Where are Charlie's other angels when you need them?
A solo Cameron Diaz goes indie -- and goes postal -- in The Invisible Circus, a grim little drama about a 1960s hippie who does a Patty Hearst and turns into a terrorist in the 1970s.
Written and directed by Canadian-born filmmaker Adam Brooks, the movie is adapted from a novel by Jennifer Egan.
The time period is 1977. A budding young woman (Jordana Brewster) has graduated from high school and is ready for her big European adventure.
Obsessed with the mysterious suicide of her sister (Diaz) in Portugal six years earlier, Brewster decides to retrace Diaz's steps on her odyssey, a trip that led to her tragic death.
The story is told in flashbacks. We see Diaz in her metamorphosis from flower child to bomb-throwing anarchist. The more Brewster learns about her sister, the more frightened she becomes. This spiral into madness now threatens her.
This could have been strong drama. Instead, with Brooks' downbeat directorial style and the empty dialogue in his script, it's mostly dreary, plodding stuff that works as psychology 101.
Even a phalanx of strong actors fails to drag the film out of its funk. Blythe Danner plays the mom. Christopher Eccleston is Diaz's former boyfriend -- and Brewster finds herself inexorably drawn to him. Patrick Bergin is involved. But none of them is reason to get excited.
As for Diaz, she is singularly unbelievable in the role. Perhaps it is hard to watch anyone play a hippie (I can't believe we wore those silly clothes then!) without giggling. Secondly, it is even harder to believe that the character Diaz creates here could become any kind of anarchist, even by default.
As for Brewster (The Faculty) she is decent but hardly magnetic enough to warrant being the centre of this film. Both her character and her muted performance is so drained that it all seems like a sad dream in grievous need of some shot of technicolour energy.
Filmmaker Brooks' colour palette doesn't help. He shoots with such dour tones that The Invisible Circus hides its passion as well as its spectacle.
As for the title of this piece, there is a brief and somewhat surreal, drug-fuelled scene early in the film that shows Diaz hosting a house party in which circus performers mill about playing magic tricks. You never see them again, so I guess they are invisible. And irrelevant.
As for drugs, they rear their ugly head later when Brewster's character stupidly drops a tab of acid in Paris and freaks out. Yet even that sequence seems oddly subdued (for comparisons, think of the drug trips depicted in Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas).
The Invisible Circus will soon pack its tent and leave town. No one will even notice.
(This film is rated AA)
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