he clued him in. Figgus subsequently used her as an icon in "Liebstraum," and she appeared similarly in "Vanilla Sky," as a cinematic marker.
Here she is early in her career, playing a woman on the edge. Its a typical role for an ingénue, a free spirit constrained by society and her own foibles that revolve around men. Natalie Porman made this role work in "Closer." Mia Kirshner did so in the much more complex "Exotica." Witt almost does here, and somehow the failure touches more.
Here she is before unadvisedly removing that bump in her nose, trying her guts out. She is raped late in the story, and the few moments after so far as I know are the high point of her adult career.
There's one sequence in the film that does work. It doesn't involve Witt. Luke Wilson's character is a pot dealer. He takes his new girlfriend on a collection trip to a camping commune, led by Jack Black. She has replaced Witt, though Witt found her to sponsor a show of Wilson's sophomoric art.
Once they arrive everyone takes acid. The girl and Black (who is terrific) hit it off. Wilson hallucinates his mother into existence, where she serves an iridescent lemonade. This whole sequence works, and I imagine it was the first one created. There's nuance, and I prefer to believe that all that follows even the existence of the Witt character is part of the trip.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.
