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Half-hearted rebellion
[Photo: Fox Searchlight Pictures]
From left, Erika Christensen, Robin Thomas, Susan Sarandon, Eva Amurri and Goldie Hawn star in The Banger Sisters. |
By STEVE PERSALL, Times Film Critic
© St. Petersburg Times
published September 19, 2002
Good casting can't overcome a bad script in The Banger Sisters. Goldie Hawn and Susan Sarandon gamely play ex-rock groupies in a movie loaded down with cliches.
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Shouldn't a movie about groupies possess some inkling of the spirit of rock 'n' roll? Watching The Banger Sisters is like hearing Led Zeppelin songs played by the Jackie Gleason Orchestra, with all the right notes played with the wrong instruments, sans the rebellious emotional release and with the delusion that it's cool.
What a waste of excellent casting. Goldie Hawn and Susan Sarandon are godmothers of the classic rock vibe, each becoming stars when sex, drugs and music were political statements and not merely pastimes. The thought of them playing ex-groupies reviving their mojo is tantalizing. But what writer-director Bob Dolman chooses to do with his dynamic duo is a shame. He builds a plot on fuddy-duddy cliches and, most regretfully, never gives the music its due, therefore cheapening the characters' former avocation.
Compare The Banger Sisters with the best rock 'n' roll film of the past decade, Almost Famous. It's easy to do because Hawn's spitting-image daughter, Kate Hudson, basically played her mom's role at an earlier, more interesting age. Cameron Crowe's screenplay was built on the allure of the music that Hudson's Penny Lane suffered for. Dolman's script mentions the decadence, ignores the innocence and drops names for wan credibility.
Hawn plays Suzette, pushing 50 and still acting like a kid while tending bar on the Sunset Strip. She gets fired from her job and decides to reunite with Lavinia (Sarandon), her accomplice in so many celebrity orgies in the old days. But Lavinia has changed. She is primly married to a Phoenix lawyer (Robin Thomas) and is smothering two teenage daughters (Erika Christensen and Sarandon's real-life daughter, Eva Amurri). Seeing Suzette again is a threat to her overly mannered life, and for two-thirds of the movie, Lavinia is a drag, although well-acted by Sarandon.
Before that happens, however, Dolman introduces another stick-in-the-mud, an obsessive-compulsive screenwriter named Harry (Geoffrey Rush), picked up by Suzette on the road for gas money. Harry has an old typewriter and a gun, with depressing uses in mind for both. Rush overdoes the fussiness angle, and the Australian strangles all authenticity from his American accent. Mostly he stays in the hotel while Suzette turns Lavinia's household upside-down.
Two-thirds of the movie passes before we get what we paid for, a chance to see Suzette and Lavinia resurrect their teen spirit. By that time, so much introspection has been shown that an evening at a nightclub seems more pathetic than liberating, the key element of rock 'n' roll. One late sequence, when the friends review their photos of celebrity genitalia and smoke a 20-year-old joint, gives an inkling of the naughty fun The Banger Sisters could have been.
Instead, the audience is treated to suicidal tendencies, loneliness and uptight conservatism. Lavinia's daughters suggest what kind of whining sometimes passes for rock 'n' roll today, yet Suzette's best advice for them is to wash the dishes. Dolman's characters are pat, and their circumstances are arbitrary. When Lavinia decides to cut loose, it's so abrupt that you wonder why it never happened before.
All you need to know about The Banger Sisters to understand its sterile drama is that the climax occurs with a high school valedictory speech. That's not rock 'n' roll; it's an after-school special.
[Photo: Fox Searchlight Pictures]
Susan Sarandon and Goldie Hawn are saddled with a bad script in The Banger Sisters.
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The Banger Sisters
- Grade: C
- Director: Bob Dolman
- Cast: Goldie Hawn, Susan Sarandon, Geoffrey Rush, Erika Christensen, Eva Amurri, Robin Thomas
- Screenplay: Bob Dolman
- Rating: R; profanity, sexual situations, brief nudity, drug abuse
- Running time: 98 min.
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