Slums of Beverly Hills . Tucson Weekly . 09-21-98

Slums of Beverly Hills

DIRECTED BY: Tamara Jenkins

REVIEWED: 09-21-98

This manipulative, cautious and contrived comedy came out of the stifling Sundance Workshop, and it shows. Like every other movie these days, it's set in the '70s. The won't-this-be-touching story focuses on a young girl coming of age, and her efforts to accept her body and her family, who are a little off-beat, but not so off-beat as to challenge the audience's beliefs or sensibilities. Alan Arkin does his usual decent job playing the aging single father. (God forbid there should be a single mother in a lighthearted film...single mothers equal tragedy and pain.) The jokes are all reasonably funny, there's enough sex to make it titillating but not enough to push it into controversy, and there's a general lack of plot. Perhaps the most interesting thing about this intentionally forgettable film are the body doubles: both Marissa Tomei and newcomer Natasha Lyonne must show their breasts at least twice, but their faces are never in the shot, and the actresses hired to stand in for them sport bodies with no visual relation to the ones they're supposed to represent. A real oddity, that: There's Tomei, she gratuitously opens her robe, and suddenly there's a shot from the neck down of someone else's body. I guess if you're doing tits-for-tits-sake you might as well bring in the best you can find, and damn the torpedoes. Other than the curious interest that provides, though, the film refuses to take any chances or do anything risky, and winds up being so benign as to be a bit boring. Perhaps this can be blamed on the heavy and notoriously treacly hand of Robert Redford, who produced this cowardly, if somewhat humorous, project.

--DiGiovanna

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