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Armed with devastating performances from Uma Thurman, Juliette Lewis
and Gena Rowlands, director Mira Nair trains her sociologist's eye on
the Garden State in HBO's "Hysterical Blindness."
You know the obligatory "chick flick" scene in which the cute,
young, unlucky in love but at least they have each other heroines succumb
to the rousing rhythms of a Motown favorite and get down, get down until
they whip themselves into a girlish frenzy that climaxes with a feather-strewing
pillow fight?
That scene never comes in director Mira Nair's latest film, "Hysterical
Blindness." The protagonists do dance, albeit separately, but when
one of them does, she makes such a wrenching display of her insecurity,
desperation and vodka-soaked longing that it makes her friend recoil in
unexpected self-recognition, horror and protective love-pain."Hysterical
Blindness," which was the centerpiece premiere of the 2002 Sundance
Film Festival and premieres Sunday night at 9:30 on HBO, is Nair's sixth
feature film. Like most of her previous ones (including this year's art-house
smash, "Monsoon Wedding," set in her native India), it deals
deftly and lightly with themes of caste, class and other social constraints.
Based on Laura Cahill's play by the same name, "Hysterical Blindness"
is set in 1980s Bayonne, N.J., and centers on the relationships between
three working-class women: best friends Debby (Uma Thurman) and Beth (Juliette
Lewis), and Debby's mother, Virginia (Gena Rowlands). Debby, still a sulky,
rebellious teenager at 30 or so, lives at home while telling herself she
doesn't. In classic Greg Brady, every-teen fashion, she has converted
her mother's basement into a mirror-lined bachelorette pad for "privacy."
Her friend Beth, who got pregnant at 16 and dropped out of high school,
lives with her daughter, Amber (Jolie Peters), in a modest apartment nearby.
Debby and Beth have been best friends since high school. Neither their
relationship nor their lives have changed since then. We never learn what
Beth does for a living, but Debby works in customer service at a nameless
warehouse. (It's an unlikely job for someone so prone to social panic
that she literally loses her sight under pressure, as she does at the
beginning of the film.) Her real life -- or what she hopes will someday
become her real life -- revolves around a local dive called Ollie's.
Every night, for what seems to have been at least a decade, Debby and
Beth sashay into Ollie's with the kind of wide-eyed, anything-can-happen
excitement that most people stop feeling after their first seventh-grade
dance. (Ollie's is the same bar, it turns out, where Debby used to go
look for her father after he abandoned her and her mother.) Once inside,
they make a mad dash for the bathroom to douse themselves in hairspray,
gather their courage and devise a game plan. Debby needs Beth to tell
her what to order, how to drink it and why. When Beth decides on tequila
shots and asks Debby whether they should have them with salt, Debby shoots
back agitatedly, "Of course, salt! I don't want people thinking I
don't know how to do a tequila shot!" But people hardly think of
Debby at all, except as the girl who "does Bayonne" and can't
get a boyfriend.
Thurman, in a serious departure from the ice maidens she usually portrays,
plays a character so intensely needy and gapingly vulnerable she sucks
the air out of every room she enters. Gangly, physically erratic and uncomfortable
in her own skin, Debby wears her insecurity like a gash, and it hurts
to watch her bleed all over nearly everyone she encounters. She confuses
letting people use her with being "cool," and consistently manages
to fool nobody but herself. She requires constant, effusive reassurances
from Beth ("Debby, you look soooo hot!") before she can even
bring herself to walk into Ollie's.
Lewis, who does a mean Jersey girl, plays Beth with a charming blend of
ditziness, patience and compassion. Debby is harder on Beth than she deserves,
but the compassionate Beth coddles her best friend and tries to keep her
from harm. This means rarely telling her the truth, even when she needs
to hear it. When Rick, a cute construction worker that Debby becomes obsessed
with after a single short conversation, ignores her the second time they
meet, she turns an anguished face to Beth and says, "My mom thinks
my problem is that I'm too aloof." Beth looks at her with wide, disbelieving
eyes. "Aloof?" is all she can say.
Thurman's portrayal of a walking emotional wound is riveting; you can't
look away even though you want to. Lewis, on the other hand, plays a character
whose quiet complexity takes some time to come through. When it does,
it's a marvel of subtle precision. Beth is the kind of girl whose over-the-top
accent, huge hair and clownish makeup make her seem instantly dismissible.
As the film progresses, however, her resilience and unassuming complacency
begin to suggest a kind of Zen depth. She has few expectations and therefore
few disappointments. There's also a melancholy quality to Beth that comes
from the way other people's expectations and demands are imposed on her.
In one scene, she tells Debby how her daughter Amber's father proposed
to her when they were 16 and her parents made her give the ring back.
"He really, really wanted us to get married ... But it would have
been stupid to get married at 16, right? ... I don't know ... Sometimes
I think it wouldn't have been so bad."
But Beth may be developing a romance with the bartender, and it's Debby,
after all, who can't distinguish sex from love and who finds it impossible
to relate to men. (A few nights later, having gone home with Rick, Debby
ends an awkward silence by blurting, "I give a fabulous blow job!")
Rick clearly never has any intention of getting involved with Debby. Yet
despite all the cruel evidence to the contrary, Debby refuses to see her
brief and sordid few encounters with him as anything but "something
special." Beth can only look on in horror and brace herself for the
imminent crash.
To complicate matters, Virginia begins a relationship with a sweet, retired
widower named Nick (Ben Gazzara) and Debby reacts to the news like a wounded
animal. Still reeling, half a lifetime later, from her father's sudden
departure, Debby takes an instant dislike to Nick. She claims it's because
he's bound to hurt her mother, but it's obvious that the comparison between
her "relationship" and Virginia's is too much for her to handle.
As Debby careens even more violently between feelings of jealousy and
anguish, her mother blossoms. Rowlands is amazing to watch as a woman
who has long since stopped looking who falls suddenly and unexpectedly
in love. She plays Virginia halfway between eminently sensible and adorably
daffy; watching her dance, cautiously but tenderly, with a melancholy
Gazzara, you can't help but feel that love is squandered on the young.
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