The manifestations of a compulsion to repeat... exhibit to a high degree an instinctual character and, when they act in opposition to the pleasure principle, give the appearance of some 'daemonic' force at work.

What Sigmund Freud is saying here about the repetition compulsion I believe has much to do with my strange tendency to keep watching Dominique Swain movies. I mean, it's not like I've enjoyed one since her duel of wits with Jeremy Irons in the Adrian Lynne Lolita. In fact, I'm on a long string of actively disliking her movies, regardless of how I've felt about her performances (she's never awful, but because of the quality of the movies, it's really tough to tell). So my tendency towards the "Dominique Swain" section at my local video store, seeing as it has no relationship to the pleasure principle must be instinctual. Or, alternatively, I must keep sitting through her movies because the Devil makes me do it.

Alternatively, Freud could actually be referring to Swain's career decisions. Why else would she keep returning to the exact same kinds of movies even though they're doing nothing to improve her career. Since she can't be getting any pleasure out of making one stinker after another, bad choices must be instinctual for her. Or else the Devil keeps making her do it. In her relatively short career on screen she has lost her virginity three times, kissed a girl three times, gone to boarding school three times, experimented with drugs three times, been involved with an untimely death three times, had an infatuation with a rock star twice, had an infatuation with Brad Renfro twice, done voice-overs four times, and had to deal with her frustration with her parents four times. Basically, every Dominique Swain movie is like a collage of the movies that have come before, or a crystal ball image of her films to come. In my review of Tart, I defended her career decisions, but I'm no longer so sure.

I can't honestly call The Smokers the worst movie I've ever seen. I leave that category for high priced studio films that just blow to high heaven, cornea damaging treats like Battlefield Earth or Gone in 60 Seconds. Those movies had the budget to feed whole African nations for decades and that kind of profligate waste disgusts me. Little independent pieces of trash — films like Feeling Minnesota or Tart or The Smokers — only cost enough to feed starving children for several years and somehow that's less offensive. Films like these sometimes just lack the necessary talent to make a polished, well-acted, intelligent finished project. The fact that films like Clerks or El Mariachi cost relatively next to nothing and were still satisfying shouldn't be held against the lesser independent films. Sometimes the breaks just don't go your way.

Then again, sometimes you start off with a bad idea, add some bad writing, hand the bad script over to a bad director working with a talent-free crew and then they all film a cast that's either awful or isn't really being given a chance to shine. That's what's happening with The Smokers. The premise is a bad one and everything just goes downhill from there. It's not mind-bogglingly bad. It's just a total waste of time.

The story for The Smokers is stupid. Actually, worse than stupid, it's ignorant and regressive. And if I stopped to give it a second's thought, I would probably be offended. And despite having a female director behind the camera (and co-writing the script), it's tough to think of a film with more contempt of women. The whole thing is just a miscalculation. I think there might have been a way to approach the plot as satire where it might have worked, where there could have been a knowing subversion to the whole thing. That's not here.

The Smokers is the story of three girls at a private school in Wisconsin. Why Wisconsin? Dunno. There's nothing the least bit interesting about the location and it only barely relates to the characters or their circumstances. Sometimes they go to Chicago, but the filmmakers must not have been able to get permits, because there's no authenticity there either. Dead Poet's Society sortta made private school locations popular, but since then, very very few filmmakers have been able to do what Peter Weir did — make us sympathize with the plight of over-privileged prep school kids. With the exception of Lea Pool's 2001 release,Lost and Delirious, I don't remember the last film to use this kind of setting well.


So these three girls are outcasts, sortta. The popular girls call them The Smokers because, well, they smoke. There's Karen (Dawson's Creek's Busy Phillips), a scholarship girl with a rebellious streak. And Lisa (Keri Lynn Pratt from Cruel Intentions 2, if that's a point of reference for any of you), a little rich girl. And then there's Jefferson Roth (poor Ms. Swain), whose mother is never around. To say that these three girls are poorly sketched out characters would be kind. Swain is sortta the star, since she does the voice-over and her name comes before the rest of the opening credits, but she totally blends into the background. The only actress who makes any kind of impression is Phillips (who was a total pleasure on this season's otherwise awful Creek), but that's just because she's louder than everybody else, not because she's giving a good performance.

Anyway, these girls are tired of being treated like meat by the men in their life. I guess. We only get a little sense of this, actually. There's no true inciting event. Lisa has a first sexual experience with her boyfriend (Oliver Hudson) which verges on rape, but the film never makes an issue of it, so it's tough to take it seriously. And Karen has a sleazy sexual encounter with a rich married man, but she incited the contact and we never really see at moment at which she becomes uncomfortable with the situation. And I'm sure Jefferson is also having problems with boys, but if they were interesting, I've entirely forgotten about them.

At Jefferson's house over a school break, Jefferson's daffy pothead younger sister (Thora Birch in an "oh-my-goodness-what-is-she-doing?" style cameo) shows the girls her mother's .44 handgun. And Karen is hooked. She decides that the girls should start raping men. Let the the other side know how it feels. Of course, this is a stupid idea and it makes no sense if The Smokers is supposed to be a drama. And the script isn't smart enough to make it seem plausible, which is an absolute necessity in a black comedy. A good dark comedy is supposed to make the audience believe that the extreme steps taken by its characters are both logical and the best way out of their situation. That's where the irony comes from — characters making choices that don't work in real life, but that seem strangely right in the cinematic universe. We don't understand the motivations for our leads and their explanations don't work either. The film relies heavily on sentences that begin with "If a man did this..." or "Why is it that men get to..." or "Men think they can just..." Nothing they do comes with any sense of female empowerment. There's no sense that anything they're doing is even intended to improve their lives. It's a totally empty revenge fantasy and it's unclear if the film every really makes that clear to the characters.

Actually, the rape aspect of the plot takes up around ten or fifteen minutes of screentime in the middle. The girls get masks and there's a confusing scene where they sortta rape Lisa's boyfriend. Well, the scene is confusing and it's tough to tell what actually happens it it. And it also is flawed in logic because the pretense for the rape is that the boyfriend had sex with some bimbette in Chicago, but according to what we saw onscreen, he actually turned the bimbette down. Now that doesn't make him a nice guy or a good boyfriend, but even if infidelity were justification for premeditated rape at gun point (which of course it isn't), the absence of that infidelity removes any sympathy that might possibly be generated for these girls. As a result, any kind of legitimate gripes that they might have with the men in their lives are similarly minimized. So post-"rape" the film has an interesting opportunity to explore an man's emotional response to rape. It doesn't. It makes light of it. So whatever.

The second attempted rape is even more awkward and at a certain point you have to start wondering where the filmmakers think the irony is in this entire situation. Is it that these girls are just putting on a tough exterior but that really all they're looking for is love? Is that why it's ironic that when Swain falls for a rock star (not that their relationship has any screentime or seems at all plausible), he turns out to be gay? Because he's been singing these love songs directed at women, so she thinks he's the perfect man, but while he can sing about women he prefers not to have sex with them? And that's ironic? I have no idea. There isn't a single idea in The Smokers that is carried through far enough so that the viewer has any clue what the filmmaker is trying to say about anything.

Is the movie just supposed to be purely misanthropic? Is it saying that the reason why young people can't find love is because young men as stupid egotistical sex-maniacs and young women are just stupid? I'm not sure that's sufficient ideology to justify making a movie. But there isn't a single likeable character to be found.

Ideally, we're supposed to think that Jeremy (Nicholas M. Loeb) is a likeable character. He's the nice guy who's in love with Swain's character, the one man in the movie who doesn't "deserve" to be raped or killed, according to the film's logic. And I sat there for the entire film wondering how exactly Nicholas Loeb came to be playing this part, because his total ineptitude ruins the character. To begin with, he's too old for the part. It's written into the dialogue that he looks old, but that's no excuse. Then there's the fact that he has no timing when it comes to reading his lines. He also has no chemistry with Swain. And no screen presence. And I'm sitting through the whole film wondering how this total non-actor ended up in such a crucial part in such a bad movie. You wanna know the answer I discovered? He's the producer. He owns the production company that funded the movie. And he "co-wrote" the "script." Now, of course, I admire people only a couple years older than I am who own production companies(though his money seems to be totally family money and his connections are totally family connections) and write scripts and get to play characters ten years younger than themselves in movies. Still, I wish he work on better projects and stay behind the scenes.

Is this review totally disjointed? It feels that way to me as I'm writing it. I assure you, though, that it has far more narrative flow than The Smokers. Nothing in this movie holds together. None of the little details have any payoff or relevance to the plot. Swain's character listens to opera, but then stops listening to opera. Why? No idea. Swain's character is also the least realistic pothead in the history of cinema, plus the characters and and their smoking is important enough to give the movie its title, but not important enough for the smoking or drug using to having anything to do with the plot. Or is the movie called The Smokers because Swain's character triggers a smoke alarm at the beginning and then end of the movie? I hope not.

What else? Oh, I'm not spoiling anything to reveal that at the end, Swain's character's voiceover explains what the characters went on to do with their lives. But the voice is the voice of teenage Swain and the movie is set in the present. Does that mean that the voiceover is coming from thirty years into the future? With the voice of the present? Why is that? I don't get it. Grrrr... I hate not being able to get things.

The Smokers was "directed" by Christina Peters with no kinda of visual signature. There's no evidence here that Peters knows what to do with the camera to tell a story. Since she also wrote the movie, I guess I hold her responsible for the fact that there isn't a single memorable (or even interesting) image or line of dialogue in the *entire* movie. The camera just sits there, which is an acceptable strategy only if you're doing it for a reason and if the story is strong enough to sustain it. She isn't and it doesn't. The DVD of The Smokers offers the choice of full screen and widescreen, but since Peters does nothing at all with the framing, you might just as well watch it without the letterboxing. It wouldn't matter.

The inexperienced DP and editor are responsible for the movie's dull appearance, lack of flow, and several totally jarring cuts. Basically, this looks and feels like a cheap independent film and if it weren't for the slightly recognizable actors in a couple of the lead roles, MGM wouldn't even be bothering with a DVD release for this project. It doesn't even rise to the level of campy exploitation cinema.

In fact, if you gave this script to Russ Meyer in 1970, I bet you anything he could figure out what to do with it. Or Roger Corman in 1969 . A fimmaker willing to make a commitment to campy trashing moviemaking could have made The Smokers into a guilty pleasure. Instead of feeling guilty, though, I just feel angry about wasting my time. But I didn't want to. The Devil made me do it. And I hope Dominique Swain has the same excuse.

Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: DVD
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age