In Cecil B. DeMented (2000) Melanie Griffith wasn't far enough out of the mainstream to be in on the joke of playing a nasty, fading star who's kidnaped by a band of extremist independent moviemakers and forced to star in their anti-Hollywood guerrilla movie. You and I may think Griffith has become grotesque but she doesn't, and, as she showed in Adrian Lyne's woefully romanticized Lolita (1997), she lacks the high style and push it would have taken to give the movie a center, as Kathleen Turner did with Serial Mom (1993). (To retract my claws a bit, Griffith has some good watchful moments in Cecil B. DeMented, and does a wonderful quick, maternal shake of her head when Maggie Gyllenhaal makes a suicidal remark.)
Tracey Ullman is as consonant a star as Waters has had since Divine's death (right after the release of Hairspray (1988).) She's a small miracle here, expertly overdoing sketch acting in a way that somehow simulates a total lack of training. Ullman runs through the movie, literally, grinding her pelvis and grimacing, channeling Waters's guiding impulse to achieve as much eruption with as little control as possible.
When Waters was a perverted midnight-movie specialist he didn't have to fake it. Now he does, and it has changed things in his movies. Watching Divine eat poodle poop off the sidewalk in Pink Flamingos (1974), you didn't have the sense that these creatures could ever fit into the world above ground. (Perhaps clearest in the shot of Divine strutting down the sidewalk past gapers unaware a movie's being shot, while "The Girl Can't Help It" plays on the soundtrack.) Waters has been integrated into the culture now and there's something quaint about his outrageousness. He may not be a big-time director but he's not an unbankable freak, either. He's genially "inclusive." So in A Dirty Shame a big part of the joke is that the self-styled "Neuters," neighbors who want to put a stop to Ray Ray's orgasmic-ecstatic revolution, object to sexual specialties that real-life sheltered suburbanites wouldn't know about. The culture has broadened to such a degree that Waters is almost in the position of selling nostalgia for the good old repressed days when he had the power to shock.
Waters doesn't worry about his position too much, however. He just whips up the hysteria and chortles over it with total ironic detachment. I have never seen him attempt direct emotion in a movie--once this gay boy saw what life could be like at camp he never went home again. The intentional overwriting and unmodulated acting, the over-the-top and under-the-skirts naughtiness, make A Dirty Shame arguably Waters's funniest movie. (It's helped a lot by a soundtrack filled with brazenly suggestive old pop tunes like "Tony's Got Hot Nuts (Ten Cents a Bag)".) At the same time, when a snake wriggles out of evangelical Ray Ray's fly, it is to Waters, albeit entirely within the overarching irony, a religious moment. It's the romance ethos for his world--a lower-middle-class Baltimore gone sexy in every way, conceivable and inconceivable. He'd mean it if he meant anything.
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