Jennifer's Body

Cody's scabrous sense of humor is on full display here, starting with the arrival at a local dive bar of Low Shoulder, a band whose leader is a smug cretin but also a lust object for Jennifer. She's dragged her BFF Anita, whose overdetermined nickname is "Needy," to the show, where she puts on a sweet-young-thing act, introducing herself coquettishly to the leering singer. As the band plays, the bar erupts in a mysterious fire, killing many concertgoers. Jennifer and Needy escape the flames together, but separate soon after -- Jennifer flees the scene with the band, riding away in Low Shoulder's touring van as Needy calls after her helplessly.

The irony, of course, becomes apparent. Needy fears that the always-forward Jennifer will be taken into the woods and, essentially, gang-raped by enthusiastic sex-predator rock-and-rollers. Instead, she's empowered. It turns out the saps in Low Shoulder bought her unspoiled-maiden schtick, driving her out of town for the express purpose of ritual virgin sacrifice. As the film's mythology goes, because Jennifer fit no dictionary definition of virgin, the demon instead took up residence in her body — a body that would give any otherworldly intruder bent on mayhem a certain psychological leverage over potential victims. When Jennifer arrives back at Needy's house, covered in blood and sweat and grime, Needy figures she's been assaulted. In reality, she's been feeding.

It's grim stuff, with disquieting overtones. The subject matter now encompasses chauvinism, male privilege, and threatened (and perceived) sexual violence along with its lighter themes about the wedges that can be driven between best friends by high-school social structures, impending young adulthood, and the attendant encroachment of sexual longings. Jennifer spends the film working her way through teen-movie stereotypes, disemboweling first the jock and then the goth kid, and finally setting her sights on Needy's own boy, the baby-faced Chip (Johnny Simmons). A showdown ensues as Needy comes, violently, of age.

Jennifer's Body is full of ideas, but it doesn't have much in the way of tonal control. The script is written more or less as black comedy, with Cody's wisecracks pretty much taking the potential sting and/or suspense out of any given scene and moving character interactions into the realm of abstraction. Her sense of wordplay owes a clear debt to Heathers, but without that film’s satirical feel for the absurd. Still, there’s a nastiness right under the surface. In the film’s nightclub scene, Cody baits viewers with gratuitous references to two different early-2000s tragedies — the fire at a Rhode Island Great White concert that killed 100 people, and the 9/11 attacks, which are spoofed with a pair of commemorative red-white-and-blue cocktails stacked in shot glasses. I’m not that guy in the back of the theater yelling “too soon!”, but it’s enough to snap you out of the movie and wonder what was really on Cody’s mind? Is she mocking the midwestern locals and their “United We Stand” sentiments? Or is she just trying, clumsily, to conjure up a sense of dread and despair through spooky points of reference?

I wish the film was less eager to follow its impulses to jokiness. A scene early in the film is set inside a mental asylum, where Needy has been committed after as-yet-unexplained events that take place in the film's final act. She explains, in amusingly wry dialogue, that she's known to the orderlies and nurses as "a kicker," which is a pretty funny line on its own. Kusama dramatizes this not just by having Needy ferociously kick the shit out of someone on screen -- which might have been a pretty great moment on her own -- but by having her kick the shit out of someone on screen who then goes flying through the air like she was just schooled by Tony Jaa. Clearly Kusama (and Cody, if the script was written that way) decided against nurturing the atmosphere of a horror movie, opting instead to dive into pure comic-book territory.

Granted, Megan Fox is already something of a comic-book character -- and I don't say that as a dis. She's got attitude to spare, and she's built like one of those impossibly slender Mary Jane Watson figures from early Todd McFarlane issues of The Amazing Spider-Man. I'm not sold on her as any kind of major talent, but she is genuinely fun to watch on screen. She's sensually aggressive to boot, and that's exactly what this movie calls for. But Jennifer is so sexually confident, and seems to represent so many things that Needy objects to, the film is never quite able to explain exactly why she and Needy have remained close all these years, beyond some murmurings about "sandbox friends" that represent an early childhood history together that’s eventually repudiated.

A lingering love scene involving full-on kissing between on-screen girlfriends is meant to depict a turning point in the relationship, as finally, through seduction techniques, Jennifer threatens to become hazardous to Needy’s health. But it’s hard to care about the corruption and dissolution of a relationship that is never really seen to cohere in the first place — and because the film is never scary in the slightest — the moment plays purely as an adroit display of teen-movie showmanship. At least minor multiplex-trash classics like Cruel Intentions and Wild Things were cynically self-aware about the nature of their glossy girl-on-girl action. In their audio commentary track, Kusama and Cody declare that they’re shocked — shocked! — that anyone would read the scene as titillation for titillation’s sake. It’s all about the characters, natch, and the intensity of their feelings. At any rate, this kind of thing could be scene-of-the-year material in a tenser, more committed horror film, but it’s not especially stirring here.

Finally, I’m a little baffled by reviewers who toss off references to the film’s “feminism.” I mean, I do wish it were true. But on what planet is a film about a straight-up succubus — that centuries-old, malevolent manifestation of female sexuality — somehow feminist? Is it the narrative inversion of the vaguely porno title that’s supposed to do it? Tweaking conventions is not the same as subverting them.

At least Fox and Seyfried both look great throughout, and cinematographer David Mullen — with the help of what looks like some reasonably aggressive DI color timing — lends the film a music-video sheen, combining deep blacks and a high-contrast look that keeps lots of points of detail visible even down in the shadows. The story never works up a head of steam, but Kusama and Mullen take the film into a fairly impressive visual mode for the final set piece, which takes place in and around an indoor swimming pool that’s surrounded by vines snaking down the walls and into the water. When a determined Needy shows up, her own fragile body nearly overwhelmed by a big pink prom dress, to do final battle, it’s a surprisingly fitting treatment of material that still never manages to find its own style.

Posted by Bryant Frazer on January 7, 2024 10:11 PM

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