Film Review: Reviving Ophelia

I'm a sucker for anything Shakespeare-related. Even if, as in this case, someone just happened to have a copy of Hamlet lying around and they just sort of waved the book around a little here and there for thematic spice.

AND EXTENDED METAPHOR.

y'all know how much I love one of them.

This is the movie poster:



If I had seen it, I might not have put the movie on. Already I can tell that short-healthy-BMI-ed-Kate-Middleton is not engaged in a healthy relationship with short-Freddie-Prinze-Jr. Just look at that chiaroscuro in her chin dimple. It very much wants me to feel afraid.

And then there's "Kelli", the blond cousin, staring fearfully at the passionately-embraced lovers. She is the one who reads Hamlet in English class and manages to put together the pieces of her cousin's abusive relationship.

That Shakespeare, so good at alerting us from the past about our bad decisions in the present.

Also, what the hell is up with that athletic jacket font?
Odd, that.

Shall we do this thing then?

The film opens with the mom from Malcolm in the Middle (not, sadly, another Shakespeare reference, although that would be a fascinating way to re-do Macbeth, no?) baking in her expensive and huge and spotless kitchen (I notice these things now that I don't have an expensive, huge, or spotless kitchen of my own) with two teenagers - Elizabeth (healthy Duchess Kate), who is her daughter, and Kelli, (prickly blond) who is her grubby-pawed niece whose early sole function seems to be eating frosting out of one of the 5 bowls of frosting they've got out.


This is going to be one hell of a birthday cake.

Peppy music alerts us to the fact that this should be a happy occasion - Elizabeth's birthday - however, it is quickly sullied (too, too sullied) by Elizabeth's dependency on texting her boyfriend and by Kelli's surly "you're so much luckier than I am/my life sucks" demeanor. Predictably, Elizabeth's beloved Mark shows up to rescue her from eating cake (there were like 242 candles on it; it probably melted before they ate it anyways) and Kelli uses "studying for a Hamlet quiz" as an excuse to make a strategic leave as well.

In Kelli's case, that means going back to her house and partying with three friends - skeevy hot boy whose voice sounds exactly like Mark's, skeevy girl friend who gets what Kelli's lascivious eye gestures really mean, and nice guy who cluelessly doesn't get what's about to happen as soon as he and skeevy girl leave.

Ay, madam, it is common.


Meanwhile, back at Elizabeth's house, Malcolm's mom and her ridiculously blond sister are having their cake and pretending to eat it too. Honestly, who doesn't eat the frosting???

Blasphemers.

They're arguing. That seems to be their dynamic. Malcolm's mom lives a charmed life with a "perfect" daughter and reliably pleasant baking skills while Blond sister made poor life decisions and now has a "surly" daughter and a very busy job at a car dealership.

I'd like to pretend there was more to this storyline but there really isn't. Sibling rivalry, be damned. Turns out, they're both equally shitty moms.

Blond sister returns home to find Kelli acting out Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2 in her living room (only Kelli's assuming the role of Hamlet here). Country matters, indeed! This poor life decision leads to Blond Sister forcing Surly Daughter to spend her afternoons with Perfect Cousin and Da-Bomb Aunt because she can no longer be trusted not to give strange boys blow jobs while mom is at work.

I shit you not. That's how they contrive that.

Of course, her night is bizarrely less nauseating than Perfect Cousin who has gone parking with her Stalker Boyfriend Mark. While sitting in the car, they play a cloying game of "let's name our future puppy children!" right before she promises to give Mark her super-secret-lady-treasure.

But not in the car, like a common girl. In a bed, like a whore.

Much is made of how great friends Surly Daughter and Perfect Cousin used to be, before they turned into angst-addled teenagers battling their own personal inner demons, carved from a lifetime of having to deal with their crazy-bitch-mothers and absentee father figures (one for work, one a jerk).

Good thing they now have to spend so much mother-mandated time together!!!

It takes Surly Daughter very little time to realize that she was headed down a bad path and make a complete life change. It takes her even less time (maybe 2 English classes) to figure out her Perfect Cousin is in a Not-Perfect-Relationship with Stalker-Boyfriend Mark. Seriously, I think her hot teacher says something like "love and death are linked in Shakespeare" and she's all light-bulb-over-head concluding that her cousin is about to die a horrible, horrible death at the hands of her weirdly short boyfriend.



Can you see where this one is going?

First off, we get to learn all the cool new stalker tricks. Not only can your psycho stalker find you via your phone's GPS, but he also can text you constantly, call you when you don't answer his texts, and climb your drain pipe to sneak into your bedroom when you're not around at his beck and call. All of these things will be important later.



We also get Mark's backstory: his mommy is gone. Perfect Daughter translates this as "she's dead" but Mark assures us "She left". If we try desperately to apply this to Hamlet, we put Mark in the central role here (obs.) and his Mom is either Gertrude, shacking up with his uncle, or Old Hamlet, deadish but still a-hauntin'.

Either way, it means Mark's got issues.

Let's ponder the greater implications of the title next, shall we? Since, you know, clearly the writers and producers failed to do so. If we are meant to think Mark is Hamlet, why the hell was Kelli's head in her boyfriend's lap? And her dad is actually gone. She's the much better pick here! But she isn't. She just points out Mark's ex "went kinda crazy" - so it seems young stalker boy has a history of turning bitches into Ophelias.

Do me a solid, Lifetime, read Hamlet before you rely on it so heavily for metaphor.



Meanwhile, back in Elsinore, Malcolm's mom still hasn't figured out that her daughter isn't Perfect. Even though Kelli tries to warn her. It takes one terrible lie about a car accident followed by her child getting hit by Mark in front of witnesses for Malcolm's mom to finally act hurt and get indignant.

Perfect Daughter still wants Mark. Mark, Mark, Mark.

In case you forgot about Surly Cousin, let's bring it back to her for a moment. Because this film LOVES foiling, she is also having her own relationship right now with the nice guy who left her alone to orally pleasure the skeevy guy. Turns out, Surly is a poet! A bard, one might even say.


If one were drunk. Or confused.

Kelli's fledgling relationship hits a low note at the beginning when she tells her new would-be-beau that she won't go down on him (take that, Hamlet! Ophelia, REVIVED!), but I think the relationship really hits its stride when, at the beginning of their date, Nice Guy asks her who her "paradigms" are.

I just about peed myself.

It's like when you're a sophomore in high school and you want to sound SO smart so you write an essay about Romeo and Juliet or whatever and you thesaurus the crap out of it. Instead of two feuding families, you get twain vigilante ancestors.

AND YOUR ENGLISH TEACHER LAUGHS HER WAY THROUGH YOUR C-.

But Kelli isn't an English teacher, so she merely swoons over Nice Guy, compliments his swell diction, and then lists some truly useless "role models" or "bands she digs" (a.k.a. paradigms). Everybody keeps their clothes on and we revel in the magic of two teenagers having a normal, pretentiously idiotic conversation in between abusive Mark and Elizabeth episodes.

Which is good because in the Lifetime school of juxtaposition that means Elizabeth has to get hit by Mark now that Kelli is on her way to healthyland. Enter Mark who suspects that Elizabeth is flirting with a fellow chemistry classmate and slaps her so hard that the blood comes out already dried to her perfect-Kate-Middleton face.

Honestly, I'd like to pretend I paid real close attention here, but I didn't. All I know is that somebody apparently took a picture of our heroine after she gets hit by Mark, slapped a caption on it, and threw it up on Facebook for her (AND THE WORLD) to see. The caption?

Wherefore Art Thou, Romeo?

I can't even.

Look, as an English teacher, I think it's bad enough that they're traipsing all over Hamlet like it's not one of the most famous plays in all of literature. But that line ain't even from Hamlet! This isn't REVIVING JULIET! It's REVIVING OPHELIA! GET WITH THE PROGRAM, PEOPLE. And, when you use "wherefore" to mean "where" instead of "why", well,  it just frosts all my Elizabethan cookies.

Wherefore art thou so fucking stupid, Lifetime Movie. WHEREFORE?!?!

Seriously, Google that shit first, would ya?

There are a few more subplots here: Surly Daughter manages to get some self pride and writes poems that her new nice boyfriend turns into songs for his shitty band to play, Perfect Daughter goes to therapy and googles "How do I know I'm in an abusive relationship?", and Mark stays out of prison until he shows up in Perfect Daughter's bedroom and threatens to hug her until they both die or she takes him back.

I wanted to see how he handled going potty.
But, alas, Poor Yorick, it wasn't meant to be.


Thankfully, around this time, Ophelia has had just about enough of Hamlet's mood swinging and abuse. She's even able to look at his puppy dog eyes and not take him back (THANKS FOR THE SHITTY ADVICE, WORST FRIEND EVER!!!).

But Mark still is wandering free, so we best resolve that issue right fast. WWHD (What would Hamlet do)???

Nothing. He'd be in England by this point. He'd have killed her dad and lost the remainders of his marbles. Then Ophelia would have made some nifty flower necklaces and attempted to play undersea mermaid palace in the icy Denmarkian undertow. End scene.

Obviously, that is not how it is going to play out here.

I figure Mark will get a gun and pretend to shoot their imaginary puppy children. Instead, he gets a gun and threatens to shoot Ophelia while she's out at a coffee shop-musical event hosted by her cousin's new boyfriend Laertes.

Just kidding. That's not his name.

SHOULD HAVE TURNED OFF YOUR PHONE'S GPS, OPHELIA.



but this is Lifetime, so happy ending it is. Mark gets arrested and shouts "I WAS JUST PLAYING! I NEVER WOULD HAVE REALLY KILLED YOU! BELIEVE ME! WE CAN STILL HAVE PUPPIES TOGETHER!!" and then Ophelia bakes celebratory cookies, healed magically from whatever defect caused her to obsessively love Mark to begin with and ready to make amends with her new BFF Surly Cousin.

BECAUSE IT IS JUST THAT EASY.

the rest, thank god, is silence.