| There's a paper to be written on the significance of our current obsession with rich young women. One generally doesn't append Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise with the "rich" tag or corral them by age-bracket and gender--it's the notion of young women (Paris/Lindsay/Britney, et al) conspicuously consuming that causes the flashpoint for mania and complaint. They're held up as standard-bearers whether they ask for the job or not, and they're absurdly lionized or demonized depending on your demographic. Though Hilary Duff has cleverly managed to sidestep the trainwreckery of the Lindsay/Paris/Britney sideshows, she's still taking on the ambiguous symbolism of Girl Rich in her latest vehicle, the execrable Material Girls. If you're looking for meaningful discussion, this ain't the place to find it--but the film manages to say symptomatically damning things in spite of itself.
The rather narcissistically-tailored plot sees the Duff sisters (Hilary and Haylie) playing celebutantes Tanzie and Ava Marchetta, heiresses to a cosmetics empire that's going south following the death of the visionary father who started the company. Imagine the girls' surprise when they discover that the "all-natural" products responsible for their fortune are causing massive skin damage, thus cutting them off from the cash flow. Compounding matters, the sisters set their house on fire AND mistake some roughnecks for valets, meaning they're without home or transportation. Lucky for them, their servant Inez (Maria Conchita Alonso) agrees to put them up; not so luckily, the whole scandal is apparently a stock fraud engineered to obtain competitor Fabiella (Anjelica Huston) the keys to the company. To defeat the evil that has deprived them of their birthright, Tanzie and Ava must depend on their wits, their wiles, and a hangdog pro bono lawyer (Lukas Haas, frighteningly well-cast).
The film is placed right on the knife-edge between people's yearning to live large and their loathing of those who do. In one corner is the basic promise of schadenfreude in teaching young doyennes a lesson about living hand-to-mouth, while in the other is the fact that nobody actually wants to watch living hand-to-mouth in a movie where they can watch a fantasy projection of being rich. Material Girls therefore becomes a sad trade-off--and as Hilary and Haylie Duff are so clearly wedged in the public eye as both rich and grateful (unlike the gross displays of Lindsay/Paris/Britney), it would be too much to punish them harshly--or even give them much to be punished for. Although our heroines realize the plight of their Columbian housekeeper and the travails of pro bono legal agencies, the point is to restore them to wealth a little wiser as opposed to upsetting the whole social order.
The concessions made for the sake of fantasy are a little hard to take. Poor Alonso is forced to play the biggest sap of her career as a woman who by all rights ought to slap her clueless charges around. Instead, she's a smiley-faced mother doll wheeled in to keep our heroines out of homelessness. (It's a shamefully patronizing role for an actress who used to be powerful and implacable.) Worse is that she's the only major representative of the underclass in the entire film: aside from Haas as the lawyer and a few bit parts, Material Girls is almost totally taken up with aristocrats. By the time of the Marchettas' inevitable redemption, the girls have learned practically nothing--but they've gone through the motions of learning, which in the movies is almost as good.
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| Material Girls: widescreen vs. fullscreen |
MGM presents Material Girls on DVD in a flipper fullscreen/2:40:1 anamorphic widescreen edition. The film was shot in Super35 to maximize the amount of real estate in standard def while simultaneously allowing for 'scope exhibition (inexplicably, say I--Apocalypse Now this is not); at home, in either incarnation, the image looks reasonably well-defined (sometimes through the unwanted intervention of edge-enhancement) and boasts a superbly-articulated range of colours. The Dolby Digital 5.1 audio is similarly pleasing, not exactly complicated (Apocalypse Now yadda yadda yadda) yet surprisingly rich, especially when it comes to music reproduction.
Extras begin with a commentary from director Martha Coolidge. As she's had her name on a few good movies (such as the nerd-pride epic Real Genius), it's sad to find her not only reduced to this kind of picture but also describing it as credulously as she does here. Coolidge goes over obvious details like they were hidden secrets, and you just wind up embarrassed for her. A video for Hilary's "Play with Fire" (3 mins.) puts the star in a reflective Barbarella dress and surrounds her with mirrors; the song is pretty lame, but the piece is more cinematic than anything in the feature proper. "Getting to Know Hilary and Haylie as the Marchetta Sisters" (9 mins.) gets up close and personal with the sibling stars as they try to differentiate themselves from the "excessive" characters they play. Much knowing banter ensues--'tween girls (i.e., not me) should love it. "Cast of Chracters: The Making of Material Girls" (9 mins.) is the usual blather about how everybody was wonderful, the script was so funny, and the casting was so offbeat; no big surprises and no real reason to watch it. Rounding things out are a completely useless "music montage" (2 mins.) with footage captured in front of and behind the camera set to Hilary singing "Material Girl," and the theatrical trailer.-Travis Mackenzie Hoover
© Film Freak Central; filmfreakcentral.net. This review may not be reprinted, in whole or in part, without the express consent of its author.
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DVD GRADES:
Image A-
Sound A
Extras C |
DVD VITALS:
Running Time
98 minutes
MPAA
PG
Aspect Ratio(s)
2.40:1, 16x9-enhanced/
Standard 1.33:1
Languages
English DD 5.1,
French Dolby Surround,
Spanish Dolby Surround
CC
Yes
Subtitles
English, Spanish
DVD-10
Region One
MGM/Fox
Buy MATERIAL GIRLS posters at Moviegoods (click on image)Anchor Bay
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Published: December 4, 2006
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