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Beautiful Creatures

2000, Movie, R, 95 mins

Beautiful Creatures: Review

BEAUTIFUL CREATURES
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A rather sour variation on THELMA & LOUISE, set in Glasgow and featuring a singularly unpleasant cast of miscreants. Down-to-earth Dorothy (Susan Lynch) and dithery, bottle-blond Petula (Rachel Weisz) don't know each other, but share the same dismal taste in men. Dorothy's boyfriend, Tony (Iain Glenn), is a violent junkie; she decides to leave him after he trashes her apartment and splashes her sweet-faced white mutt, Pluto (along with her entire wardrobe), with paint. Petula's Brian (Tom Mannion), a drunken lout, is trying to strangle her when Pluto (apparently motivated by some inherent doggie decency) slips his leash and intervenes. Dorothy, who arrives hard on Pluto's hairy heels, grabs a piece of pipe and whacks Brian on the head. Then the women haul him back to Dorothy's place to sleep it off in her tub. But while they're bonding over a joint and girl talk, Brian trips and dies on the bathroom floor. Petula is panicked and disconsolate, partly because she's grown accustomed to life with Brian, but mostly because she's flat-out terrified of his older brother, Ronnie (the very scary Maurice Roëves). A nasty little predicament, to be sure, but just when you're feeling sorry for the put-upon Dorothy and Petula, they start doing unbelievably stupid things. Rather than calling the police (it was, after all, an accident, and neither of them is wanted by the law), they decide to conceal Brian's corpse until they can smuggle it onto his boat and stage a fatal mishap. Then Pluto chews off Brian's ring finger, inspiring Dorothy to fake a kidnapping instead. Enter sleazy Detective Inspector Hepburn (Alex Norton), who's in Ronnie's pocket, knows Petula's up to something, and figures that if he plays both ends against the middle, he'll wind up with a cut of whatever action is unfolding. Handsomely photographed and efficiently directed, this blackly comic and vaguely feminist revenge tale would be more appealing if the women's behavior weren't alternately moronic and venal. The usually capable Lynch seems baffled by Dorothy and makes her unpleasantly shrill, while Weisz invests Petula — the less conventionally sympathetic character, since at worst there's a bit of the gold-digger about her, and at best she's been coasting on her looks — with a certain goofy charm. She even wrings a certain charm from Petula's dim acceptance at face value of Dorothy's sarcastic remark that the pink-and-white Pluto is "half acrylic." leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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