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PRETTY PERSUASION Send This Review to a Friend
Evan Rachel Wood makes a delightfully wicked and rebellious Beverly Hills high school villain in this entertainingly nasty portrait of a teenager who is thoroughly evil and will manipulate anyone to get her moment of fame, preferably as an actress. Director Marcos Siega and screenwriter Skander Halim satirize contemporary societal distortions and demonstrate how destructive they can be. Wood’s performance is superb as she turns on her faux sexy charm to be a sly temptress without conscience and beyond redemption.
Wood portrays Kimberly Joyce, the daughter of a racist curmudgeon played to disturbingly comic perfection by James Woods, who complains there are so many Jews on his company board that it is beginning to seem like a synagogue. His racism is passed along to Kimberly, who makes racist observations of her own as she condescendingly befriends Randa (Adi Schnall) a Mid-Eastern student whom she enlists in a sinister plot. Kimberly also betrays her supposedly best friend Brittany (Elisabeth Harnois).
The target of Kimberly’s scheming is a teacher, Percy Anderson (Ron Livingston), whom she and her cohorts accuse of sexual misbehavior. Although innocent, he isn’t especially sympathetic, as evidenced by a scene in which he cruelly berates Randa for her inability to write English. Jane Krakowski delivers a smart performance as the opportunistic television news reporter, who is seduced by Kimberly, and then blackmailed into subservience as a result of their lovemaking session.
Oral sex seems to be the order of the day in the relationships, with men or women, and that, too, is made rather funny. Although Kimberly’s cleverness leads to tragedy, the tone of the film is mostly scathing satire. At the end there seems to be an effort to strike a note of sympathy for Kimberly given her background, including a brother killed in Iraq, but she has been so bad one is unlikely to shed a tear for her. Here’s one teenager who deserves whatever she gets. An IDP Distribution release.
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