Neil Young’s Film Lounge – The Banger Sisters

Published on: March 23rd, 2004

THE BANGER SISTERS

3/10

USA 2002 : Bob Dolman : 98mins

Watching her daughter Kate Hudsons headline-grabbing breakthrough in Almost Famous, Goldie Hawn must have thought to herself Ill have a bit of that. Because here comes The Banger Sisters, which takes early-seventies rock groupies like Hudsons 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 Morrisons 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 Lavinias teenage daughter Hannah (Erika Christensen) has a run-in with an acid tab on the night of her high-school prom, Suzettes know-how proves crucial and Vinnie/Lavinia starts loosening up and reverts to her old ways. Though essentially Vinnies story her transformation recalls the rejuvenation of Kevin Spaceys 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 (shes 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 Ive lost me, Harry coming to terms with his deceased father.

It all becomes rather grindingly inspirational, reaching a nadir with Hannah delivering writer-director Dolmans 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 Christensens doll-faced smugness but for once she’s only the second most annoying performer on-screen: Sarandons real-life daughter Eva Amurri is far too screechily convincing as Vinnies 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 familys perfect TV dinners.

16th February, 2003
(seen 24th January, Warner Village, Ellesmere Port)

by Neil Young

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