The Smokers (2001) – DVD

*½/**** Image B- Sound C
starring Dominique Swain, Busy Philipps, Keri Lynn Pratt, Nicholas M. Loeb
screenplay by Christina Peters and Kenny Golde
directed by Christina Peters

by Bill Chambers Thora Birch turns around in the closing shot of The Smokers and sticks her tongue out at the camera. Short of adding a raspberry sound, we couldn't ask for a more pithy review of the film, even if Birch's gesture wasn't intended as such. (Whatever the case, it's a bit of fourth-wall breaking that ultimately feels cathartic.) The Smokers is aimless, feckless, and finally bad, an indie made with an absence not only of cash but also vision, though the fact that it doesn't have any major-studio obligations leaves the filmmakers free to present complex female characters. Too bad they are that way in large part because their actions are so damn inexplicable.

Take the set-up for the story–please, as Henny Youngman would say. Three kittenish boarding-school townies–collectively nicknamed The Smokers because, well, they smoke–go to a bar; two of them return home alone but the third and most promiscuous one, Karen (Busy Philipps), gets it on with a rich man in a limousine. When the day breaks, he refuses to give Karen his number, fearing that a call from her might disrupt his marriage, and after this unpleasant experience, she learns that her pal Lisa (Keri Lynn Pratt) was similarly left on the discard pile by a hook-up the same evening. Karen concocts an asinine plan for The Smokers to "rape" a man at gunpoint, an act which will stand for women's reclamation of power or some such, and the film's sharpest development is how this backfires: Their victim becomes the envy of his guy friends, inspiring a "Rape Me" T-shirt fad across campus.

You think The Smokers is really onto something at this juncture; you hope it will be brave enough to maybe flesh out Karen's hypocrisy (she uses boys as much as they use her), pick at the self-loathing beneath the crime she and her friends commit, or simply go off into other, equally surprising directions–but alas, the film suffers from short-film-itis, playing its best card too early and squandering our goodwill for the rest of it. The story gives way to a subplot about Smoker #3, narrator Jefferson (the Lolita remake's Dominique Swain, still gangly and kinetic), learning to see a nerdy boy she grew up with (Nicholas M. Loeb, whose co-producer credit explains his presence as an actor–he's so amateurish the student-crude cinematography and choppy editing are above him) in a new light. Karen continues on in her mission and goes off the rails, yet director/co-writer Christina Peters seems too conflicted about the film's feminist advantage (when was the last time you saw a teen-themed picture with three female leads, outside of the horror genre?) to contend with the Smokers' politics honestly, instead making a cheap irony of their identity by involving them in a fire that gets out of hand.

The last thing one expects from a low-budget guns 'n' gals flick is for it to turn "Dawson's Creek", but a Heathers for the '00s The Smokers is not. Peters trivializes her own subject matter to the extent that we're assured in last-minute voice-over pronouncements of everybody's future successes, including that of Lincoln, Birch's character, who will apparently graduate from the film's posh Lindenhurst Academy despite being something like a feral badger. Jefferson's über-delinquent sister, Lincoln is introduced in Pris-meets-The Crow make-up and henna tattoos smoking a bong that almost equals her in height; in the second of her three scenes, she plays Russian Roulette with a loaded .44! Birch's commitment to this underwritten, nay, unwritten role is kind of embarrassing. (I suspect she's aiming for the iconic heights of Brad Pitt in True Romance.) Philipps, incidentally, is now a regular on the actual "Dawson's Creek", which at least has better production values.

THE DVD
MGM's flipper DVD release of The Smokers is a movie-only affair that sports colourful 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen and full-frame transfers on opposite sides of the platter. Each nonetheless suffers from soft detail and mulchy contrast, perhaps owing to the movie's presumed but unconfirmed Super 16 origins. Note that the fullscreen version crops out Birch's tongue, the best part. The Dolby Surround soundmix, featuring lots of post-synched dialogue, is borderline unprofessional and seemingly unfinished: the balance between live music and voices is completely out of whack, and sound effects are almost absent, never mind surround effects. The disc hits shelves in tandem with the infinitely superior Birch-starrer Ghost World.

90 minutes; R; 1.85:1 (16×9-enhanced), 1.33:1; English Dolby Surround; CC; English, French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-10; Region One; MGM