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Impressive cast can't avoid basic faults of 'Banger Sisters'
Susan Sarandon and Goldie Hawn in 'The Banger Sisters'
Robert Zuckerman, Fox Searchlight
Credibility is something else.
It seems that from the 1960s through about 1982, non-sibling substance abusers Suzette (Hawn) and Lavinia/Vinnie (Sarandon) were legendary groupies who slept with every rock star extant, which is why Frank Zappa nicknamed them the Banger Sisters.
The women haven't seen each other since.
Suzette, the Peter Pan of the pair, never grew up. She's a West Hollywood flower child turned 50ish, tending bar at Whisky a Go Go along the Sunset Strip, but fired in the first scene.
Penniless, she heads for Phoenix to find Vinnie. She's out of gas and panhandling at a desert rest stop when she picks up the 50-year-old phobic screenwriter Harry (Rush), a refugee from a fly-infested bus who offers fuel money in return for a ride to a Phoenix hotel.
Upon arriving, Suzette finds Vinnie unacceptably reformed — a straitlaced social worker with a lawyer-husband Raymond (Robin Thomas) and two high school-age daughters, Hannah (Erika Christensen, the psychotic predator in "SwinFan"), who is to be valedictorian at graduation, and the snappier Ginger (Eva Amurri, Sarandon's off-screen daughter).
Screenwriter Bob Dolman ("Willow," "Far and Away"), directing for the first time, might have tried what Arthur Laurents accomplished so well in "The Turning Point" (1977) — looking for insight, pathos and maybe even laughs in the roads not taken.
Instead, Dolman selects the roads always taken by Hollywood.
Suzette, despite her utter lack of accomplishment, is depicted as a free spirit of such integrity — no, really — that she won't even accept Vinnie's offer of $5,000 to please get lost.
Vinnie, the film insists, is the one who sold out by becoming domesticized. Besides, she selected a dull husband — the film doesn't give him a chance — and has raised her children too strictly. The picture's notion of strict child-rearing is criminally naive and biased.
"The Banger Sisters" conspicuously champions Suzette over her now-conservative contemporaries, who are depicted as uptight and in need of being liberated like a phoenix rising from the ashes of a suburban grave.
Suzette is inherently superior, Vinnie stultifying and pathetic. Lucky that Vinnie saved a joint with which they can loosen up before taking on the town.
Only by being true to herself, which is to say, like Suzette, can Vinnie be a better whatever.
And all Harry needed after 10 sexless years is a quickie with Suzette.
Leave it to the Lone Ranger. Or to Suzette, who every now and then breaks her regular speech pattern to say something like, "Like I'm trippin' out here, man."
The upside is that our dealers through this stacked deck are very capable and charismatic. You have to like the sight of them dancing shoulder to shoulder.
But another downside is the over-reliance on contrivance in the way characters connect and bond.
The meeting of Suzette and Harry is so clumsily constructed it begs an I-don't-think-so response.
Suzette's later rescue of Hannah from an acid trip on prom night — same hotel, same floor where Harry is staying — is the sort of sloppy plotting you slap your forehead watching.
The Hawn-Sarandon-Rush constituency might not want to pass up the opportunity to see strong performers interact, but everyone deserves better.
| 'The Banger Sisters' |
Director: Bob Dolman
Stars: Goldie Hawn, Susan Sarandon, Geoffrey Rush
MPAA Rating: R, for language, sexual content and some drug use
