March 4–11, 1999

movie shorts

Cruel Intentions

Directed by Roger Kumble
A Columbia Pictures release

by Cindy Fuchs

High school movies are an art unto themselves. It's true that they usually aren't considered respectable by well-paid critics. They tend to be formulaic, retrograde and prescriptive, made by people who haven't been in high school for a long time for relatively little money. And they're usually populated with stars-in-the-making, and predictably marketed to their target audiences, through tie-in clothing and "gear," posters, fast food and soundtrack CDs.

Roger Kumble's Cruel Intentions is all of this and less. Ostensibly based on Choderlos de Laclos' 18th-century novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses, it features a bevy of TV stars and a killer soundtrack (Placebo's edgy "Every You Every Me" opens the film and the Verve's rousing "Bittersweet Symphony" closes it). Rife with gorgeous, perfectly coifed private high school students, the film makes no bones about its moral lesson (perhaps directed at the parents who will not even see the movie because they'll be put off by the rumored sexual innuendo): Unsupervised kids go bad. Though obvious comparisons will be drawn to previous great-lit adaptations, like Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet or Amy Heckerling's Clueless, this film's immediate thematic precursor is Larry Clark's Kids, in which poor unparented youngsters turned mean and violent. In Cruel Intentions, the villains are rich, but the film avoids even the most obvious class analysis.

Adrift in upscale Manhattan during a steamy summer vacation, step-siblings Kathryn Merteuil (Sarah Michelle Gellar, from the WB's Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and Sebastian Valmont (Ryan Phillippe) are home alone and bored out of their minds. So they contrive a plot to severely fuck with the new headmaster's daughter Annette (Reese Witherspoon), a self-proclaimed virgin who has published her intentions to "wait" in Seventeen. To make the basically straight-up seduction interesting, they make a bet: If Sebastian can't bed Annette by summer's end, he has to give Kathryn his precious 1956 Jaguar; if he succeeds, she has to fuck him. "You can put it anywhere you want," she purrs, an invitation that, for whatever reasons, does the trick. (While I understand that this situation is derived from the novel, it is never clear why the intelligent, arrogant Kathryn would even consider equating her body with a car.)

The art of high school movies depends on a certain respect for their viewers. Even if winning the big football game (as in Varsity Blues) or going to the prom (in She's All That) seem trivial in a real-life context, the movies understand that for their characters and the kids who have invested in them for 90 minutes, these are meaningful goals (or briefly resemble same). Cruel Intentions misses this point. Its relocation of "adult" interests (like sex) to teens isn't especially daring. Today's high school movies—even the least insightful—are all concerned with revenge, frustration and escape: Such ideas have long since lost their "adult" cachet.

While Sebastian's transformation into a simpery nice guy is silly and Kathryn's plight is annoying (she has one speech where she articulates her beef—guys get props for being careless but girls still get called bitches for similar behavior), the secondary plot best illustrates the film's short-sightedness. Sebastian's other conquest is the naive and slapsticky Cecile (Selma Blair, Zoe in the WB's Zoe, Duncan, Jack & Jane). Cecile is a lovely, tension-relieving creature, but Blair's expert comedy seems to obscure other, more disturbing aspects of the film.

Never mind that his seduction of Cecile resembles date rape (he gets her drunk to have his way with her). And never mind that Kathryn teaches Cecile to french kiss (though this moment apparently makes adult viewers squeamish, judging by critical responses). What is most troubling is Cecile's relationship with her cello teacher, Ronald (Sean Patrick Thomas). That he's black would seem to testify to the film's well-intentioned multiculti-casting, and that Cecile's racist mom (Christine Baranski) is a dim-witted, easily manipulated dupe makes Cecile and Kathryn (who also beds Ronald) look relatively open-minded. But the film's use of Ronald as the predictably violent ruffian called on at film's end to "beat up" the suddenly sympathetic Sebastian is annoyingly thoughtless. It seems that even the wealthy black kid (who lives at 59th and Park, no less) is fated to provide the tediously climactic brutishness.

The problem is that Cruel Intentions imagines that its gestures toward inclusiveness are enough. Sporting bleached Roman-style hair (read: "stereotypical gay," pronounced as Christina Ricci might pronounce it), Joshua Jackson (from the WB's Dawson's Creek) plays Blaine, a gay classmate who's blithely in cahoots with Sebastian to blackmail a homophobic, anxiety-ridden gay football player. Sure, kids are cruel. And sure, Blaine is at least as campy and potentially delightful as Kathryn (whether or not they're supposed to be so campy is another question). And sure, Blaine doesn't get punished for being gay, only used and disappeared from the script.

Kathryn, though, doesn't get off so easily. Her comeuppance depends on very old-fashioned notions of high school, that being exposed in front of a slew of anonymous, previously unseen classmates means anything to Kathryn, even though the rest of the movie has demonstrated her calculations and concerns to have precious little to do with such peons. Despite its apparent superficiality, the art of high school movies is a delicate balance. And it's disappointing when movies made by adults treat kids—as characters and viewers—with disdain.