The best way to kill a technically well made film is through a bad screenplay. Exhibit 1A: filmmaker Allison Anders’ 2003 Showtime film Things Behind The Sun. Ostensibly based upon Anders’ real life ‘trauma’ of being raped as a child, the film wallows in every manner of cliché on the subject of victimhood imaginable. It also wastes some fine performances, save that of the ever PC and increasingly hyperbolic Don Cheadle, whose performance here presages his terrible role in last year’s Oscar-winning Crash.
The tale is about a blond sexpot singer-songwriter, Sherry McGrale (Kim Dickens), whose life has fallen into the dregs of self-pity, alcohol, and self-destruction. This is because she has not been able to get over being gang raped, at fourteen, by the older brother and friends of a boy she cared for, and shared a love of music with. She has blocked out all memories of that time — even the boy’s name and where he lived.
That boy, Owen (Gabriel Mann, a younger, slimmer James Spader), has now grown up into a rock critic and interviewer, in Los Angeles, for Vinyl Fetish magazine. His boss is a woman named Pete — giving Rosanna Arquette her cameo. He flies to Florida to interview Sherry, after she's arrested for being drunk. She was smashed on the lawn of the house where she was raped (an event which, for some reason, she doesn't remember), for the third straight year. He interviews her also because her song on rape (a la Tori Amos) is climbing the charts.
If all the clichés of a rape/victim movie are present, they are added to by all the clichés of a rock and roll movie, as well as those of the tormented writer that Mann embodies. Yet, for all the clichés, the truth is that Sherry is simply a typical artsy ho or skank, whose wimpy black manager/ex-boyfriend Chuck (Cheadle) has not the strength nor verve to tell her to grow up. The all-worrying manager of a rock singer is yet another cliché the film is not shy in mining; although plaudits for the nonchalant way the interracial romance angle is accepted.
Owen, meanwhile, who loved Sherry before the rape, is looking to make amends, because after his brother Dan (Eric Stoltz) - now in prison for armed robbery - and pals had their go at Sherry, they physically (and melodramatically) dragged Owen out from his room, and forced him to have sex with her. Since that time he has never been able to have a good sex life, either failing to maintain an erection or coming too quickly (which we learn he did when he lost his cherry to Sherry).
Article comments
1 - b
Wow. Scare quotes around rape being a 'trauma'. That's some classy writing.
Just stumbled on this review trying to figure out what this movie is on tv. Thanks for clueing me in to the conspiracy between those damn feminists and PC black actors!
2 - Dan Schneider
They're yawn quotes.
3 - carmen
I just saw the movie and I disagree with you on many things. Being a male you will never comprehend the horror of a rape mind you a gang rape. I lived and as you call it "grew up" and though I got married had a child I can only tell yoiu one never out grows it. Though released from therapy I still have blackouts and stay away from men though I married late and had a son. My trust in life is now taking the course of what I never had done since the rape. I understand Cherry and I am glad it was made it does help many of us who can't go back and face the horror as she did. one may 'move on" but that "experience" always catches up to you and the nightmares come and go throughout ones life. Many of us do not say anything cause many do not want to listen to such a thing that always is out there and I have spoken and many care not. So why speak of it. and one walks away also not wanting to hear .... I thank for this and hope it opens up to many and who knows these husbands or boyfriends friends family or whoever can listen and someday understand...
4 - Stéphane
I'm french and i'm not agree with you.
It's a ggod stuff and i'm think that Don Cheadle especially in his las scene with Gabriel Mann in the kitchen is very big.
Quant au violen lui même nul besoin d'être une femme pour comprendre à quel point cela peut être un acte dégradant et pertubateur et c'est à chacun de réagir ou de non réagir.
5 - Kayla
Wow Dan, insensitivity is thy name. I presume nothing bad has ever happened to you in your life (sarcasm Dan, this sentence was sarcasm). So, do you feel the same about men who suffer from flashbacks and PTSD from war time experiences? Do you feel they must be effeminate whiners who should just get over it and move on? And before you answer that, yes of course they should. If only life were so simple. The sad fact is that not everyone can, and that does not make them weak, it makes them human. Humans that deserve your respect, not your ridicule.
6 - Dan Schneider
It's a bad film, poorly acted, and when trite situations are handled melodramatically, they deserve ridicule.
I do not care if it's a film on Dr. Mengele, if it's nothing new about the man, save that he was a monster, yawn. A good philosophic or political position is not an excuse for bad art. I am a reviewer of the film's art, not its politics. And if the latter damns the former. then it deserves to be skewered.
It's called maturity and objectivity.
7 - Dan Aloi
I love this movie. It actually is not that cliched and treats both the specific traumatizing events and the milieu - which the director knows very well - with sensitivity and depth. The critic seems to be gunning for feminists, or offended somehow by how the material is treated, and comes off as sexist and cynical. The characters behave and interact in a way that shows their pain, denial, and impotence in all senses of the word. Things Behind the Sun is much better than The Accused, and even Kill Bill's thrust of female revenge and survival.
The songs are also very well-done, evoking the original influences on young Sherry. Music is integral to the setting and tone and verisimilitude of most of Anders' work, and here she surpasses everything else she's done, and extraordinarily so, as painful as all the explicit associations with the music are in this film.
8 - Dan Schneider
Triteness and predictability do not equal sensitivity and depth. You may love that, Dan. So what?
9 - Dan Aloi
This film boasts neither... and I'm not a fan of either. I dare guess that as a conservative you have an agenda with victim/survivor narratives or with 'PC' actors. I did enjoy your Pete Hamill interview, what you got out of him, his redress of your questions and his thoughts on what writers should do.
Criticism needn't be objective, but it should be informed and responsible. Critics should serve, not their ideologies, as Hamill notes; but their readers.
10 - Dan Schneider
I'm a conservative? That you even claim such bespeaks your own biases. The film is ill-written, ill-acted, and not of much depth.
Art is not something that one should use as a political hammer.
As for crit- the only way for it to be good and reach across limited POVs is to be objective. Otherwise it's a bumper sticker; like this film.
11 - Kim
Dan, Just came across this. Agree with b back in 2007 - please explain why you place quotation marks around gang rape being a trauma. Do you not believe that rape/ gang rape is a trauma - yes or no?
12 - Dan Schneider
Her being raped or not is not the issue.
Shit happens in life, and making bad art off of one's claimed trauma is not good. I could trot out MANY incidents in my life that would make Anders life look like Disneyworld to my life in Beirut. But I make great art, and don't milk my woes.
As example, Oprah Winfrey got phat off of preying off of dumb and insecure people who would do anything to get on tv, including sell their souls and dignity; and then peddled this to zombie hausfraus to make billions. Then she hit these idiots w her noxious PC New Age religion.
And all this because of a claim that some uncle abused her. So, because Oprah got molested or worse as a child, all the years that she basically did the same to MANY times more people is forgiven?
Similarly, Anders made bad art from a claimed trauma, and puts the trauma over the art. Yawn- as said in response 4 yrs ago.
Art is NOT about pain and suffering, it is about enlightenment. This film did not enlighten; it inflicts pain and suffering on intelligent viewers; therefore it is not mitigated by Anders' claims to being raped.
In short, she's paying forward her pain to all the rest of us- is that fair?
13 - N.
You seem to miss the point that your quotes around the word "trauma" have nothing to do with the film. You are dismissing the gravity of rape.
For that matter, apparently you also missed that no one who pointed this out to you had anything to say about your assessment of the film. They might even agree with you (I do not think the film is very good either), but they, like me, are only pointing out that you are incredibly tactless. Even on the Internet, this beggars belief.
14 - Dan Schneider
The quotes around trauma are clearly because there is no proof that it ever occurred. As well the way the film uses it as a hammer to make political points that are obvious.
It is a well worn convention that things that have no proof of having occurred are handled in such a manner, a de facto synonym for the term 'alleged.'
Given the PC nature of the filmmaker, the film, and the commenters, it's quite ludicrous to even need to explain this, as most people with a super-third grade reading comprehension understand this.
Yet, given the nature of PC, this level of barely functioning literacy does not even beggar one's disgust any longer. It's simply a symptom of deliterate America.
But, please, continue the demonstration of your collective lack.
Yawn.