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Wildflowers

2000, Movie, R, 98 mins

Wildflowers: Review

WILDFLOWERS | WILD FLOWERS
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Sixties flower-power clichés are venerated in this meandering melodrama, which chronicles the rude awakenings of various aging hippies. It's 1985: Free-spirited teenager Cally (Clea DuVall), who's grown up in a Northern California commune with little supervision from pot-smoking pop Wade (Tomas Arana), senses an immediate bond with former radical Sabine (Daryl Hannah), a troubled woman who blows back into town to care for a dying friend. As Cally slowly learns the details of Sabine's past as an SDS activist who was eventually forced into hiding, Cally begins to believe Sabine is her mother. Sabine — who's emphatically not the maternal type — denies Cally's suspicions; Cally prods Wade about his stormy relationship with Sabine, but doesn't get confirmation from him either. Cally's search eventually leads to the bed of drug-dealer Jacob (Eric Roberts), yet another of Sabine's ex-boyfriends. Did Sabine desert Wade and Cally so she could join Jacob in Mexico? Cally's quest to uncover her origins is clearly meant to prompt viewers to reexamine the excesses of the free love era, but Melissa Painter's literal-minded direction and mock poetic script instead have a numbing effect. All the vintage rock on the soundtrack can't energize this debilitating viewing experience, which doesn't so much revisit an era as embalm it. DuVall has considerable tomboy appeal that's used to good effect, but the rest of the cast toils listlessly in a dramatic mill of sanctimony and reprisals. And though Painter depicts Cally's predicament as an unintended side effect of Sabine's human frailty, overall the film plays oddly like an update of a vintage unwed-mother flick, in which the old-fashioned stigma of out-of-wedlock childbearing is replaced by the more modern sin of inadequate parenting. leave a comment --Robert Pardi
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