Review: Holy Smoke
Dateline: 2/19/00
Jane Campion is back, and this time with the same sense of tragic humor that she evoked in her previous movies, Sweetie and An Angel at My Table. Holy Smoke is the intense, yet funny story of a young woman and her meeting with her deprogrammer. Written by Jane and Anna Campion and directed by Jane Campion, the film follows Ruth Barron, (Kate Winslet) from her induction into an Indian ashram to her family's subsequent intervention, and, finally, to the showdown with the cult exiter, P.J. Waters (Harvey Keitel).
| "It's a shame that Campion likes to work with Harvey Keitel." |
It's a shame that Jane Campion likes working with Harvey Keitel. I didn't like him in The Piano, and I don't like him any better here. What I do like about this movie, however, is Kate Winslet and her character's manipulation of the man who's supposedly manipulating her. Ruth's transformation from sari-wearing, love-touting guru devotee to truth-telling seductress only makes the final moral of the story even more poignant: be kind.
It's really not Western theology, or the lack thereof, that Ruth is trying to escape in India. She's escaping the fear that she's heartless and wicked. And sometimes she's both of those things, but by turns she is also vulnerable and scared, and in the end, kind. The movie is a roller coaster of Ruth's emotions. One minute she's dancing and lip-synching to Alanis Morrisette's "You Oughta Know" in the emu stockyard with an unbeatable energy, the next she's surrounded by the bumbling men in her family and pleading to her gay brother to let her speak to her mother. It's really quite exhausting and riveting.
| "...break-out performances..." |
There are several break-out performances in this movie. Kate Winslet, of course, is magnificent. She beams, she cries, she pisses herself, she gives cunnilingus lessons to Harvey Keitel, she makes platform sandals out of paperback books and plastic wrap. She should wear a sari in every movie she makes. Julie Hamilton as Ruth's mother, the asthmatic veterinarian Marion Barron, is a delight. Her trip to India to bring back her daughter, the golden child of the family, is both horrifying and touching. It's even more traumatic and mesmerizing to witness her helplessness at watching her daughter be put into the hands of P.J. Waters.
Pam Grier as Carol, the professional partner and girlfriend of P.J. Waters, is brilliant in a very small but moving role. She comes in at exactly the right moment in the movie. Finally, the entire Barron family deserves accolades for their performances: Tim Robertson as Gilbert Barron, Daniel Wyllie as dim-witted Robbie Barron, Sophie Lee as the vixen Yvonne Barron, Kerry Walker as Aunt Puss, and Paul Goddard as Tim Barron. Jane Campion has a way of finding remarkable actors and actresses who play roles that on the surface seem like camp, but are actually very real.
Kate Winslet isn't quite as lovely in this movie as she was in either Jude or Hideous Kinky, but you still can't help but fall in love with her as she creates a make shift help sign out of rocks in the yard or meditates on the floor of her bright pink room. She outshines Harvey Keitel who can be forgiven in this movie because he's supposed to be smarmy, and I really did almost like him when P.J. reminds Ruth that he's just a person, and not the devil. In their isolated "Halfway Hut" they tear at each other's beliefs, leaving only one moral standing: be kind.
