Movie Review - Virginia

Virginia (2012)

Starring Jennifer Connelly, Ed Harris, Emma Roberts, Harrison Gilbertson, Amy Madigan, and Toby Jones

Directed by Dustin Lance Black

***This film is currently streaming on Netflix***

Everything but the kitchen sink is thrown into the little seen indie called Virginia which I'd heard about sometime earlier this year in a positive light.  It was only until I was halfway through when I ventured onto rottentomatoes.com and discovered that this had a whopping 4% Fresh rating.  Now, I don't always agree with the general consensus of freshness levels on that site, but they were right on the money here.  The flick, scripted and lensed by Dustin Lance Black, can't ever find an appropriate balance between dark comedy and emotional drama and, as such, it never once appears to be anything other than a jumbled mess.

There is the possibility of potential somewhere in there and I think most of it comes from the all-over-the-place performance of Jennifer Connelly as the title character.  I say "all-over-the-place" not as an insult to Ms. Connelly because actually think she does quite an admirable job considering what she's been given to work with, but rather because Virginia herself is such an odd duck.  She's a single mom with a teenage son named Emmett (Harrison Gilbertson) who seems to be moderately put together enough.  She's got her own home, but a menial job driving a boardwalk tram at a coastal Virginia town has her just gradually scraping by.  As if the economic woes weren't trouble enough, she's in the middle of a decades-long affair with Sheriff Richard Tipton (Ed Harris), a married and purportedly strongly religious Mormon who is currently running for governor of Virginia.  Since Dustin Lance Black is apparently a masochist, he also makes Virginia a schizophrenic who has likely just been stricken with lung cancer.  Let's be honest here -- that's simply too much for one actress to take on in a two hour film, but Connelly tries her hardest and she is the only reason I stuck with the film from beginning to end.

Because the film was just begging for more story, young Emmett finds himself falling for Sheriff Tipton's daughter Jessie (Emma Roberts), the local amusement park owner (Toby Jones) likes to dress up as a woman in his downtime, and the Sheriff has a fascination with S&M that his wife (Amy Madigan) uncovers.  If you're as confused as I am about how all this crap comes together, I'm here to tell you that watching this movie doesn't help you decipher that puzzle.

Ultimately, the fault lies with Dustin Lance Black whose script and direction can't determine what kind of film Virginia should be.  Anything that's supposed to be funny -- and I think the hugely stereotypical and overly broad characterizations of both Mormons and "southerners" condescendingly fall into that category -- fails to elicit a single laugh.  Anything that's supposed to have us feel empathy for the characters does nothing but cause us to roll our eyes.  Throughout Virginia, there fails to be a moment that rings legitimately true.

The RyMickey Rating:  D