Noxiousness is the point, of course, of Marcos Siega's Pretty Persuasion, which discovers a star in young Evan Rachel Wood but spends the rest of its time slapping on the country-club offense in sloppy, self-congratulatory strokes. Wood plays Kimberly Joyce, daughter of a sleazy electronics magnate (James Woods) and the Heather-est of all the Heathers in the brief history of high school mean girl melodramas: a calculating, cunning black widow using sex, race, and class to take her revenge on the classmates and teachers she believes may have wronged her. The point at which I stopped playing ball with Pretty Persuasion is the moment where Ron Livingston's idiot English teacher Mr. Anderson congratulates his wife (Selma Blair, natch) for using the word "besmirch" correctly in a sentence. It's a big, giant, spine-crushing, shoulder-separating pat on the ol' back--a "we're attacking all sorts of pretensions here" situation that scavenges the blow-jobs from To Die For, frames a conversation between two lesbians against a washroom "women" sign, and, most egregiously, finds Mr. Anderson delivering an important monologue in front of a blackboard with a definition of "satire" on it as its only decoration.

The crux of the piece is the picture's dedication to equating the Iraq War with a sexual harassment tempest in a teapot, stirred by Kimberly's canny manipulation of every single other character in what amounts to a high school version of Arthur Miller's "The Crucible". Miller, incidentally, is largely unreadable (I still like "Death of a Salesman", but not for the same reasons I used to), badly dated, and so didactic he's not social satire anymore, he's one of those interminable "talks" you used to have with your grandfather. I don't know who still needs to be lectured on our legal system, our almost equal intolerance for Jews and Arabs, or the scary confluence between our news and entertainment media structures--any more than I know who still needs a lesson on how sex is power. Wherever they are, they represent the only people who could possibly be edified by Pretty Persuasion. Failing an education, the film fails too in entertainment in that broad shots across the bow from a source so smug that it doesn't know at what point it crosses over to the dark side aren't what most well-adjusted, well-informed people consider entertaining.

It's clumsily written (there's actually, without irony, a Sylvester Stallone joke), with Wood's glacial performance its only saving grace. When the poor little Muslim girl (Adi Schnall) drawn into Kimberly's web serves as the resolution of the film's gun violence subplot, one does wonder if the message is that "we are all sinners" (scrawled poignantly in Arabic, natch, on another blackboard), or that if you push Arabs just a little bit, they'll go off like a pipe bomb. The film's receiving praise for hating everybody and has been compared to "South Park" for its general lawlessness ("South Park" actually appears to be attacked by the film for its insensitivity), but by tacking on pathos and even a kind of bed-wetting feminist redemption for our antihero, it's pretty crystal clear that the target it most hates and underestimates is its own audience. Kimberly's called a bitch, a cunt, a dirty little whore, and a twat by her father, her lovers, her best friends, and herself--and so, by the end of Pretty Persuasion, after 100 minutes of director Siega participating in her systematic degradation with ugly flashbacks and obfuscating, superior time shifts, you come to realize that despite the comparisons being made of this film to good films, it's really just a geek show with a tacked-on moral. If The Baxter is Rosencrantz replacing Hamlet, Pretty Persuasion is the distaff Napoleon Dynamite starring the liger.-Walter Chaw (excerpted from a longer review found here)

2.33:1 DVD capture: Pretty Persuasion

Canadian rights-holder Maple issues Pretty Persuasion on DVD in an impeccable 2.33:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer. I can't vouch for the image as being either superior or inferior to that of Sony's stateside release (since the two discs are identically configured, I'm guessing they utilized the same master), but it manages to retain a filmlike quality without sacrificing fine detail. The pastel colours are extremely pleasing to the eye while the depth of contrast is remarkable. In comparison, the Dolby Digital 5.1 audio is underachieving, with almost every sound element clinging tenaciously to the centre speaker. And that's all she wrote--this is as bare-bones as a DVD gets.-Bill Chambers

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