The Opposite of Sex
Don Roos, USA, 1998, 101 mins; Columbia video
Review by Gerald Houghton (1999)
Baltimore’s so-called Pope of Trash, John Waters, has had a lean few years. It’s not that his films have become any less inventive, any less funny, any less, well, bad taste. No, it’s more Hollywood cottoning on: there’s money in filth. Dumb and Dumber, Kingpin, and, of course, There’s Something About Mary have shown a lack of decorum and manners need prove no obstacle at the box office, leaving Waters himself rather foundering. And now we have The Opposite of Sex, a film, one suspects, John Waters would be proud of.
At least, he’d be proud of Dedee Truitt (Christina Ricci), wearing trailer trash credentials on her 16-year-old sleeve like a badge of office. SHe’s a Divine anti-heroine’s writ small, a malevolent sex pixie who understands the way to a man’s heart is through his dick. Even gay men. Especially gay men. That’s why she fetches up in Indiana to see her teacher half-brother, Bill (the excellent Martin Donovan) and convinces his beefy but spectacularly dim boyfriend, Matt (Ivan Sergei) that maybe He’s bisexual after all, and father to her unborn child.
There follows a gleeful rag-tag comedy of really bad manners - part road movie, part plea for gay family values - a sharp, acidic journey that is both tolerant and deliciously bile-filled. It’s the sort of film the Right hates and some liberals - like when Bill is suspended, accused of molesting an ex-pupil - might find hard to swallow.
Essentially it’s a terrific synthesis of script and performer, finding in Ricci (only 17 at the time) a young star who already seems to be operating at the peak of her powers. It’s the natural extension of her astonishing turn in The Ice Storm, where she used sex and sexuality as a toy. In Dedee’s hands it’s long past that - sHe’s using sex as her weapon: against Matt, and against Randy, her former, Bible-punching, one-balled boyfriend. She can’t work Bill, but that’s more to do with him swinging the other way than being kin. ‘I don’t have a heart of gold and I don’t grow one later,’ her spiky voice-over explains.
The amazing thing, however, is that even with Ricci aboard this is far from a one-woman show. Odder still that sHe’s forced to share honours with Lisa Kudrow, refugee from TV’s execrable saccharine-fest Friends, and that Kudrow is excellent. She’s sister to Bill’s dead lover, a fading, snobbish, melancholic woman, secretly in love with Bill and possessed of an equally acidic - if more judiciously employed - tongue. She labels Dedee ‘the human tabloid.’
Possibly Don Roos’ film is visually conservative - more like good TV than good cinema - but then it lives or dies on performance and script more than pyrotechnics - and what performances, what a script, and, in the dazzling Ricci, what a star.