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Holy crap!
Holy Smoke is a holy mess!
Writer/director Jane Campion still seems unable to
return to the form that made her an Oscar winner in 1993.
Since The Piano, Campion has cranked out the
abysmally drab The Portrait of a Lady and now Holy
Smoke, which is definitely not a step in the right
direction by any stretch of the imagination.
The
opening credits begin promisingly enough, using slow-motion
shots of India placed over a rockin’ Neil Diamond track.
Once the story kicks off, we learn that an Australian
girl named Ruth (Kate Winslet, Hideous Kinky) went to
Delhi for vacation and never came home, apparently choosing to
live her life with the followers of some guy with Baba.
Naturally, her suburban Sydney family is distraught,
and they try to lure Ruth home so she can be deprogrammed by a
“cult exiter” from Los Angeles named PJ Waters (Harvey
Keitel, Three Seasons).
The first
step of the plan is for Ruth’s asthmatic mother (Julie
Hamilton) to travel to Delhi to tell her that her father (Tim
Robertson) has suffered a serious stroke, which is just a lie
to get her home. While
this is supposed to make Ruth fly back with her mum, she
instead shrugs it off and tries to get her mother to attend
one of Baba’s wacky ceremonies.
Long story short, Ruth finally agrees to come home to
see her allegedly ailing father.
Once home,
the family locks Ruth and PJ up in a second home in the middle
of the Aussie outback. PJ
explains that his technique generally takes three days and
that he has saved 189 souls during his career, with a whopping
97 percent success rate.
Ruth is still obviously reluctant, and after this
forty-minute setup is complete, Smoke concentrates its
focus on its two acting leads.
This is when the film goes downhill – fast.
You can
guess what happens next. Ruth hates him as he begins to make headway in his
deprogramming, but then uses her incredible rack to turn the
tables on PJ. Before
you know it, they’re going at it like a couple of horny
teenagers. Heck,
if you locked me up in a house with a mentally unstable Kate
Winslet for three days, even I could get lucky.
Well, maybe four or five days.
Aside from
being predictable on just about every level, Smoke
seems to go out of its way to be disturbing.
Ruth and PJ hit it off sexually when she pisses all
over herself and their crazy relationship ends when he dons a
red dress and lipstick. At
times, you will wonder if Campion, who adapted the script with
her sister Anna, intended the film to be funny or dramatic.
It’s neither, so I guess her intentions really
don’t matter. The
film is brutally uneven, but not without visual flare.
It’s a damn colorful picture, from the incredible
blue skies, to Keitel’s ghastly white ass, to his bright red
lipstick.
Winslet
makes the best of the crappy script, acting crazy enough to be
believable. But
the craziest thing about Winslet is her choice of post-Titanic
films. First, she
ran off to Marrakech in Hideous Kinky and now India in Smoke.
Get over yourself – two lousy art films are enough of
a penance to make up for starring in the biggest blockbuster
of all-time. The
good news is that her “area” is kept a little tidier that
it was in Jude.
And just
what does Campion have over Keitel where she can continue to
blackmail him into taking risky roles in her films?
In The Piano, he waived his tiny wiener at the
camera, and here he’s in a drag for the last third of the
film. Whatever it
is, I hope the debt has been paid off.
I can’t bear to see him embarrass himself again.
1:54
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for tons of nudity, strong sexuality and a litany of adult
language
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