A Dirty Shame
At 58, John Waters hasn't changed. He hasn't gone off and made a sweaty Jerry Bruckheimer picture or some star-studded, Oscar-lusting weepie. "A Dirty Shame," his 12th movie, is as dingy and obscene as his first. But in his single concession to what sells, he's made an apocalyptic disaster flick -- about sex, the first hour of which is Waters's most fearlessly funny work since "Female Trouble."
"Shame" is set in Hartford Road, a lower-middle-class Baltimore suburb crazed with a nasty hunger for sex. As one disgusted character observes, "There's pubic hair in the air. Everywhere." The cause is that old Hollywood melodrama standby: bumps to the head that open up new personalities. Of course, when uptight Sylvia Stickles (Tracey Ullman) is injured in a car accident, what her new self wants to do isn't printable in this newspaper. (The movie worked for its NC-17 rating.) Needless to say, it could get a girl both arrested and recruited to dance with the Pussycat Dolls. In seconds, Sylvia goes from snappish hausfrau to town slut. Soon she's having X-rated heart-to-hearts with her miffed daughter Caprice (Selma Blair), a slatternly stripper under house arrest for exposing enormous breasts. (Her nom de pole is Ursula Udders.)
Soon after Sylvia's bump, she has a rendezvous in her car with Ray-Ray, whom Johnny Knoxville plays with erotic self-assurance. Ray-Ray is convinced Sylvia has been delivered unto him and his band of fetishist apostles to come up with the ultimate sex act, a move that will liberate, titillate, and, from the looks of it, injure Waters's beloved Baltimore, then, presumably, the world.
Sylvia's awakening is almost religiously erogenous. Reborn, she ravishes her supportive and dim husband (Chris Isaak) and heads over to her mother-in-law's retirement village, where she makes a riotously lewd contribution to the hokeypokey.
Ullman starts the movie tired and grumpy, but after her whack on the head, her performance turns increasingly demented. The hokeypokey is a marvel of physical comedy -- her gyrating body is communicating in some new, naughty language -- and the closest I've seen a movie actress come to true rapture since Emily Watson in "Breaking the Waves."
From this exalted but scurrilously bananas moment, "A Dirty Shame" has nowhere to go but down. The descent is not without its pleasures -- which don't include the movie's randy chipmunks or the inexplicable appearance of David Hasselhoff. Waters regular Patty Hearst shows up as a woman who enjoys rubbing against people and things, in a scene in which the movie's horndogs face off against the square conservatives.
In this encounter, the movie starts running out of gas, chiefly because Waters is content to let it build into a great big orgy. "A Dirty Shame" has the giddy structure as one of those Frankie and Annette beach pictures, but it's more disrespectful. One wishes Waters were a little more articulate about his intolerance for prudes, instead of merely basking in it.
Waters gives us three generations of Stickles women who take up different places on the spectrum of sexual attitudes. But the comic tension between them doesn't exist, for a strange if obviously Waters-specific reason: He doesn't appear to have any idea what normal really is. He never has.
He makes this apparent by casting the wonderfully masculine Suzanne Shepherd as Big Ethel, the Stickles' appalled matriarch. Her partner in cleanliness is Marge the Neuter, played with great vulgarity by Mink Stole, another regular Waters co-conspirator.
Anyone offering these two as delegates for community values must be telling a joke. That's really what "A Dirty Shame" is: a big, lascivious punch line about America's peculiar, embarrassed, hypocritical relationship with sex. The iconoclast in Waters asserts that everybody needs a knock on the head to unleash that inner nymphomaniac. It's just possible Waters has been whacked on the head one too many times to take himself the littlest bit seriously.
Video
