Crime & Punishment in Suburbia (98 Mins, 15) Directed by Rob Schmidt; starring Ellen Barkin, Monica Keena, Michael Ironside, Jeffrey Wright
Saltwater (97 mins, 15) Directed by Conor McPherson; starring Brian Cox, Brendan Gleeson, Peter McDonald, Conor Mullen
Bless the Child (110 mins, 15) Directed by Chuck Russell; starring Kim Basinger, Jimmy Smits, Rufus Sewell, Ian Holm
The cinema has had a dozen shots at Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, ranging from Von Sternberg's 1935 version starring Peter Lorre as Raskolnikov to Aki Kaurismaki's transposition of the story to modern Helsinki and a Latin American treatment a couple of years ago that reworked the story in Colombia. All missed the target. But none was as odd as Rob Schmidt's low-budget American independent production, Crime & Punishment in Suburbia.
Without that title and an epigraph by Dostoyevsky (from one of his prison letters) one might not have guessed the film's source, and thus not noticed the significance of the teenage heroine's name - Rosanne Skolnik. Yes, Raskolnikov has changed sex to become a pretty high school cheerleader who lives in an anonymous suburb of Los Angeles with her drunken, abusive stepfather (Michael Ironside) and her sluttish mother (Ellen Barkin). When Mom leaves home to move in with a good-looking black bartender (Jeffrey Wright), a deranged Dad rapes Rosanne who then gets her football star boyfriend to help her murder Dad. She butchers him with an electric carving knife, but Mom gets arrested and charged with Murder One.
This is a curious affair that plays around with themes from the book, turns Sonia into a sad, mystic Christian voyeur called Vincent, but has no equivalent to Inspector Porfiry. Like a novel, it's divided into eight chapters, each given a sort of explanatory Brechtian title. But this is less Dostoyevsky Lite than Crime and Punishment re-written in the lowdown pulp style of Jim Thompson, and as such not without a certain interest.
The screenwriter Larry Gross - best known for his collaborations with Walter Hill (on 48 Hrs and Geronimo) and for some trenchant articles on Hitchcock and Kubrick in Sight and Sound - wrote the script a couple of years ago for This World, Then the Fireworks, one of the best screen adaptations of a Thompson fiction, and also dealing with murder and incest. Unsatisfactory as the picture is, one senses a serious mind behind it.
Saltwater, the cinematic debut as writer-director of Conor McPherson, author of the long-running play The Weir, might well have been called 'Crime Without Punishment by the Seaside'. Set out of season in a small coastal resort north of Dublin, the movie (based on an earlier play by McPherson called This Lime Tree Bower) is an account of a hectic week in the lives of three Irish lads living under the roof of the widowed George Beneventi (Brian Cox), a chip-shop owner in hock to the local loan shark (Brendan Gleeson). Two are his sons, Frank (Peter MacDonald) who works in the shop, and the 15-year-old schoolboy Joe (Laurence Kinlan); the third, Ray (Conor Mullen) is a cocksure philosophy lecturer living with George's daughter.
Joe gets involved with a seductive delinquent newcomer at his school which leads to him being accused of rape. Frank fakes an armed robbery at the loan shark's betting shop to pay Dad's debts. Ray, who's having an affair with a student and is threatened with losing his job, gets horrendously drunk the night before an important university occasion.
As with most Irish drama, the men are weak, feckless, drawn to the bottle, and the women are sensible, wry and long-suffering, most especially the local representative of the Garda, an attractive female police sergeant. The plotting is not entirely plausible, the college scenes are unconvincing and the pace is evenly slow. But there's a nice sense of place in the empty seaside town, some good turns of phrase and several excellent performances, especially Laurence Kinlan's as sad, serious, likeable Joe, who unlike the others faces up to the consequences of his actions.
Producer Mace Neufeld made his name in 1976 with The Omen, a derivative contribution to the diabolical possession movie that had included such notable pictures as Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist. His latest film, Bless the Child, turns up at the end of a similar cycle of sanctimonious horror flicks in which the forces of good and evil do battle for the future of the world on the eve of the third millennium.
The dispute this time is over Cody, a six-year-old girl with special powers, born under the same star as Christ, and kidnapped like other children born that day by a sinister band of diabolists called New Dawn and headed by Satan's agent Eric Stark (Rufus Sewell).
Opposing them with bell, book and Magnum are the girl's aunt (Kim Basinger), an ex-seminarian now doing God's work as an FBI specialist in 'ritual homicide and the occult' (Jimmy Smits), and the usual renegade priest, a grizzled, crazy old-timer, who knows things the Vatican won't acknowledge, played in this case by Ian Holm. The cross-cutting between a chapel full of nuns praying for Cody's soul at Easter 1999 and Sewell conducting a black mass with the Devil himself in attendance is hilarious.
