Robin Hoodwinked
Cherish sees an unjustly accused Robin Tunney put under house arrest.
It's
easy to love Robin Tunney -- she's pretty and she can act -- but it gets harder
and harder to understand her choices. 1996's The Craft was a good call,
and undoubtedly furthered her options, as it did for costars Neve Campbell and
Fairuza Balk. But many of her parts since then smack of calculation rather than
actual script-reading: the obligatory showy handicapped role (
Every film Tunney does is
supposed to be her real breakthrough, and maybe the poster for Cherish,
with her suggestively licking a lollipop (strikingly similar to a current World
Wrestling Entertainment bus-shelter poster advertising their name change from
WWF) might lure enough people in to make it a hit. Once again, however, Tunney
fans are going to be saying, "Well, she's good in it, but..."
Tunney plays Zoe Adler, a worker
drone at a San Francisco computer-animation company with a thing for mediocre
music, which she justifies early on in a conversation that sounds like
writer-director Finn Taylor's personal mea culpa for not obtaining better music
clearances (honestly, do we need to hear Soft Cell's "Tainted Love"
on yet another soundtrack, when there are so many other good new wave
bands who could use the money?). Frumped-down in true movie style, i.e. braces
and bad hair, Zoe nonetheless does get plenty of first dates, but never second
ones. Her therapist suggests that she uses socializing simply as an excuse not
to be alone with her thoughts, which means, of course, that the movie will soon
contrive an opportunity for her to do just that.
After crashing an exclusive
after-work party by reconstituting the invitation from the office shredder, Zoe
tries desperately to seduce Jason Priestley, but instead runs into her own
personal stalker (Brad Hunt), who, for reasons unknown to us, forces her behind
the wheel after she's gone a drink or four over the limit. He then makes her
run over a street cop, before conveniently disappearing, leaving her to take
the rap. Thus begins her alone-time: When it becomes clear that Zoe's being
abused by lesbians in jail, her Gloria Allred-like lawyer (Nora Dunn) manages
to get her put into a house-arrest situation, wherein she'll be confined to a
loft in the inner city by means of an ankle bracelet that will call the police
if she goes beyond...her threshold? The top of the staircase?
The exact boundary seems to vary as the plot demands, but the point is she
can't go outside or downstairs.
It's a tedious and
overconvoluted set-up, laden with silly "fantasy" sequences that are
frequently the hallmark of a first-time director (Finn Taylor's actually a
second-time director after Dream With the Fishes,
so no such excuse here). Even more of a groaner is when it turns out that Zoe's
neighbor in the building is a gay Jewish dwarf in a wheelchair (Ricardo Gil).
One suspects that this character may have been a canny bit of contrivance
designed to allow Cherish to be submitted to every possible
demographic-themed film festival. But anyway, once all this ponderous backstory
is done with, we get Zoe alone in her apartment, and it is at this point that
Their
interplay is what saves the movie, and possibly should have been expanded upon
to the exclusion of the other plot points. For the climax, the movie takes an
awkward turn into thriller territory, with reasonably satisfying results, but
then ads on an ending that's unclear and ill-served. It seems at times as
though Taylor's trying to draw parallels between the stalker and parole
officer, or even imply that one is the other (clearly not -- even though the
stalker remains mostly in shadows, we can see enough to tell from the get-go
that he's not Nelson). But