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THE
BANGER SISTERS
3/10
USA 2002
: Bob Dolman : 98mins
Watching her
daughter Kate Hudson’s headline-grabbing breakthrough in Almost
Famous, Goldie Hawn must have thought to herself “I’ll have a
bit of that.” Because here comes The Banger Sisters, which takes
early-seventies rock groupies like Hudson’s Penny Lane and imagines how
they might have turned out 30 years on. Hawn is Suzette, whose dress and
behaviour don’t seem to have altered one jot over the intervening decades
– she’s still serving beers at Jim Morrison’s old Sunset Strip haunt Whisky
A Go Go. But when she has one clash with the management too many, Suzette
is given her marching orders – and decides to seek out her former partner-in-crime,
Vinnie (Susan Sarandon).
Now a respectable
Phoenix ‘home-maker’ who prefers to be called Lavinia, this prim mother-of-two
greets her one-time best friend with barely disguised horror. But when
Lavinia’s teenage daughter Hannah (Erika Christensen) has a run-in with
an acid tab on the night of her high-school prom, Suzette’s know-how proves
crucial and Vinnie/Lavinia starts loosening up and reverts to her old
ways. Though essentially Vinnie’s story – her transformation recalls the
rejuvenation of Kevin Spacey’s Lester Burnham from American
Beauty – The Banger Sisters is really a vehicle for Hawn,
who delivers whatever energy the film possesses.
Sarandon, however,
never looks entirely comfortable (she’s a very long way from the female-buddy
dynamics of Thelma and Louise) in either of her ‘roles’, though
she has rather more to do than Geoffrey Rush, wasted in a badly-integrated
subplot as Harry, a fuss-pot writer who helps the cash-strapped Suzette
get to Phoenix. This is an undemanding, underpowered comedy which, despite
some amusing moments in the early and middle stretches, really hits trouble
towards the end as the various characters each make crucial breakthroughs
in their personal development: Suzette facing up to adulthood, Vinnie
realising “I’ve lost me”, Harry coming to terms with his deceased father.
It all becomes
rather grindingly inspirational, reaching a nadir with Hannah delivering
writer-director Dolman’s mulchy moral (“Do your own thing – whatever you
do, do it true!”) at her graduation ceremony. As in Traffic
and SwimFan, there’s
something maddening about Christensen’s doll-faced smugness – but for
once she’s only the second most annoying performer on-screen: Sarandon’s
real-life daughter Eva Amurri is far too screechily convincing as Vinnie’s
whining daughter Ginger. As for Dolman, he makes a bland job of his directorial
debut – despite that cloying “do it true” message, this veteran screenwriter
most certainly does not ‘do his own thing’ on film. Just as the unadventurous
Almost Famous would have undoubtedly sent its own rebel-hero-critic
Lester Bangs screaming from the auditorium, The Banger Sisters is
a conventional, predictable, heavily muzak-ed up example of Hollywood
product – one that Lavinia, not Vinnie, could easily have made in between
preparing her family’s perfect TV dinners.
16th
February, 2003
(seen 24th January, Warner Village, Ellesmere Port)
by Neil
Young
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