Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

Mary Ann and I saw MY FIRST MISTER last night. It is a film which shows how far GHOST WORLD might have gone wrong, without Terry Zwigoff to give the film a realistic vision for its surreal style. Leelee Sobieski (JOAN OF ARC, Duguay, TV-1999), Albert Brooks, Carol Kane, Mary Kay Place, and John Goodman fight a losing battle with an excruciatingly contrived screen play. Sobieski strikes me as a kind of tall, young Hedy Lamar who can act, but she is encouraged here, as a Goth teenager, to display too many sides of the character, not always with much motivation, and her performance breaks down, through poor direction and edits, as she is "caught in the act" (mugging). The picture, unfortunately, is a boutique feature-film-directing debut for Actress Christine Lahti (RUNNING ON EMPTY, Lumet, 1988).

MY FIRST MISTER begins well. In fact, the first half-hour or so reminds me of a sunny copy of the recent GHOST WORLD, as if Lahti and her veteran TV sitcom writer Jill Franklyn (SEINFELD) had slipped onto Zwigoff's set, taken lots of notes, and said to themselves, "With some jazzy camera tricks and circus editing, we can do this better!"

They can't.

Still, we have Leelee Rudebet Gloria Elsveta Sobieski. Coltish at 19, still being tutored on the set, she portrays 17 year-old Jennifer, hidden away in her room, making drawings in her own blood, writing lush romantic poems, admiring herself critically in mirrors. Her Jennifer "frugs" wildly to music and avoids her parents. But mostly she self-mutilates herself, applies grape-shaded lipstick, and cares for numerous silver studs, piercing rings, etc., which adorn her body. She is the very model of a modern Goth-girl, a nymphetic Marilyn Manson. However, she rejects all the roles of her gender and any of those society holds out for her as a young adult.

We see the world in the opening section through Jennifer's eyes, and it is extremely effective. At school, she rejects the overtures of a rosy-faced school mate. She hides in the back of her English class, and when the instructor calls her up to recite a personal essay, she regards him as the Devil Incarnate. She is exceedingly brief and blunt in her recitation, but imagines (in her lack of self-worth) that she has put the class to sleep.

Leelee Sobieski convinces us that Jennifer, despite her appearance, her language, and her dialogue, remains a pure soul, a self-torturing virgin trying to make sense of her experience. It is not a small trick, but for an hour she has us almost in her thrall.

At home, Jennifer's mother (Carol Kane) frantically attempts to connect with her daughter, cajoling and bribing her to show the slightest interest in conventional manners. Might she think of getting her EARS pierced? Would she consider attending college? What about washing off her "tattoos" and the black or purple or violet dye from her hair? Jennifer's answer is to leave school and continue to mutilate herself or the plastic babies which decorate her room. Her stepfather Bob (of course), played by Michael McKean, remains detached, in a haze of Jeopardy from the TV set.

Jennifer's look, attitudes, experiences, slang and underlying vulnerability ring intriguingly true.

Then, one day, she escapes her troubles to hang at the Century City Mall. There she meets her father-figure, dream-lover, mentor-boss Randall, and the film begins to come apart. Cinder-ella's Prince Randall (Albert Brooks) is the avuncular 49 year-old manager of Rutherford's, a conservative men's clothing store, where Jennifer becomes fascinated with the Art of Window Dressing. Presumably, he has never seen a Goth-girl before at the Mall, for he inexplicably gives this foul-mouthed, ill-mannered, outrageously dressed, inexperienced teenager trial employment in his stock room.

Randall has a motivation of sorts, but by the time it is revealed late in the film, most of us have ceased to believe that this is anything but very trumped-up, phony May-December non-romance.

What Jennifer sees in the flabby, overweight, up-tight, exhausted looking and acting Randall is hard to discern at all, until one day, she visits her real father, the even more gross, pot smoking John Goodman, who owns a hamburger joint. Then, although we get it, we have to attribute the attraction Jennifer expresses for Randall to some Darwinian pull from the primordial ooze.

Randall gives Jennifer tips on how to be a successful stock person, which she mostly ignores; preferring to spy on people with elliptical binoculars, which distort their appearance; or to play smart-azz tricks on Randall and his assistant in front of customers, which would have to get Jennifer fired from such an establishment. Randall prefers to take her under his wing, driving her home, going to her hang-outs like Rey's Pizza and The Bourgeois Pig.

The "relationship" progresses in a dysfunctional manner. Jennifer pays Randall back by calling him pathetic, and when she observes him in conversation with a mysterious "older woman" (Mary Kay Place), jealously sets up a display of nude mannequins in S&M poses in Rutherford's hallowed window. In reaction, he gives her instruction on how "not to overuse the f-word," and she reciprocates by teaching him the latest teenage slang, such as Hey! for Hello. We know things are getting serious when he meets her almost half way in considering a tattoo for himself (seemingly in an intimate spot).

And then --

But you've read enough. You see the problem. It gets worse. By trying to have it both ways, MY FIRST MISTER becomes a bit creepy and then, to save the situation, just maudlin and pathetic, and with the possible exception of Mary Kay Place (who manages to keep her balance as a friendly nurse), every veteran actor in the picture eventually overacts in an elusive quest for verisimilitude. Carol Kane, milking her heartbreaking motherly smile, and John Goodman, belching every other shot, are particularly misfortunate.

It is not that MY FIRST MISTER does not have some funny lines and bits, especially in the hands of Sobieski and Brooks. It is not that Sobieski fails to be appealing, indeed entrancing, even when tattooed, black and violet haired, lying on the grave of her grandmother, channeling Gothic romantic thoughts. But the screen play, direction, and editing constantly ask us to forgive too many unprepared for character and plot shifts, gaffes, inept personifications, unlikely reconciliations, and deuce wild cards from the machina.

That said, Mary Ann rather liked MY FIRST MISTER. [Where does that title come from? Is it ethnic? teenage? or does it suggest the course of Jennifer's life?] I suspect young women, of a certain age, may like the film more than men, remembering uncertain feelings in their own adolescence.

Otherwise, however, if you want a romantic "feel-good" comedy about attractive opposites go see Vince D'Onofrio and Marissa Tomei in the current HAPPY ACCIDENTS. If you want your comedy to dwell on the dark side of teenagedom, and a surprising romance between a young girl and an older man, take in GHOST WORLD -- still out there, and the best of its kind in recent years.

'Nuff said.


Recommended: No

Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older