Blown-Up Skit
FILM: But I'm a Cheerleader
DIRECTOR: Jamie Babbit
STARRING: Natasha Lyonne, Clea DuVall
GRADE: C+
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THE STRAIGHT STORY: RECOVERING LESBIANS GRAHAM (CLEA DUVALL) AND MEGAN (NATASHA LYONNE) PRACTICE THE JOYS OF MOTHERHOOD IN BUT I'M A
CHEERLEADER.
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Want to know how bad it's been at the movies this summer? So bad that even most
of the independent features have ranged from indifferent to boring. Case in
point: Jamie Babbit's heavy-handed sex comedy, But I'm a Cheerleader.
This is a picture that takes an actual ridiculous phenomenon and develops it
into a humorous idea, then fails to stretch the idea into a satisfyingly funny
script. There's perhaps material enough here for a pleasing Saturday Night
Live skit, but like the host of movies made from SNL skits, this one
runs out of gas long before the closing credits.
Written by Brian Wayne Peterson, But I'm a Cheerleader is
the story of a young lesbian confronting her sexual orientation under unusual
circumstances. Megan (Natasha Lyonne) is a varsity cheerleader for a high
school football team going to the playoffs. She really has school spirit and
likes nothing better than shaking her pompons and building a pyramid with her
fellow yell leaders. Moreover, Megan is going steady with the team quarterback,
who appears to like completing passes in his parked car more than he likes
taking a snap from under center. Megan, meanwhile, is clueless that fantasizing
about the other cheerleaders is not the
common heterosexual response
while
French kissing her boyfriend.
But Megan's the last to know. The boyfriend has noticed, though we
aren't clear how because Megan seems to feel duty-bound to "put out" like the
other girls. The other girls have noticed that instead of posters of Brad Pitt
in her locker, she has pictures of hardbody girls just about to flop out of
their bikinis. And Megan's parents know, though they seem so dense it would be
hard to believe they realize Megan wasn't delivered by a stork.
At any rate, friends and family stage an "intervention," confront
Megan with her lesbianism (she protests in the words through the film's title)
and then pack her off to a sexual-reorientation camp called True Directions. In
a fairy-tale world of hot pinks and garish greens, Megan is grouped with a
coterie of other gay teens whose anti-genetic loved ones want them rewired into
heterosexuals. Real programs like this exist, but they try to work their
alchemy with heavy doses of misread Biblical scripture and vise-like
applications of guilt. In that regard, this picture lets the real places
off
easily with a series of increasingly
predictable jokes.
In a weak parody of Alcoholics Anonymous, True Directions offers a
five-step program. The first step, "Admitting You're a Homosexual," makes
little sense. Isn't the purpose of this institution to convince the kids
they're not homosexuals?
The second step, "Rediscovering Gender Identity" contains just
about all the comedy the film has to offer. Here, True Directions' matron Mary
Brown (a shamelessly mugging Cathy Moriarty) works with the girls while her
"formerly gay" assistant Mike (a surprisingly effective RuPaul Charles,
sporting a goatee and eschewing drag for the duration) trains the boys. The
girls learn to prance while vacuuming, daydream while scrubbing the floor and
feel faint while trying on wedding dresses. The boys, meanwhile, learn to snort
and spit while adjusting their genitals, work on cars, play football, handle
firearms and wield a chain saw. This section of the film provides a lot of
smiles and a genuine laugh or two, but it's the last watering hole before a
trek into the great desert of arid imagination.
As the film marches through its last three self-help steps, it
doesn't manage to generate but one lone moment of comedy. Instead, the flick
turns politically correct to investigate how true homosexual love can blossom
even in a place like True Directions. Instead of becoming transformed into a
yearning heterosexual, Megan flips for her roommate, Graham (Clea DuVall), an
angry, chain-smoking, unreconstructed lesbian who attends the True Directions
training sessions with a snarl of contempt and leads the girls in her dorm on
midnight escapes to the local gay bar.
This might be all well and good if it were pursued with any
consistency. On the contrary, however, it's Megan who quickly becomes the
aggressor and Graham the one determined to dress up in her pink strapless
evening ground and "graduate" into straight society. Wouldn't the whole premise
have worked better the other way around? Well, yes, of course, but then the
whole picture would have worked better if writer Peterson and director Babbit
had figured out a way to provide it two missing body parts: a more active funny
bone and a much larger heart.
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