Director : Larry Clark
With : James Woods, Natasha Gregson Wagner, Melanie Griffith

Not unlike the totally bleak, yet potentially realistic look at New York City kids in his debut feature “Kids,” photographer turned filmmaker Larry Clark has once again created a movie fixated on his love of sleaze. Having not abandoned his infatuation with young kids doing dirty adult things, Clark’s latest opus appears to be a slightly kinder and gentler take on the topics explored in “Kids:” sex, drugs, and thieving. After a brutal opening scene where young Bobbie (Vincent Kartheiser) is nearly beaten to death for robbing some vending machines, Clark sets out to take a plot and unfold it rather linearly. From the moment professional junkie and thief Mel (James Woods) and his girlfriend Sidney (Melanie Griffith) pick up the barely recovered Bobbie and his girlfriend Rosie (Natasha Gregson Wagner ) from their dingy warehouse squat, you can tell that both parties have, in a way, looked into that mirror that makes you look both younger and older.

And so the petty thieves and junkies head into the sunset to set up a robbery of a clinic, where they will come away with a bunch of cash and enough amphetamines to keep them flush for quite a while. Sidney and Mel take to their newfound accomplices both because of their glaring similarities and because of the fact that we are told that they can’t have children of their own.

At first the road seems like the best thing in the world to Bobbie and Rosie, but eventually when the life of crime begins to bring with it a legitimate sense of danger, the honeymoon wears off. And so the Larry Clark allows the booze to run thicker, the drugs to shoot harder and the pain and sadness to ooze more overtly from the older and younger “Bonnie and Clyde’s”. There is nothing easy about watching a teenaged looking DiCaprio (Kartheiser) and a doll-faced Natasha Wagner, pretend to be adults by shooting junk, chain-smoking butts and stumbling around like bleary-eyed bums.

But you can’t help applaud the courage of Clark’s neo-realist vision. Surrounding the soulful vagabond existence is a warm and authentic soundtrack of music by Otis Redding, Clarence Carter, and Chocolate Genius playing soul classics. You might not have the stomach or the desire to crawl around the gutters pulling small crimes, but if you do, Larry Clark at least makes it real, like a modern day Roger Corman.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 2nd, 1999 at 4:34 pm and is filed under movies + dvds. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.