Review of Pretty Persuasion (2005) by Forrest P — 16 Jul 2011

Pretty Persuasion should have focused on trying to be a straight comedy or moving, provocative drama. Settling for something in the middle worked for movies like M*A*S*H that knew how to handle the dark stuff in a light-hearted manner, but Pretty Persuasion had no idea how to properly accomplish this.

This is a movie about three high school girls (played by Evan Rachel Wood, Elisabeth Harnois, and Adi Schnall) inspiring to be actresses who accuse their teacher (Ron Livingston) of sexually harassing them. What part of this is suppose to be funny? I suppose the notion that Ron Livingston would sexually harass high school girls is pretty funny. Something that I found out very quickly with this movie is that the "comedy" that the film aimed for did not work at all. There was not a single funny joke in the film, mostly because the lead characters are too cruel to really be found funny or witty.

Most of the plot revolves around the trial as the three girls lie to make the teacher seem to be a perverted human being. I think my readers may see why this comedy did not work for me. This is a very real issue that happens in high schools more often than not and it is very difficult to accept light-hearted fun being poked at it. So for the first seventy minutes of the hundred and four minute running time, I found myself watching a very unpleasant and rather cruel film full of leads that I did not enjoy watching at all.

Other detractors from this film include cinematography that is only so-so and occasionally poor editing. These things are not enough to make a film good or bad, but they can make a big difference in the way an audience enjoys a film. I wanted better craftsmanship than what I got.

But things started to change after the first seventy minutes. The last half-hour of this film is... quite good. I have never, in fact, in all the films that I have watched, seen a film that was able to become so good in it's final act. The comedy was dropped and the drama was focused on and... it worked. It really, really worked. Had the whole film had the kind of impact the last half hour did, I might have liked this picture.

As it is, however, I cannot bring myself to like or appreciate a film that did not bother to move me as an audience member until the last thirty minutes. The entire first two thirds of the film was awful. I hated the characters, the comedy failed miserably, the dialogue was subpar at best, and the complex themes that the film begins to bring up are horribly overlooked or manipulated entirely. As a comedy/drama, this film does not hold water. I cannot say that enough. Had the film really tried to be one or the other, I might hold a different opinion. But as it stands, there just was not enough meat in this movie to hold it together.

4/10.