Heavy-handed satire provocative, unfocused

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This article was published 25/06/2010 (5955 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

This sex, drugs and murder movie from Canadian director Reginald Harkema bears little resemblance to his excellent 2006 film Monkey Warfare, which examined the lives of a couple of off-the-grid radicals living something approaching a quiet middle-class life in Toronto.

This less impressive followup examines socio-political extremes in a highly stylized satire of lust and murder in the era of Vietnam.

Inspired by the Manson murders of 1969, Harkema spins off two parallel narratives. One follows a promising young cheerleader named Leslie (Kristen Hager), who, like Manson acolyte Leslie Van Houten, was a homecoming princess before an unplanned pregnancy and a subsequent abortion drove a wedge between her and her mother (the late Tracy Wright).

Leslie drifts into a hippie lifestyle and eventually meets Charlie (Ryan Robbins), a charismatic sociopath who convinces Leslie and an assortment of other impressionable teen runaways that he has been sent to baptize the world in blood by eliminating middle-class "pigs."

In high contrast to that character is Perry (Gregory Smith), a clean-cut Christian lad under pressure from his dad (Peter Keleghan) to fight in Vietnam and under pressure from his wholesome Christian girlfriend (Kristin Adams) to keep his hands to himself until they’re properly married.

Perry resists his dad’s patriotic entreaties and instead goes to college to study chemistry. But even dad is impressed that he has been chosen to do "God’s work" when he is selected to be a juror at the circus-like trial of Charlie and his family.

Unexpectedly, during the course of the trial, Perry finds himself drawn to Leslie and that crush (and the more lurid details of the trial) fuels Perry’s own dark fantasies.

Harkema’s rather obvious intentions are to show how Vietnam and the Manson murders were two sides of the same coin, wherein people were duped by unstable, bloody-minded leaders (Manson and Nixon) to carry out atrocities in the name of righteousness.

Sadly, the film is a heavy-handed, unevenly performed satire. Hager’s portrayal of Leslie is actually pretty grounded and wouldn’t be out of place in a serious drama, while Smith’s performance as Perry is a sincere compendium of clean-cut clichés. Keleghan in particular goes over the top as a mid-century American patriarch selling God, guts and glory: Father Knows Worst. None of the performances are bad, but each seems to be a part of a different movie.

Still, Leslie, My Name Is Evil is provocative stuff and it carries contemporary currency, Harkema suggests, as 21st-century political policy is advanced by the Christian right wing in the U.S., the modern manifestation of Nixon’s "silent majority."

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

MOVIE REVIEWS

Leslie, My Name Is Evil

Starring Kristen Hager and Gregory Smith

Cinematheque

18A

3 out of 5 stars