Opposite Attracts
A wildly offbeat movie that's a dark parody of love in the new millennium

THE OPPOSITE OF SEX
With Christina Ricci, Martin Donovan, Ivan Sergei, Johnny Galecki
Written and directed by Don Roos

THE BEST THING about Don Roos' postmodern ultra-black comedy, The Opposite of Sex, is its torrent of funny, acerbic one-liners.

When a gay teacher (Martin Donovan) is accused of sleeping with his conniving student (Johnny Galecki), the lad tells the press, "Teachers everywhere have to learn no means no--at least until we drop out." When a bubble-headed 25-year-old gay boy (Ivan Sergei) sleeps with his first girl and then declares himself bisexual, a friend (Lisa Kudrow) tells him, "I went to a bar mitzvah once, that doesn't mean I'm Jewish." And when the gay teacher just can't take the insanity going on about him any more, he says: "I survived my family, all the Republicans, every other Democrat..."

Unfortunately, the second best thing about The Opposite of Sex is just about everything else. You can certainly admire Roos' modern sensibility in his wildly offbeat movie, which is a dark parody of love and sex in the new millennium from every odd angle a writer can contrive. But his movie itself too often lacks sense, and a few of the performances are clumsy and dissonant. Simply put: Sometimes this movie works, and sometimes it doesn't--although I'm not sure which way the balance tips.

The Opposite of Sex is told to us by Dedee (Christina Ricci), a 16-year-old, cigarette-smoking, alcohol-drinking, bleached-blond New Orleans trailer trash slut who at least paid attention in English class when they taught meta-fiction. As we watch her tale unfold, she often pauses in her voice-over narration to make sure we're paying attention: This gun is important, she tells us, as she places it in her purse--or, you didn't really think Dedee was going to die in childbirth because, like, duh, she's the narrator. And do not expect her to grow a heart of gold at the end. She has a word for people like that: "Losers."

We meet Dedee on the day of her stepfather's funeral (he died of "ass cancer"), after which Dedee seeks refuge in quaint Indiana with her gay 35-year-old half brother Bill (Donovan), a school teacher who lives in posh digs because his stock broker lover recently died of AIDS. Bill's new young boyfriend is Matt (Sergei), who's as beautiful as he is dumb.

Things get going when Dedee seduces Matt and claims to be pregnant with his child, though we eventually learn the child belongs to Randy, her Bible-thumping high school lover from back home who only has one testicle, so he'll sleep with any girl who doesn't laugh at him (naturally Randy hates homos because they're immoral). The pregnancy breaks up Bill and Matt, who takes off with Dedee. Then Jason (Galecki) enters the fray: He's Bill's former student whom Bill did not molest, but Jason claims Bill did because Jason is hot for Matt and Bill won't tell him where Matt has gone.

Are you with me so far?

There's more. Lucia (Kudrow) is the bitter, lonely, wise-cracking sister of Bill's former lover (the dead one), and Carl (Lyle Lovett) is the town's top cop who has a crush on Lucia, although she wants nothing to do with love or sex in any way. So off they all go, from Indiana to California to Canada, trying to work out their relationships, desires and paternities.

Roos is a better comedy writer than he is a storyteller and director, so a lot of The Opposite of Sex feels thrown together to shock or amuse. In that sense his movie is like camp, which we all know has a decidedly gay sensibility. He's nakedly unsubtle, which I suppose is a valid style, though not a very rewarding one once you catch onto it. Unlike, say, John Waters, Roos gets too intellectual and self-conscious about his project. Call it Clueless meets Heathers meets To Die For--an assault on straight, sentimental, middle-class morality and values, where you can be dysfunctional no matter what your gender, age, orientation or religion.

For Ricci, who played the dismal Wednesday in The Addams Family movies, The Opposite of Sex is her first grown-up role. She could use some diction lessons, and I fear she's about to launch an adult career as dour and one-note as Juliette Lewis. Donovan, who has always been more suited to the minimalist films of Hal Hartley, is slightly flatter than usual; Sergei, a pretty young thing, should be able to get by on his looks in a few more movies before he has to prove he can act. The movie's most annoying performances come from Galecki, who tries too hard with his drama queen caricature; and Kudrow, whom Roos doesn't even pretend to direct, so she spits out her lines with near-amateurish acrimony.

Once or twice toward the end of The Opposite of Sex, Roos threatens to get sentimental and wise. He turns out to be quite smart about the compelling impossibility of human relations. He's even a little bit provocative about taboo subjects: "PC crap aside," snaps Lucia, whose sibling died of AIDS, "didn't sex kill my brother?" (Nobody disputes her.) But Roos ultimately recoils from his soft touches, though his ending leads us to believe that Dedee has commenced to de-bitch herself. There is no gay sex in the movie aside from a few cuddles and one quick kiss, after which Dedee informs the audience, "If you're with a guy who groaned during that kiss, you're with a closet case." You're left with a movie that's funny enough to recommend but awkward enough to disappoint. Still, I'd like to see more from Don Roos, who at least has the guts to try something vulgar and different.

THE OBJECT OF MY AFFECTION
With Jennifer Aniston, Paul Rudd
Written by Wendy Wasserstein, from the novel by Stephen McCauley
Directed by Nicholas Hytner

THE OBJECT OF MY AFFECTION is so admirably stuffed with earnest, downtown, left-wing, pro-gay, pro-rainbow, can't-we-all-just-get-along goodness that People Like Us--and if you're People Like Them, youcan stop reading now--have to be careful we don't trip over ourselves to get to the front of the reception line and shake hands with director Nicholas Hytner (The Madness of King George), screenwriter Wendy Wasserstein (The Heidi Chronicles), and all the good folks who star in it, especially the young actor Paul Rudd (Clueless), who certainly won't help his movie career along much by playing a gay man.

And Rudd isn't the only appealing performer in The Object of My Affection. There's Jennifer Aniston, the Friends star with the expressive oval face and casual smile; Steve Zahn, the impish blond wag from That Thing You Do; Alan Alda, who looks dashing with silvery hair; and even John Pankow, who plays brittle Cousin Ira on Mad About You, and who in The Object of My Affection has a healthy good look about him.

Hytner's movie ambles through its wearying two hours with the leisurely rhythm of a novel rather than the necessarily tighter pace of a movie. Its plot has too many convolutions, and its characters, rather than having an arc, just sort of get flung at you. It all seems to take forever to get exactly where you know it will end up, and the script is neither funny enough nor sad enough to give you any strong feeling when it's over. Instead, it's merely sophisticated, and once or twice it even threatens to become erudite--although its ending is nakedly Wasserstein.

The Object of My Affection takes place in a fancifully romantic and sun-streaked Manhattan and Brooklyn among liberal people, most of them with a little bit of money. Aniston plays Nina Borowski, a social worker who talks frankly about sex and birth control to the inner-city girls at the center where she works. Her boyfriend Vince (Pankow) is a good-natured, working-class lawyer who wants to move in, but she's too independent to allow it. Her stepsister is a fabulously wealthy socialite married to a cocktail-party leftist book editor (Alda) who knows everyone from Martha Stewart to Colin Powell.

Then Nina meets George (Rudd), an ingenuous first-grade teacher at her niece's private school. George is gay, and his self-absorbed, almost-40 boyfriend (Tim Daly, who gives the movie's only misdirected performance) has just left him for a college student. So George moves in with Nina, who finds herself pregnant by Vince and in love with the emotionally available but physically unattainable George.

If you throw out all the complications that ensue, you might be left with a sweet comedy-drama about two lonely people who make bad choices for a while until they finally come around to facing up to reality. Instead, you get a mini-saga about '90s lifestyles for a group of educated, comfortable New Yorkers, the sort of thing that's rampant on TV lately. There's nothing overtly wrong with The Object of My Affection. In fact, it's very smart to cast gay relationships in the same light as straight ones. (I didn't say it's necessarily accurate, only smart.) But you just keep waiting for it to focus, and it only keeps meandering, although some of its more spirited or romantic moments--like when George and Nina take dancing lessons-- are satisfying in a guilty-pleasure sort of way.

Finally, there's the sex, which always turns into the major bugaboo of Hollywood movies about gay men. You'd hope that a movie so drenched in progressive ideas would have the balls to go even halfway with it. No such luck--and it's a good thing, too. When George finally meets a cute guy and they give each other a quick kiss--and I mean very quick--a good bit of the audience--which had been laughing up to that point, or at least sitting still--audibly moaned with disgust.

You sense that Hytner had more man-to-man smooching and bedroom romping in the first cut of his movie, but that he took it out when it tested badly with preview audiences in Kansas. He certainly couldn't have wanted his movie to be so cowardly. And this gay man doesn't even have a circle of gay friends, which makes him especially easy for the good-minded straight folks (and the people in the audience) to put up with.

I've said things like this before, and I'll probably be saying them well into the next millennium: You know a gay-themed movie is hedging when its most erotic scene involves a woman seducing a man, even if the man is gay. So for all its liberal bluster, The Object of My Affection ultimately plays it safe. Decide for yourself if that's better than not playing at all.