A DIRTY SHAME
US, 2004, 95 minutes, Colour.
Tracey Ullman, Johnny Knoxville, Chris Isaak, Selma Blair, Mink Stole, Patricia Hearst, Ricky Lake.
Directed by John Waters.
A Dirty Shame comes rather late in John Waters’ career. Originally from Baltimore, and always returning there in his films, he made an impact in the 1970s with some films in grossly bad taste, often featuring transvestite Divine. He seemed to revel in gross comedy about bodily functions, about relationships and sexuality, about deviancy… There were such films as Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, Multiple Maniacs.
Later, Waters was to go more mainstream while keeping his reputation as a director who embraced ‘filth’ in his screenplays. There were oddball films like Polyester, Lust in the Dust. There were also films which appealed more to the mainstream, Cry Baby with Johnny Depp and, especially, Serial Mom, Pecker, Cecil B DeMented? and Hairspray which was later adapted as a Broadway musical and then as a big budget film starring John Travolta.
With A Dirty Shame, Waters says he was interested in making a sex movie, especially about sex addiction – and wanting to satirise and spoof situations and characters. And that is what he has done.
The audience for A Dirty Shame will not be as large as that for many other films, audiences put off by the characters, the behaviour, the treatment of sexuality, the gross spoofs, bodily functions humour that go all the way to gross-out. When all is said and done, a lot of the humour is very juvenile, a blend of the corny and the crass – with a lot of repetition. The whole film and its point could have been made much more briefly and succinctly – and effectively.
Waters had something of a coup in inviting British comedian, Tracey Ullman, to play the central role of the very uptight and sexually repressed Baltimore housewife, burdened with a daughter who has had a huge breast enhancement and has played sleazy clubs and is now locked in her room at home. Chris Isaak is her husband, with an emphasis on sex at the beginning but his turning out to be an NEUTER, the group of citizens of Baltimore who were rebelling against sexual excess, all under the leadership of his mother-in-law, Big Ethel (Suzanne Shepherd).
Johnny Knoxville plays a kind of Satanic sex addict controller, finding people of been knocked out or had concussion in an accident whose lives are being transformed, becoming sex addicts of the most excessive kind. And there are plenty of illustrations of this, showing characters and in the upper right-hand corner illustratiions of the concussion that they had and how they were transformed. Another device that Waters uses is to rely on stock footage of all kinds of episodes in life as well as in film and television, placed in rapid collage, to indicate the type of sex addiction.
When Tracey Ullman is transformed, there are a wide range of episodes where she changes character, changes clothes, becomes more permissive, has special effects of fire from her vagina, changes to talking confidentially with her daughter, supporting her, and meeting all the sex addicts around Baltimore. When she is de-concussed, she and the family go to a 12-step sex addict meeting where there are a lot of confessions – and then more concussions and transformations back and forth. Her daughter, Caprice, Selma Blair, also goes to the meeting and goes back to the family store where there is a protest meeting against excesses. She has been changed. However, as might have been expected, there are parodies of religious groups attacks on them, there are all kinds of reversals, finishing with people bumping each other on the head transforming and re-transforming into addiction.
There is a guest episode with David Hasselhoff in a plane – and the headbanging going on during the trip.
There is no real reason for seeing the film. Many audiences will be put off by the sexual shenanigans. The reason to see it is for completion of films by John Waters, where A Dirty Shame finds its place.
