This is an odd movie. At times it seems to aspire toward
status as an Oscar-baiting drama about dysfunctional families, ala The Hours. At
other times it borrows from Southern Gothic melodrama, like The Heart is a
Lonely Hunter. At other times it plays out like a conventional Hollywood
thriller. At still other times it flirts with the conventions of the lurid,
youth-oriented exploitation thriller, in the manner of Wild Things. The trailer
goes for something still different, and makes it seem like a horror film.
It's a little of each of those, and they don't always blend
easily, so that it forms a cinematic cocktail with a consistency less like a
smoothly blended martini than like a rusty nail. No matter how hard you try to
blend in that Drambuie, it always leaves that weird oil slick floating on the
surface.
The film begins with a dark-haired cheerleader telling her
blonde friend what a great family she has: successful mom, handsome dad,
beautiful home. This conversation will soon reveal itself to have been darkly
ironic. The blonde's household is about as dysfunctional as possible. Her mom is
a pill-popping space cadet and dad is fucking his cheerleader daughter. The already volatile
situation is brought to the boiling point by the family's adoption of their
godchild, a deaf teenage girl who has suddenly found herself orphaned. While the
cheerleader is one of the most popular kids in school, her new step-sister is a
freakish outsider who is even rejected by the losers, and sits completely alone
at lunch.
The Gothic portion of the film soon takes
over, as all of the family members start to confide their innermost secrets to
the deaf-mute. It is just a way of getting things off their chests without
actually betraying any secrets because, well, she can't hear what they're saying
anyway. Various people at school do the same thing, including a sincere guy who
courts the deaf girl in earnest, and confesses all his innermost secrets with
his back to her. The film reveals quite early that the deaf-mute girl is neither
deaf nor mute
really deaf, and has quickly learned the secrets of the family, the school, and
probably the Chinese Navy for all I know, since everybody has conversations
around her as if she were not there at all.
The next phase of the film is the Oscar-baiting portion,
in which the incestuous father confesses how he hates himself and wants to quit
the abuse, and the cheerleader daughter informs him she is pregnant, and so
forth. We then find out that the mother really knows what's going on, but
withdraws into her own drug-addled state and ignores the situation. The daughter
finally decides that she doesn't want to sleep with dad any more. Dad gets upset
at her.
At this point the film becomes a thriller, with all of the
major characters locked in a tense situation which will soon come to a head in
violence.
The 6.6 at IMDb
is truly an aberration, since Yahoo voters rate it a C, which is about
as low as Yahoo's ratings ever go! Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo, 4.2 at IMDb, is also rated
C at Yahoo. Even the 5.7
from the top IMDb voters seems high for a film with no box office, a C at Yahoo,
and a 12% rating by RT's "cream of the crop," but the difference is a matter of
interpretation. The strongest criticism argued that the film's dialogue and plot
twists were so bad as to be comical. The film's IMDb supporters countered, "Exactly.
It's a spoof and a dark comedy!"
I guess there is some evidence to support the dark comedy
theory. For example, there's one point where the cheerleader tells her dad she
can't fuck him at that moment because she has to iron her cheerleading uniform.
Whether the cheese was intentional or not, I found
the film too dark to allow for any real humor or eroticism, yet too sleazy to be taken
seriously.
