I thought it was enjoyable.

B-

This is one strange movie. Dead Poets Society by way of The Virgin Suicides (two of my favorites), the film turns on four privileged teenage girls at a prestigious New England boarding school as they come of age and discover their sexuality. The pacing is lax, and the structure often seems downright random. It stops and starts, it alternates between subtle drama and broad humor, etc. Each girl is given a small plot of her own--one begins a sexual relationship with an older married man; one acts out because she resents her fur-wearing, liquor-swilling, acid-tongued caricature of a mother; one teases a frustrated English teacher and doesn't realize at first how much her Lolita routine impacts him; one is a burgeoning, reluctant lesbian.

Those latter two plots fizzle out in the most spectacular fashion. One is, I shit you not, concluded with a tiny bit of narration which more or less says, "She felt awful. She never left campus for the rest of the fall." And we never see the character again! And the other two, while more nuanced, still ring a bit false, a bit hollow. They aren't given enough room to breathe, to develop, to come alive as more than just scripted melodrama. Oh, and don't even get me started on these bizarre interludes with faculty members played by Chris Kattan and Amy Sedaris, following them as they cope with married-too-long sexual frustrations. Scenes of her trying to get him hard play as bad SNL skits and don't fit at all with the rest of the material.

Around an hour and ten minutes into it, with just 25 minutes to go, it feels as if the film just starting. A downside of being so incredibly episodic. Everything is unearned, in particular the multiple tearful confrontations and life-changing epiphanies crowded into the final ten minutes ("Knowing each other's darkest moments somehow connected us and redeemed us. The way two negatives make a positive. The way your eyes adjust to the dark").

What the film does have are several strong performances, including one by Rooney Mara. (It's obvious this film, which debuted quietly at the Toronto Film Festival three years ago, was given a theatrical release at long last because she was cast as the heroine in a certain David Fincher film.) And better still, the cinematography is stunning. Shot in Rhode Island during the fall, the film's autumnal atmosphere--the colorful leaves, the nip of the breeze--is palpable and gives certain moments an incidental dose of dreaminess and nostalgic melancholy which defines the Sofia Coppola gems it so aspires to match (and, in every other way, falls well short of).

C-