Past Misdeeds: Violet & Daisy (2011)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Violet (Alexis Bledel) and Daisy (Saoirse Ronan) are silly teenagers (or in Violet's case a young woman using a not quite age-appropriate teenage persona to protect herself from things she and the film can't speak about directly) and best friends. Or really rather "only friends", for they are both too weird for the general populace. Together, they don't fight crime but work as professional killers. They're the sort of professional killers whose thoughts after the rent are pop stars and dresses, though.

Their latest hit develops a curious dynamic. It isn't, after all, every day that a hit person's victim reacts to finding two armed girls asleep on his couch by putting a blanket over them, nor are offers of cookies day-to-day experiences in the killing business. Of course, their victim (James Gandolfini) is rather atypical in that he actually wants to die and has therefor done his best to piss the leaders of two independent criminal organizations off to get his death wish fulfilled. Our heroines are not quite prepared for this kind of situation, and soon a peculiar sort of friendship develops between them - in particular the more classically sane Daisy, who really only ever became a killer to be with Violet - and their prospective victim, with unexpected and expected expressions of humanity.

To complicate matters, there are also the number one killer of Violet's and Daisy's organization (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), the killing troupe of the other gang, and the kind of lies you tell people because you love them to cope with.

At first, Geoffrey Fletcher's Violet & Daisy seems to be another movie in the never ending line of would-be Tarantino gangster movies, the kind of film Tarantino hasn't been making for a long time, or ever, and the kind of film his imitators generally painfully not succeed at making anyhow. The longer the film goes on, though, the clearer it becomes that Fletcher isn't really making one of those films at all but something much more interesting and individual.

Violet & Daisy does share some of the surface aspects of the semi-Tarantino genre but the film's emotional core and the direction of its intelligence are both completely different from that horrible non-genre. And not just because of its protagonists' prolonged teenage-hood, but because Fletcher's main interest seems to lie in examining the way in which people, young women like Violet and Daisy as well as older men like Gandolfini's Michael, can grow sideways and crooked, yet still deserve some basic human compassion. The film doesn't believe that compassion then magically fixes everything but it does believe in it making things better, even if an act of compassion is as twisted as the one Michael provides for Daisy in the end.

I was at first rather uncomfortable with the way the film's portrayal of its female main characters, with horrible clichés about teenage girls hanging in the air, but here, too, things became more clear and more interesting the longer the film went on. Fletcher is neither out to reduce the two to the clichés they at first seem to be, nor does he look down on them. Turns out a girl can be a professional killer for dresses and still be a complex character; it's as if Fletcher had actually met teenage girls.

One of the film's tricks to achieve its obvious goal of complexity and ambiguity is by playing with audience expectations. The best example for this is the casting the 30-year-old Bledel not as we'd (ironically) expect - and some typically dense IMDB reviews even complain about - out of painful movie experience as an actual teenager, but as a woman who acts like a teenager to keep things in her past at bay the film can only ever hint at or show in a metaphorical dream sequence, because the character just can't articulate them. And yes, this is the sort of film willing to be ambiguous enough to just tell (or not tell, depending on your perspective) its audience something important about one of its main characters via a metaphorical dream sequence.

It being a rather black comedy, Violet & Daisy very often happens to be not just surprisingly profound and emotionally complicated but also to be very funny. The interplay between Gandolfini, Ronan and Bledel really sells practically every joke in the movie, with no moment played too broadly. The trio is just as good in the film's more serious moments (though this is the kind of film where the humour is part of the serious business too, and vice versa, so it's rather difficult to keep them apart), playing off each other beautifully in ways that feel natural in a film little interested in realism but very much in feeling emotionally and philosophically real. They're so great together it's rather unfair to single one of them out, but I have to say, if Saoirse Ronan is this great at selling complexity in a role a lesser actress could have turned into a mere caricature when she isn't even twenty yet, what kind of performances will she be able to give in ten years? [Future me feels decidedly vindicated here.]

So, if you're in the market for a non-naturalistic film about growing up, compassion, and bloody violent murder, Violet & Daisy will be for you. I'd even recommend it if you're not.