Talk Dirty To Me
by David Chute
Published in the Los Angeles Times, June 22, 1998.
by David Chute
Published in the Los Angeles Times, June 22, 1998.
Sony Pictures Classics
Credits: Director/Screenwriter: Don Roos; Producers: David Kirkpatrick, Michael Besman; Executive Producers: Jim Lotfi, Steve Danton; Director of Photography: Hubert Taczanowski; Editor: David Codron; Music: Mason Daring; Production Designer: Michael Clausen; Costume Designer: Peter Mitchell. Cast: Dedee Truitt: Christina Ricci; Bill Truitt: Martin Donovan; Lucia: Lisa Kudrow; Carl Tippett: Lyle Lovett; Jason: Johnny Galecki; Matt Mateo: Ivan Sergei; Randy: William Scott Lee. MPAA rating "R." Running Time 100 minutes. Color.
The characters in Don Roos "The Opposite of Sex" never seem to know when to shut up, and that's their charm. They are compulsive commentators on their own lives, and again and again the comments elicit explosive laughs. When the firecracker dialog subsides, the deliciously snide narration takes over, delivered (with a sneer we can hear) by Christina Ricci.Her character, Dedee Truitt, is a psycho bimbette with a bottomless fund of contempt for the gross stupidity, especially in sexual matters, of just about everybody she encounters. "Typically gay," Dedee groans, of the gleaming golden urn in which her queer uncle Bill (Martin Donovon) stores the ashes of his late lover.
Roos is a successful screenwriter ("Single White Female," "Boys on the Side") making his debut as a director with "The Opposite of Sex." For a first-timer, his craftsmanship is impressively polished. This is a verbally bawdy movie but visually it's the soul of discretion, nudity-free even in scenes that seem to call for it. Although Roos offers lip service to sexiness (if you'll pardon the expression), he isn't a sensuous satirist like Pedro Almodovar; rather than reveling in naughtiness he holds it at arms length and squints at it quizzically, firing off bon mots. The focus is consistently upon the mental and social side-effects of sexuality; the impossibility of making sense of it, the unforeseen consequences of unleashing it.
Dedee is fleeing a hellish family situation when she ends up on Bill's doorstep, dribbling cigarette ashes on the potted plants. She zeroes in her on her uncle's current housemate, the dim Adonis Matt Mateo (Ivan Sergei, making the most of every vacant stare)-in part because the spectacle of a contented gay relationship makes her crazy. She sets out with brisk efficiency (and a skillfully deployed bikini) to seduce the handsome stupe. Writer-director Roos takes current assumptions about the fluidity of sexual orientation absolutely for granted, and gleefully works changes on them.
It's been only a couple of years since Christina Ricci was headlining films like "Casper" and "Goldiggers: The Secret of Bear Mountain." On the evidence of this picture, and of her star turn last year as a barely-pubescent temptress in "The Ice Storm," she will not be a TGIF icon anytime soon, not even as "Wednesday the Teenage Ghoul." Ricci is an expert malevolent pouter, and the juxtaposition of her Cupie-doll face and her curve-a-minute physique is inherently unsettling. But once she's served her initial plot function as a troublemaker, Dedee's role in the story becomes peripheral. The focus shifts to the sensible people left behind to tidy up, Bill and his friend Lucia (Lisa Kudrow), a sharp-tongued colleague from his high school teaching job who's been carrying a hopeless torch for him for years.
Kudrow is a spectacularly crafty comedienne. Roos hands her many of the films best lines, and, with her preternatural timing, she nails every one. But Kudrow can also floor us with nothing but a raised eyebrow, or with her tonal modulations when delivering a string of expletives. Her manipulation of dialog is the comedic equivalent of scat singing. There's some amazing team work in her scenes with Donovan, who gives the movie a solid, subtle center. Kudrow's lovelorn Lucia seems at first to be defined by an all-encompassing bitter disappointment, but by the end she has emerged as the movies moral center, a pivotal presence in a film that often seems to relish cynicism for its own sake.
Probably only an openly gay moviemaker like Roos could get away with some of the elaborate slurs that these characters (Dedee, mostly) thoughtlessly hurl at each other. His honed approach to dialog, though a wizard wisecrack generator, begins to sound speechy when the characters have something serious to get across.
By roughing it up with eruptive anger, Donovan naturalizes a Bill Truitt diatribe to the effect that the gay men of his generation paved the way for the freedoms that ungrateful young "grunge fairies" like Matt's snotty boy-toy Jason (Johnny Galecki) take for granted. But Lyle Lovett, who has to deliver the movie's other major philosophical pronouncement (sex is a form of "biological high-lighting" designed to focus our attention on a single individual) isn't able to cushion the blunt impact of the lines. In close ups Lovett does delightful tiny takes just with the squinchy muscles around his eyes; an infinitesimal facial twitch is often his sole response to tumultuous events.
The pervasively self-conscious tone of "The Opposite of Sex" is certainly no accident. Roos is a ironist through and through, and in Dedee Truitt he supplies a narrator who knows she is one and snaps out comments on the craft of storytelling. When a previously cold-blooded but voluble character finally warms up, Dedee is appalled by her boudoir antics: "She turned out to be one of those talkers!"
Apparently the habit of loquacity dies hard.