Stuffing the archives is a slow and sometimes seemingly pointless task, but with Evan Rachel Wood‘s birthday and her new film, King of California, both looming, it seemed the right time for this re-posted review of Pretty Persuasion, originally published upon its theatrical release in 2005. To wit:

Director Marcos Siega’s Pretty
Persuasion has a streak of originality a mile long and about an
inch deep. A sort of forked-tongue, high school mash-up of Clueless and To Die
For, with the respective if disparate quality of each of those films
canceling each other out in a tidal wave of tangy smirk, it serves as a
bracing, in-your-face reminder that creativity and quality need not be mutually
exclusive.

Thirteen‘s
Evan Rachel Wood, above left), a self-involved and casually cruel diva-in-training given to
proclamations like, “I’m tolerant of all races, but I’m glad I was born white.”
The daughter of a successful but zonked and anti-Semitic businessman (James
Woods, chewing scenery in a frequently open bathrobe) with an equally out-there
new trophy wife (Jaime King), Kimberly attends Roxbury High School, an elite
Beverly Hills private institution, and it’s no surprise given her surroundings
and preternatural maturity and influence that she wants to be an actress — or,
more to the point, a celebrity. Orbiting around Kimberly are two satellites,
her dim best friend Brittany Wells (Elizabeth Harnois, above right) and naïve newcomer Randa
Azzouni (Adi Schnall, above center), an Arab girl whom Kimberly takes under her wing with a
doting sanctimoniousness.

To advance her popular agenda, Kimberly hatches a
plot to frame their nebbishy English instructor, Percy Anderson (Ron
Livingston), for sexual molestation. As the accusation moves toward trial, the
scheme ensnares local lesbian reporter Emily Klein (Jane Krakowski) and
Brittany’s boyfriend Troy (Stark Sands) in an expanding daisy chain of
blackmail, double-crosses and back-biting (large portions of the third act seem
nipped from Wild Things).

The young Wood’s work as Kimberly is undeniably the
stuff of a major talent, but it comes in the service of empty vehicle of
flattened emotional affect. Director Siega cut his teeth on music videos and
Miramax’s Underclassman,
but never elevates Pretty
Persuasion to anything more than the sum of its arch,
self-satisfied parts. (Incidentally, the music, by Gilad Benamram, is a
straight-up rip-off of Angelo Badalamenti’s work on Twin Peaks.)

This may not always be Siega’s fault. Skander
Halim’s script is a real mouthful; at times delightfully bitchy, it touches on
a wide swath of hot-button issues and topics, and like, say, Donnie Darko, hearteningly
shows the cruel underbelly of adolescent life in a way that mainstream studio
films do not, and also the way that teens craftily exploit one another’s
obliviousness. Any and all sort of relation to the outside world, though, rings
false and willfully strident. The movie likes to “shock” with lewd and
politically incorrect off-the-cuff remarks, 15-year-old Kimberly’s sexual favor
brokering and a scene with Woods diddling himself.

The problem is that this none of this ever comes
across as anything more than superficial. That would be fine were Pretty Persuasion a much
broader comedy. But the movie flails, rowdily and flagrantly, in its efforts to
infuse drama into the proceedings, and by the time a death occurs and
ostensibly genuine tears are shed during the third act, one can barely stand to watch. (Samuel Goldwyn/Roadside Attractions, R, 110 mins.)