The young Canadian actress Sarah Polley can sizzle in character parts--she burns a hole in the screen in her tiny bit in Cronenberg's EXISTENZ, and she was luminous as the princess in the wheelchair in THE SWEET HEREAFTER. But in leading roles, she seems both brittle and amoeboid. As Harper, the insecure and overlooked daughter of a family of cutthroat lawyers, she has one amazing scene--being seduced, her reactions fry out her speakers, sending from giggly hysteria to overdrive lust. Harper is seduced by an aging bohemian wedding photographer (Stephen Rea)--a lush who talks a big game, pontificates in bars with his low-rent cronies, and makes a sport and a pastime of mentoring (and groping) avid young women. But we don't see any hunger, any passion or obsession in Harper. When the photographer, Connie, tells her she has talent it's an obvious pick-up line--not because she hasn't done any work, but because she shows no interest in anything but being noticed.
The writer-director, Audrey Wells, doesn't show much interest in anything else, either. The author of the scripts for GEORGE OF THE JUNGLE and INSPECTOR GADGET, her first indie feature has more than a whiff of the dilettante. Like AMERICAN BEAUTY, GUINEVERE likes to flirt with the idea of having an "edge," then shies away from it. Both of these movies are just too damned clear. The pleasure of that seduction scene is that Harper responds in ways that are messy, funny, unprogrammed; every other scene in the picture makes its point in letters so bold the thickest member of the audience couldn't miss it.
You can take the girl out of the studio, but ain't no way you're taking the studio out of the girl. The lechy photographer's big sin--the thing that makes him evanesce in Harper's eyes--is that, at fifty, he's still stumping and hustling for cash. Can Audrey Wells really intend that it's okay for Connie to be a serial phony, an ego-inflating come-on artist, but his real Achilles' heel is that he never made real money? (Wells' point seems to be: Connie gets Harper's tender young flesh--he could at least pay the bills.) Every scene is so blandly overdetermined it reeks of falsity--especially the much-applauded one where Harper's bitchy mom (Jean Smart) comes into Connie's loft and undoes their relationship with a single cutting observation. (Would these lovers react with such shock to such an obvious accusation?)
For someone making a movie about the romance of the artist's life, Wells seems to have no clue how artists talk to each other, or even behave--she seems to think that's egghead stuff the audience won't care about. But it's that, not sex, that's supposed to be the fundament of Connie and Harper's relationship. Despite Rea's and Polley's efforts, the movie drowns in big-movie timidity. And the ending--a Felliniesque princess fantasy where all of Connie's sweet young things gather for an All That Jazz adieu--maybe intended to be tender. It comes across as a final, passive-aggressive flipping of the bird to a half-forgotten, dirty-minded teacher.
