Feminine Wiles

Jane Campion's weird spectacle and Janet McTeer's bad mother.

by CHRIS HERRINGTON

Outside of commercial nonentities like Maya Deren and Chantal Akerman, New Zealand-based director Jane Campion might be the most significant female filmmaker ever. That Campion has risen to such a level in a career that spans only five features over 10 years says a whole lot about the enduring patriarchal dominance of film production, of course. But it's also a testament to the groundbreaking quality of Campion's work -- the back-to-back shot of The Piano and The Portrait of a Lady established Campion as one of our most accomplished and vital contemporary filmmakers.

That said, the new Holy Smoke! might be Campion's first real misfire, but if it's a failure, it's a fascinating one. And it only confirms Campion's ability to extract great performances from her female leads, with Kate Winslet following Holly Hunter's Oscar-winning turn in The Piano and Nicole Kidman's equally memorable performance in The Portrait of a Lady, one of the last decade's most unjustly neglected films.

Harking back to the localized weirdness of Campion's 1990 debut, Sweetie, Holy Smoke! is ambitious, scrambled, and at times, overwrought -- but it's never boring. Winslet is Ruth, a young Australian woman who succumbs to a cult while backpacking through India. Her horrified, bourgeois family tricks her into returning home by concocting a medical emergency. Back in Australia, Ruth is confronted with P.J. Waters (Harvey Keitel), an American "cult exit counselor" hired by the family to "deprogram" her.

Keitel's P.J. is a somewhat laughable American cowboy figure -- an anachronism decked out in cowboy boots, black jeans, and dyed hair and mustache. We're introduced to him -- in iconic Tarantino fashion -- to the tune of a Neil Diamond song. Ruth, by contrast, prefers to dance and sing along -- loudly -- to Alanis Morissette's "You Oughta Know," in one of the film's more memorable bits of spectacle.

Ruth and P.J. retire to an abandoned country house, where Ruth has reluctantly agreed to appease her family by participating in a three-day deprogramming session -- before she returns to India, of course. And here is the heart of the film -- a psychosexual, May-December pas de deux between two fearless actors. A raw, sexual confrontation between an aging method actor and a luscious young star, Holy Smoke! signifies as a feminist update of Last Tango in Paris, and the film has delirious fun with P.J.'s farcical machismo meltdown. When P.J. confronts the strong-willed Ruth about India's misogyny, she replies that the country is merely more honest about its hatred of women than he is -- to which P.J. responds uncomprehendingly, "But I love ladies!"

Holy Smoke! works quite well as a good-natured girl power tract, with Ruth deploying mind and body to deprogram her deprogrammer, but it falters at the end when it reaches for deeper emotional terrain. The film's climax is a misguided, out-of-control oddity -- Ruth and P.J. wandering the outback, he in a red dress and one boot, she wearing homemade sandals constructed from Dostoyevsky paperbacks, "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" on the soundtrack.

Yet, despite its failings, Holy Smoke! has plenty worth seeing: The film is peppered with instructively organic special effects, starting with a film title that materializes out of smoke. Ruth's cult rapture in India is filmed in beautifully swirling pink and orange, with the guru Baba's eyes taking on an unearthly gleam. And P.J. later hallucinates Ruth as an eight-armed Indian goddess, dancing in the desert to the Shirelles' "Baby, It's You." The cinematic postcard of a coda may not be anything special in narrative terms, but adds something novel to film language, which is not something you can say about just any film. And, most of all, there's Winslet, who dominates the screen both with a performance that carries and outclasses the film and with a Pre-Raphaelite physicality that she crafts into a weapon of liberation.

Tumbleweeds is as modest as Holy Smoke! is ambitious, but it also boasts a good lead female performance. British actress Janet McTeer's Oscar nod may have been better spent on Winslet (or All About My Mother's Celia Roth, or Election's Reese Witherspoon), but she still acquits herself well as the kind of ditsy-yet-soulful, sexualized Southern woman that borders on cliché.

At the outset of this verite-style film, McTeer's Mary Jo, perhaps the least sensible woman in North Carolina, packs up her young daughter Ava (Kimberly J. Brown) after a nearly abusive argument with husband number four, and points her rusty American car west for a new start. Though the film, probably to its credit, doesn't spend much time on exposition, we learn that this is a pattern for Mary Jo, whose dependence on ancient sexual values becomes apparent to her long after it has to both the audience and her own precocious daughter.

The narrative outline here is achingly familiar. The film reminds one of Martin Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (mother and child hit the road in search of a new life) and Victor Nunez's Ruby in Paradise (woman flees the South and an abusive relationship for a new start on the coast), but it lacks the directorial personality of the former, and tries but fails to approximate the naturalism and serenity that makes the latter such an enduring treasure.

The predictable twists of Tumbleweeds' telegraphed script is the stuff of television drama, but the film gets by on the strength of its engaging performances, of which the best may not be Oscar-validated McTeer, but the more believable Brown. The character of Ava, as written, is in danger of being a typical, all-too-knowing movie kid ("You're in denial," she counsels her mother early in the film), but Brown's charming performance is the film's most memorable element.

You can e-mail Chris Herrington at letters@memphisflyer.com.

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