Crime and Punishment in Suburbia [2000]

The closest this gets to the recent craze for restaging classic literature in an American teen movie setting [Emma as Clueless, Dangerous Liaisons as Cruel Intentions, The Taming of the Shrew as 10 Things I Hate About You, etc] is in the title. As it happens, Dostoievsky's Crime and Punishment, which after all does have a young if not teenage protagonist, has already been adapted several times with modern settings: a 1958 French version with Robert Hossein as a Left Bank student Raskolnikov, and Denis Sanders' Crime and Punishment USA [1959], with George Hamilton as a Leopold-and-Loeb-informed murderer. Dostoievsky's plot, as a cool criminal's perfect murder scheme is slowly unpicked by a persistent investigator, is also the avowed model for over a hundred Columbo episodes. Though Raskolnikov is mutated into Rosanne Skolnik, played with hitherto unexpected depth by yet another Dawson's Creek refugee Monica Keena, occasional Sight & Sound contributor Larry Gross's script takes the difficult road by leaving the original plot behind while struggling to develop a modern-day equivalent of Dostoievsky's fatal vision.

The whole story is filtered through the constantly-snapping Vincent and broken into scratchily-titled chapters, emphasising a Dostoievskian insistence on a possibly futile search for meaning and order in chaos. An initial quote from the master establishes the parameters, so the film is then free to go its own way, allowing for a tangle of complex relationships that goes beyond Raskolnikov's philosophical crime and Porfiri's nemesis-like punishment to give equal time to the second half of the title. Like Penelope Spheeris and Richard Linklater, who made films called Suburbia [1983] and subUrbia [1996], Rob Schmidt does not give us a Brady Bunch utopia but characterises the setting as 'a desert'. The film spends very little time in typically suburban domestic spaces - the Skolniks house has dark gothic interiors on a byway that might as well be called Elm Street or belong to Joe Dante's The 'burbs [1989] - to observe characters lost in minimally-graffitied schoolyards, locker-rooms, stretches of concrete wilderness, yoghurt shops, courtrooms and prisons. Here is a world that might have driven the Russian further into despair, yet the inquisitive, clear-eyed Vincent - who takes upon himself the intellectual, experimental side of Raskolnikov jettisoned by the more direct, motivated Rosanne - is on hand to give context, though his conclusion ['what a strange path it took to find your heart'] sounds more like a David Lynch cast-off than true depth.

As the heroine's name suggests, the film is more an anagram than an adaptation - though there is thematic cross-over not only with the high-school classic rom-com but the bad grrl fairy tales of Matthew Bright's Freeway films. Early on, as Vincent photographs the girl he has a crush on and we observe the sexual tensions and dissonances swirling around the middle-aged, desperate Fred and Maggie, it seems the film comes perilously close to being an imitation of American Beauty, but if anything the comparison serves to show up how neat and tidy the Oscar-winning hit was about its suburban crises. The thrust of American Beauty was to humanise its weirdoes, so everyone was in the end understandable and sympathetic. Here, everyone is strangled by mixed motives, so that even the bogeyman figure of the drunken, abusive stepfather - Michael Ironside, establishing his character's hollowness by failing to understand why some people think the old black and white version of The Outer Limits is superior to the colour revival - is more like a messy human being than the building block of a thesis. Nothing works out as it is supposed to: Chris's late-in-the-day sleuthing goes pear-shaped in such a way as to cripple Jimmy and land himself in prison, while the fuss raised by this minor shooting forces Rosanne to confess before she has made up her mind to cop to the killing her mother is about to be convicted of.

Schmidt adopts a striking [and risky] visual design, with patches of the screen in sharp focus as others blur as if seen through rain or tears, and stages especially the night scenes with hallucinatory blobs of bright colour in the darkness [the soundtrack uses brilliantly-chosen snatches of offbeat music to the same effect]. In contrast to the fantasylands of much American film and TV, the high school we see here looks less inviting and glamorous than the prison Rosanne winds up in, and the kids are actually seen doing classwork and homework between dating and killing. The young leads are photogenic, but not in an air-brushed way: Rosanne is at once glamorous and slightly dumpy, Jimmy handsome but always awkward in posture as if expecting to be body-slammed at any moment [the one time he relaxes on the football field, that's exactly what happens to him] and Vincent's geek cool, which extends to a sober speech about an old girlfriend who taught him to smoke crack, is also spikily disturbing to such a degree that we can see why others find him so hard to be around. The saintliness of the kids and kidlike adults in American Beauty and other recent 'serious' Hollywood teen-centric films is present here, but scratched out or blurred over like the altered images Vincent makes of his photographs. It falters at the end, with a narrated wrap-up and a few weak lines, but is for the most part a remarkable, haunting work.
KIM NEWMAN

First Published In: Sight & Sound [issue unknown]

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