Alexis Bledel and Saoirse Ronan (MV Nepenthes LLC/Cinedigm)An 18-year-old girl and her young mentor are desperate to buy a $300 Barbie Sunday dress. Where will they get that kind of money? Murder!
Director Jean-Luc Godard famously quipped that all you need for a movie is a gun and a girl. Writer-director Geoffrey Fletcher takes this cinematic axiom to a painfully self-conscious extent with perky assassins named Violet and Daisy.
Fletcher won an Oscar in 2009 for his adapted screenplay of Precious, and, as overheated as that urban melodrama was, he fares much worse here. With the help of cinematographer Vanja Cernjul, Fletcher has made a visually compelling first feature. But his first original screenplay is a terribly derivative mess that tries way, way too hard to be cool.
The movie comes off like teenagers playing at Quentin Tarantino. We meet Violet (Alexis Bledel) and Daisy (Saoirse Ronan) upset that a concert by their idol, Barbie Sunday, has just been cancelled. But they have other fish to fry. Dressed as nuns, they deliver boxes of Religious Pizza to their targets, and as “Angel of the Morning” plays in the background, the young women’s guns blaze out of the pizza boxes.
If that kind of obvious layered irony, like a black pug that drinks out of a dish marked “Whitey,” turns you on, you’ll love Violet and Daisy. But it sets up an attitude and hipper-than-thou irony that makes Family Guy seem subtle.
Even worse is the infantilization of the flowery leads. These guns are far from empowering. Like Frances Ha with ammo, Violet and Daisy play patty cake. As annoying as that was in Frances Ha, I have to give Noah Baumbach credit for stopping at that. Fletcher goes on to have his childlike women pillow fight and talk like little girls. The script treats Daisy with particular contempt, less an innocent than a naive dunce who doesn’t get Vi’s jokes and is generally clueless despite being a hired killer. The vapid behavior of these women is what you might expect in a Disney Channel movie. In this kind-of-indie movie, it’s possibly meant as an ironic indictment of consumerism and media portrayal of women. But something tells me that lofty ideals were not in Fletcher’s mind when he created these bloodthirsty adult babies.
Alexis Bledel and Saoirse Ronan (MV Nepenthes LLC/Cinedigm)James Gandolfini plays Michael, a target who welcomes the cherubic gun moll for reasons that he gradually reveals. There’s not much he can do with the boilerplate dialogue he’s given. It’s one thing to play at the violence-as-humor that is Quentin Tarantino’s mark on contemporary filmmaking.
But Tarantino can write good dialogue (unlike awkward howlers like, “it’s some kind of gentrification shit”) and coax strong performances out of his actors. There are talented actors on board, but the casting itself feels like a stunt. Ha, Tony Soprano is the object of a hit man, and is threatened by the guy who played weak Artie Bucco (John Ventimiglia)! Ha, Machete (Danny Trejo) is the girls’ boss! These self-reflexive assignments add to the sense that entire scenes of the movie play like they’re in ironic quotes. Not to mention the film’s arbitrary chapter headings, which, like Bledel’s distracting Anna Karina-esque bangs, is a vaguely Godardian homage.
On some level, Violet and Daisy might have worked as a satire. A deadpan approach, like the affectless epiphanies of avant-garde playwright Richard Maxwell, could have pulled this together. But the sight of grown women doing their “internal bleeding dance” atop fresh victims doesn’t come off as shocking, as intended, but as an eye-rolling exercise in cringe worthy misogynistic dread. Violet and Daisy are not the flowers you are looking for.
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Written and directed by Geoffrey Fletcher
With Alexis Blede, Saoirse Ronan, James Gandolfini.
Rated R for violence, disturbing behavior, language, and pillow fights
Running time 88 minutes
Opens today at AMC Hoffman Center 22
