Jimmy and Judy
The
world has changed one whole hell of a lot in the half-century since James
Dean broke out with Rebel Without a Cause. That movie seems
positively chaste today -- however it is still very much responsible for
movies like Jimmy and Judy being made. For it tapped into a
very simple human truth -- rebellion and bad behavior can be romantic and
sort of sexy when viewed from a discreet distance. The bad boys in
these films are always shadowboxing against nothing in particular.
They have a vague realization that they are unhappy with life and the world,
but no specific gripes so much as a general apathy to society. (When
asked what he was rebelling against, Dean contemporary Marlon Brando famously answered in his own 50s
bad-boy epic, The Wild One, "What ya got?")
Edward
Furlong -- a long, long way from the cute little kid destined to save the
world in Terminator 2 -- plays Jimmy. He is a disaffected teen
who has been thrown out of school, has parents who are freaks and sexual
deviants, and spends most of his time doing vaguely antisocial things for no
apparent reason (like poking roadkill with a stick, showing up at his
parents' anniversary party naked or bursting in on their
cross-dressing S&M session). He also obsessively watches life going by
through the lens of a video camera, filming everything that is going on
around him while never really experiencing it. In fact in these early
scenes it is rather distracting that he does film some nasty things
happening, rather than actually helping out the people he is spying on.
Things
change for him when he finally hooks up with Judy, another outsider, who he
has had a crush on for years. Honestly, Rachael Bella seems way too
pretty to be the total pariah in the school that she is portrayed as.
In fact, all of the bad girls in this movie (and there are several of them)
look more like cheerleaders than outcasts. However, we'll give the
filmmakers the benefit of the doubt; beautiful girls do get into trouble,
too. At first, Judy seems to be totally disinterested in this weird
guy with his camera, but when she catches flashes of the bad boy lurking
inside, she feels a weird attraction towards him.
When
Jimmy realizes that his sense of danger is an aphrodisiac to her, he steps
forward and starts to live out some of the rebellious fantasies that he had
always harbored. Once the genie is out of the bottle, they quickly get
caught up in the thrills as they spin into an escalating cycle of violence
and death.
The
film is completely taped "by the characters" with Jimmy's video camcorder
-- a gimmick that both gives the film an immediate power and at the same
time tests the audience's patience with disjointed periods where the camera
is unable to come to rest on anything. One long scene is nearly
completely audio while the camera rolls on a closed car door. The
effect is similar to the one of The Blair Witch Project several years
ago. Although this film is better made than that one, there is
a reason that this style never quite caught on.
The
movie is trying to have it both ways -- in certain ways it seems to want to
look at Jimmy and Judy as romantic rebel figures, but at the same time it
can't quite hide the fact that he is borderline psychotic and she is at the
very least an enabler. (God, I can't believe I just used that
psychobabble word -- see what this movie is doing to me?) So while you
are queasily fascinated and voyeuristically titillated by all the sex and
violence going on around you -- you never really like Jimmy. This is
not the fault of Furlong, who nicely captures Jimmy's self-destructive
loathing of everything in the world that is
not Judy -- himself included, sometimes.
Judy,
on the other hand, is a much more sympathetic, nuanced character and Bella
does an extraordinary job at an extremely difficult role. She throws
herself gamely into it, stripping herself physically and psychologically for
long periods of time. Judy is a swirling tornado of self-doubt,
violent urges and just-tapped sexuality.
The
filmmakers try to stack that deck by making everyone in the film truly
abhorrent. Any character that you get to know for even moments
is selfish, ego-centric and offhandedly nasty. I don't know if they
are going for the "two wrongs make a right" defense, but it just doesn't
fly. Even if their victims don't deserve sympathy for who they are and
what they do, they do not usually deserve what is done to them.
Jimmy and Judy is a fascinating study of antisocial behavior; a more
nuanced version of Natural Born Killers, a less mannered version of
Kalifornia, a new millennium, totally disenfranchised take on
Badlands or Bonnie and Clyde. The movie doesn't exactly
work in the long run. In the end, no matter how much the creators want
you to feel for the couple, you can't get over the fact that they are simply
bad people who do some completely horrific things. However, it
certainly is a very absorbing near miss. (9/06)
Jay
S. Jacobs
