#*** SPOILERS ***
The Opposite of Sex is a strange kind of movie - for the most part emotionally uninvolving, at times very affecting. (This is an unusual mix for me - as a rule either I'm completely absorbed or I spend the whole film alternating between checking my watch, counting the cinematic clichés the director's indulging in, and wishing all the characters would suddenly die so that the film would just end (I sometimes think Shakespeare had the same reaction when writing Hamlet 8) )). Part road movie, part meditation on relationships and the role of sex, it's a smart and blackly funny movie, but I felt that at times something fundamental was missing.
The film opens with a voice-over from DeDee (Christina Ricci), a Jerry Springer-style white trash 16 year old living in Louisiana with her momma, the equally trashy Bobette. After her stepfather's funeral, she takes off to visit her gay half-brother Bill (Martin Donovan), a high school teacher living in small-town Indiana in a house left to him by his dead stockbroker partner Tom. Bill is the archetypal nice guy, taking DeDee in despite the misgivings of Lucia (Lisa Kudrow), Tom's sister, who tells him she is only out to cause trouble. Of course, Lucia (pronounced Loo-sha, as she makes a point of telling us) is right: DeDee seduces Bill's lover, the gorgeous-but-dim Matt, announces she's pregnant, and steals ten thousand dollars of Bill's money before blowing town with Matt in tow. Then Matt's on-the-side lover, drama queen Jason, shows up demanding to know where Matt is, and when Bill tells him he doesn't know, Jason assumes he's lying and as a form of blackmail files a complaint that Bill molested him in high school. *Then* things get complicated.
DeDee is an outstanding creation. Foul-mouthed, smart, sassy, and with a black sense of humour, she embodies late-1990s-style self-consciously knowing irony. She loves to keep one step ahead of the audience, playing with our minds and throwing conventional storytelling to the winds. When she leaves Louisiana, we get a close up of her picking up a handgun, while her voice-over tells us "this is like, duh! important! Remember this later. It's foreshadowing: we did it with Dickens." She likes to tell it straight, warning us at the beginning that "I don't have a heart of gold, and I don't grow one later,", and her blunt, cynical narration is one of the gems of the screenplay: funny, sharp, and devastatingly to the point. The other woman in the picture could not be more of a contrast. While DeDee uses her lush sexuality as a weapon, flaunting herself in tight tops and short skirts, Lucia is a repressive Freudian nightmare, finding the idea of sex revolting and wondering why relationships ca'n't revolve around back rubs or shampoos instead. Sex killed her brother: it is dangerous and scary. Her body language tells us all we need to know - hunched shoulders, crossed arms, she walks, stork-like, with her limbs so tightly squeezed together it's a wonder she can move at all. Fat and awkward as a teenager, she seems to take comfort in Bill as someone around whom her body, her sexuality is irrelevant. The story of her sexual awakening is one of the sweetest threads in this film, which, although blackly cynical on the outside, has, unlike its narrator, a heart of gold.
There are problems with the film however, notably the disastrous casting of Lyle Lovett as the town sheriff who must investigate the allegations against Bill. His acting is flat and dead and it is impossible to connect to the character. There is a story thrown in about an affair with his dying wife's nurse which is entirely artificial and pointless, designed to create some friction between he and Lucia but which never really goes anywhere.
Martin Donovan's performance is hard to pin down: some reviewers have found his portrayal of the quiet, civilized, tolerant Bill still grieving for his dead partner to be the most impressive in the film: for me, it was one of the reasons the film seemed essentially emotionally flat. Donovan specializes in playing quiet, sensitive characters, but here, rather than being the serene, steadfast core of the movie, he was the emotional void at its centre. It was hard to tell if he was being stoic and serene or simply feeling nothing at all. Bill's response to every emotional trigger, to fights and betrayals, was to say "I'm beat. We'll talk about it in the morning." It's just hard to feel for a character who gives nothing back. Where he *was* allowed to show some emotion, such as at the hospital after DeDee gives birth, he shone: it's one of the disappointments of the film that it didn't happen more often. Having said that, after an hour spent trying to connect with the characters, I found the end to be genuinely touching: the possibility of redemption for DeDee, a new life for Bill, fulfilment and happiness for Lucia. Towards the end DeDee questions whether human relationships are ever worthwhile - they're messy, they involve hurt, pain, being trapped into untidy tangles of conflicting emotions and desires. While she speaks, we are played a montage of shots of the relationships in the film: Bill and Lucia, Bill and Tom, Matt and Jason, Lucia and Karl: it feels like a peek through someone else's photograph album, a record of how our short lives touch other lives, and the pictures in there make you realize that with all their untidiness, those tangled connections are what make our lives worth living. At one point in the movie, Karl tells Lucia that the role of sex is to focus one's attention on one person out of all others: "you look for me first in a crowded room, and I'll do likewise". Fundamentally, this is a film about the importance of being connected, of being somebody's focus, and it does a pretty good job of showing us exactly why those connections matter.
(c) Jennifer Mellerick 1999