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FILM CRITIQUE:
Take three of our finest actors, throw them into a cliché-filled movie thankfully salvaged by a rather thoughtful turn
at the end, and you will end up with "The Banger Sisters." The charisma on the screen and the more than a few very
funny, well placed one liners (many of them of a rather vulgar, sexually oriented nature) raise the level of the enjoyment
of this film to one of neutral recommendation.
The main premise of "The Banger Sisters" that one is given from
the many previews or seeing this film reviewed on the many "dog and pony" talk shows is that of a 50 year old
Los Angeles hippie, looking like she has stepped out of a time warp, being forced by personal circumstances to visit her long
ago friend and former fellow rock star groupie for help.
Her friend, meanwhile, has long since grown up, cast off her antisocial and free sex philosophies, and now lives a colorless
but respectable life in a wealthy suburb of Phoenix as a wife to a bland husband and a mother to two rebellious teen aged
daughters.
The initial simplistic implication, of course, is that the hippie character (Goldie Hawn) is all sweetness and light and
the colorless character (Susan Sarandon) has somehow sold her soul to the devil of upward economic mobility and now has a
husband who is a lawyer (heaven forbid!). He also has political aspirations and thus values his family's squeaky clean reputation.
The reality of the film, thankfully, is much more complex. While Suzette (Goldie Hawn) is a frozen-in-time hippie, she
is also much more than that in that she is subconsciously a catalyst for everyone in the movie, including herself. Her entrance
into the well groomed, uptight Phoenix suburb that Lavinia Kingsley (Susan Sarandon) and her family call home shakes everything
and everyone up. By the end of the movie everyone in it has moved to a more centralized personality location in which being
true to yourself (in a more mature, responsible manner) has become the new guidepost for living.
Thus Suzette also realizes that she is as much a loser as her former best friend, Lavinia. There is, she comes to find
out, something to be said for a stable lifestyle, long term commitments, and building for the future, especially through your
children. She admires what Lavinia has, not what she has become. And she also allows Lavinia's two rebellious children to
see that their mother wasn't always that stern, upstanding, humorless taskmaster and control freak that they have long known
her to be. They are surprised, shocked, even, to learn that a long time ago in another life she was the same kind of free
spirit that they each now long to be.
As St. Paul reminds us, when we were children we thought as children and acted as children, but now that we have grown
up we have cast away our childish things. "The Banger Sisters" reminds us that a good parent is responsible, but
a better parent, a very wise parent, will always remember that there is a special time to think and act as a child and that
our children deserve to have a certain amount of freedom to experience for themselves those childish things that we ourselves
treasure as our own memories of our increasingly distant youth.
A critique of this movie cannot be made without some sort of comment on the familial coincidences that abound in "The
Banger Sisters." Goldie Hawn in her role as the flamboyant, aging hippie, Suzette, plays the elder version of the Penny
Lane role that her own daughter, Kate Hudson, excelled at in the movie, "Almost Famous"(2000). I still think that
she should have won an Oscar for that wonderful portrayal!
And now we also have Susan Sarandon's real life daughter, Eva Amurri, playing her "reel life" daughter, Ginger
Kingsley, in "The Banger Sisters." Very cute. Both girls seem to want to make it in show business on their own merits
as each has adopted a screen name totally unrelated to her own family connections.
The final coincidence is that Kate Hudson is also starring in the
recently released movie, "The Four Feathers," opposite Heath Ledger. This movie and "The Banger Sisters"
both opened on the very same weekend back in September.
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FILM SYNOPSIS:
Suzette, a locked-in-time former rock star groupie has just been fired from her job as a bartender in a seedy hard rock
bar in downtown Los Angeles. Being around rock bands has been her life for 40 years, but her boss is far too young to appreciate
her history with the likes of Jim Morrison, who was the inspiration for the tattoo on her arm, and the many other famous rock
band members that she has slept with over the years.
She ponders her fate back at her apartment also frozen in time
with hippie and rock culture memorabilia from years past festooned everywhere. Her live for the moment lifestyle has left
her penniless and hopeless for the future until she spies a box of treasured photographs from her storied past.
The times were greatest back when she had Lavinia, "Vinnie," as she used to call her, for her best pal and they
hung around all through the freewheeling Sixties and Seventies doing drugs, sleeping with band members, and protesting the
Vietnam War together. Suzette comes to the realization that Vinnie is the only one she can turn to for friendship, support,
and also for a hoped for $5,000 "loan."
At a bus stop half way to Phoenix, Suzette stops to gas up and
finds that the pump will only work for cash, not credit, and she has
none. Suzette tries to bum a few bucks off the bus passengers in the station mini mart in a painfully pathetic scene in
which this flamboyantly dressed, but aged caricature of a hippie with puffy, collagen filled lips, tries to appear anything
but foolish in front of the "jus folks" types that normally frequent bus stops. Eyes are quickly averted and they
all uncomfortably move out of her way.
Then an angel in the form of Harry (Geoffrey Rush) not only meets her offer but goes her one better. It turns out that
he is also going to Phoenix and he will pay for all the gas they will need if she will give him a ride. You see, Harry has
suffered the ultimate indignity of having two flies at once land on his hand in the bus and the bus driver wouldn't do anything
about this. (How he is going to avoid meeting this same fate in Suzette's over the hill, open windowed sedan is not addressed
in this movie.) No matter, the tank is soon filled up and they are on their way.
Harry is a hypochondriac and a deeply troubled man who is returning home to face his father after failing as a script
writer in Los Angeles. He had fled the dull life of being a furniture salesman years before with the promise that he would
come back home if he was still a failure at the age of 50.
Sadly, he has failed and now he is returning home, but his meeting with Suzette throws his obsessive-compulsive well ordered
life on its ear. In some of the movie's best scenes with a very sympathetic, curious, and perhaps even mildly jealous hotel
clerk (Kohl Sudduth) looking on, Suzette very provocatively scampers in and out of Harry's rather luxurious hotel suite.
With the face of a sad eyed Bassett Hound, Geoffrey Rush is
perfect as the long lost writer who has lost his ability to write, his zest for life, and a sex life that has been nonexistent
for the last ten years. Is there any doubt that Suzette is herself an angel in a heavily made up disguise ready and available
to help this poor soul once again regain his zest for life and love and, perhaps, even a little great sex?
They eventually reach the Kingsley home in suburban Phoenix and find it to be the picture of beauty with a manicured lawn
to die for and a free form, boulder sculptured swimming pool in the back yard. Suzette takes in all this material excess in
and freezes. Her courage fails her as she sees the Kingsleys send off their daughter, Hannah (Erika Christensen from "Traffic"),
to her high school senior prom party.
As luck would have it, Hannah's prom party is in the same Phoenix hotel that Suzette and Harry are staying at, and Hannah
collapses from a bad mix of drugs right outside their bedroom door. Suzette, knowing full well what is going on, quickly takes
command and takes Hannah into her suite and under her wing.
She now has her entree into the Kingsley family home, and she brings Hannah home the next day with the promise not to
divulge any prom secrets. At the picture perfect Kingsley Phoenix suburban manse Suzette now gets to see how the other half
lives as she gets to meet Lavinia's other rebellious daughter, Ginger (Eva Amurri), and her colorless attorney husband, Raymond
Kingsley (Robin Thomas).
It might be mentioned here that one of the major flaws in this movie is the cardboard characterization of Lavinia's husband,
who does little more than occupy space and look lost and confused as his wife's alter ego comes to the fore.
Suzette quickly gets Lavinia to unwind from her boring, colorless
"beige" lifestyle as she helps her to adopt both a brighter clothing style and the ability to live life to a
fuller measure to go along with it. The nightclub scenes are fun but they are largely irrelevant to the interior growth that
both these two women go through in their movement towards adopting the best parts of the other.
The real fun of "The Banger Sisters" is watching these two seasoned pros play out their buddy roles in a movie
that could have gone the "Thelma and Louise" route, for example, but ends up traveling down the higher road to respect
and responsibility.
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