This film draws on an extreme true-life story that seems sure to make a person feel and think. In 1979, a rough, wild, pretty 19-year-old from a broken home leaves Philadelphia, where she works behind the counter at her father's Italian diner and hangs out in seedy nightclubs, for New York City. She becomes a phenomenal success almost overnight as an elite, new-wave, jet-set fashion model with "attitude." She parties on the wild side, has a close, on-again-off-again lesbian relationship with a makeup artist, suddenly loses her agent/mentor to cancer, and heavily abuses harder and harder drugs, frequenting "needle parks." Quickly, she burns out her body, relationships, and career. Reduced to trading sex for money, she is beaten up and raped. She is arrested for reckless driving and resisting arrest. She tries to make a career come-back and to go home. She sells jeans in a local shop. After repeated tries at rehabilitation, she either relapses or attempts a massive overdose. In seclusion in a hospital indigent ward, she dies in 1986 at 26 of the newly discovered AIDS.
Angelina Jolie gives a raw, emotional performance, combining child-like and hard qualities. The generally well-acted main supporting characters are thin (especially the idealized, "sweetness and light" Elizabeth Mitchell character), at times hammy (Mercedes Ruehl), but have some basic believability and traits that play into the drama (Faye Dunaway, Ruehl coddling and pushing; Ruehl and Mitchell withdrawing for various reasons; Eric Cole as a decent but dim hometown pal). There are glimmers of poignancy in some interactions and details of the experiences. Probably the most effective moments are the model's relationship with the makeup artist and destructive drug use. The movie conveys (partly by fictionalizing and tightly limiting its snapshots of her life) a sense of frenzy, loneliness, and emptiness -- life in a dead zone.
Yet, the movie is startlingly unsatisfying on any but the most basic emotional level of watching the vivid, photogenic Jolie act out the fateful events, with flashes of striking visuals in recreated settings and with perhaps the invitation to viewers to project onto the screen whatever trite, preconceived notions they might want to see about emotional problems, exploitation, or addiction. The film seems to lack any point of view. It narrates through sketchy, spotty vignettes rather than thoughtfully examines. The movie lacks detail, context, depth, substance, and insight, the characters and events little more than a blur. It barely scratches the surface of her "demons," how and why they came about, what was special about them, why they hit her so hard, and why drug abuse was her answer. (Regarding technique, scenes shift arbitrarily from color to black-and-white and back again, sometimes accented by heavy-handed music; they alternate with awkward, glib documentary-style "interviews"; and the long, distinctive chain-link-fence photo shoot and shower scenes, intended to be candid and uninhibited, are hampered by the stagey effort to avoid full frontal nudity, even in the extended, uncut version.)
Consistent with statements in the film that "No one knew Gia" (including her), its treatment of her background, emotional problems, promiscuity (among a flurry of quick, slick throwaway lines at the start we are told, but never shown, that she "slept around" but sex "was not the goal," "was not an issue"), overall relationships, lesbianism, drug addiction, and (strangely and especially) her modeling talent and career is vague, minimalist, and simplistic. Particularly weak or artificial are the statements mouthed by actors playing her contemporaries in the retrospectives; by the Italian photographer who spouts drivel as pious philosophy ("This is life...."); by the scornful, speechifying woman in the stilted, scripted rehab scene; and most disappointingly by the model herself and her "journal" (presented as poetic gems of meaning but falling far short of any such thing, even the message she wanted to send from her deathbed oddly off and easy, given her experiences: "she wanted to tell kids, you can handle it, you can handle anything that comes your way"). The movie does painfully little to delve beneath surface notions and manifestations and to illuminate any real understanding of this woman's situation, even less why she was a human being worthy of all of this special attention.
As a result, those reviews that claim to find profound meaning in this film are left to string together fuzzy, lofty-sounding clichés and platitudes ("tragic" "lost soul" or "free spirit" who "lived in the moment" and "followed her instincts"; "too beautiful to die, too wild to live"; "America's first supermodel") and to coast on the extreme, sensationalistic events of the model's life. Some make vast pretensions for the movie (that it itself does not make, much less deliver on), building up a heroine or martyr and sketching a morality play that blames everyone and everything else for what happened to her, while asking no hard questions about her own willful qualities and responsibility for her own behavior. The claims of deep meaning come across as shallow glorification of physical beauty, of tempestuousness, or of a glamorous, sensuous image for their own sake or as sheer sentimentality for a supposedly pathetic, helpless victim.
Ironically, all of the mindless emoting, adulation, even idolatry by those claiming to know, admire, or adore this woman through this essentially superficial movie -- just as surely as her supposed exploitation in her chosen career -- risks again reducing her, now in death, to a flat, one-dimensional, token figure being grabbed at by the masses (as fallen physical beauty, force of nature, glossy image, or victim). And if that does not diminish her, it may merely lavish undeserved attention and acclaim on a person of little or no substance (mired in what is presented as near-total confusion about who she was, what she wanted, and what she cared about, combined with non-stop destructive, thrill-seeking, instant-gratification behavior). The hollowness at the core of this film, of its subject, and of so much of this site's commentary about it is as troubling as the events depicted.
25 out of 35 found this helpful.
Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink
