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In one of the film’s first scenes, Sarah (Asia Argento) looks at her confused child after freeing him from life with his doting middle-class foster parents, then points to her vagina and says, “If I had my way, I’d have flushed you down the toilet.” Nice to meet you, too.
After Sarah’s 23 years of religious oppression, emotional abuse, and sexual maneuvering, she submits her child, Jeremiah, to a similar education. From teaching him how to be raped by her boyfriends to telling him his foster parents hated him, this fictitious story is as detailed and sensationalized as the “autobiographical novel” from which it was adapted. JT Leroy’s book has been criticized for being exploitive, full of pop psychology, and a garish display of perversity and negligence that, if at all untrue, is ultimately unnecessary, and the same can be said for this adaptation.
Starring as a central character as pathetic as she is despicable, director Argento’s vivid onscreen presence can only add so much to a film of horrific scene after horrific scene. And while the stunt casting can get tiresome (See Winona Ryder as a social worker! Marilyn Manson as trailer trash! Ornella Muti from Flash Gordon as a Christian fundamentalist grandmother!), the three boys playing Jeremiah (Jimmy Bennett and twins Cole and Dylan Sprouse) portray their character so realistically that sympathy is inevitable, no matter how cartoonish Jeremiah’s litany of abuse becomes.
Argento’s writing and direction are as transparent as Leroy’s plot. In fact, the more subtle characters from the source material are either left out or whittled into a four-minute role. But in the end, it’s the needless employ of gratuitous situations that makes the film feel more like Pasolini’s homage to American depravity than the telling dramatization of cyclical abuse that the filmmakers would like us to believe. Zachary Jones
March 10, 2006
