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Dir. Deborah Kampmeier

Rating: 4.2  |  0 User Reviews  |  Send to Friend

By Piers Marchant

Much angry controversy and condemnation was courted with this effort from writer/director Deborah Kampmeier, mostly on account of the film's depiction of the rape of a 12-year-old girl. While the scene is indeed harrowing (though thankfully not graphic), the real vitriol should have been reserved for just about everything else. We're in the south of the mid-'50s, where Elvis is king to a young, besotted fan, Lewellen (Dakota Fanning). When we first see her, she's convincing her friend Buddy (Cody Hanford) to show her his "thing" in the thicket of a Cedar grove. Later, we meet the rest of her family: Her sternly religious grammie (Piper Laurie) and her brutish father (David Morse). Her father has just reunited with a new woman (Robin Wright) -- a woman he soon desserts -- right before he gets struck by lightening, rendering him gentle but imbecilic. Lewellen, meanwhile, becomes so obsessed with getting an Elvis ticket, she puts herself in harm's way with a pockmocked-face adolescent, ending in the aforementioned horror. Kampmeier's south is filled with the full gamut of standard clichés: barefeet kids, ramshackle houses, a buzz of locusts perennially cranked to full power and wise old black men who help the white folks get in touch with their souls. The film's idea of subtlety is to drape slithering snakes all over the screen, and have young Lewellen crush bright red apples under her grubby feet. For her part, Fanning gives yet another performance demonstrating her eerie prescience -- she's 12 going on 35 with her big, baleful eyes and commanding elocution -- but, despite the fact the much of the material is set to showcase her strengths, it only goes to show the limit of her as-yet not fully formed abilities. This is never more apparent than at the film's emotional climax, where she and her dimwitted father shriek at one another, Fanning as shrill and ineffective as a cloud of neutered mosquitoes. There are many reasons to avoid this film besides child-rape, it turns out, and from them you may only have to take your pick.

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