dir. Marcos Siega
Roxbury High may be a den of bulimia, pedophilia, racism, and misogyny, but its resident femme fatale is a little tame. As Kimberly Joyce, a 15-year-old girl who accuses her teacher of sexual abuse, Evan Rachel Wood is somewhere between preppy and perverse. She never convinces us that her character is anything more than “a manipulative little twat,” as her father puts it; when her lies are exposed at the end of the movie, the effect isn’t chilling.
To Wood’s credit, though, the screenplay (by Skander Halim) doesn’t give her much to work with. Kimberly attends a prissy private school, and is attended upon by two hangers-on—a blonde obsessed with the fact that Kimberly used to date her boyfriend and a Middle Eastern girl with no discernable personality beyond modesty. The precocious way Kimberly handles her racist father and his wife—in some of the film’s best scenes—seems to indicate that she has a handle on even her own upbringing. Constantly accusing one’s stepmother of having sexual relations with a dog may make a kid incorrigible, but it hardly makes her a sociopath.
Pretty Persuasion is not without bleak pleasures—the moment when Kimberly’s father catches her sawing on her violin to mourn her own downfall is hilarious. And its treatment of the shaky line between inappropriate sexual desire and outright predation is intriguing. But the movie can’t decide between the targeted satire of Mean Girls and the loose, wicked comedy of Cruel Intentions, and the result is more than a little conflicted. Pretty Persuasion feeds on society’s long-standing fear of little girls. What it fails to do is present a character who justifies fascination.
