Pros: Wonderfully entertaining, with imaginative direction, inspired acting, and an interesting message.
Cons: A few screenplay lapses, which may bother you more than it did me.
The Bottom Line: CHERISH's marketing campaign made it look like some quirky little indie comedy, but it's much deeper than that. It worked for me startlingly well.
We’ve all known someone like Zoe Adler, the San Francisco animator who is the central character of Finn Taylor’s CHERISH. Played by Robin Tunney, Zoe’s a wallflower type who’s not unattractive but not stylish either, with unkempt hair and a retainer. Her coworkers dodge and dismiss her, and when someone does talk to her she has a tendency to talk too much. She’s clearly uncomfortable in her own skin, to the point where she finds it impossible to simply stay at home in the evening, preferring to go to bars to pick up men. When her shrink asks her why she’s had so many men in her life, she responds, “I wouldn’t have had so many if any of them would call me back.”
Beyond her one-night stands, she has another man in her life- a stalker. She finally meets him outside a bar where she has been working on yet another one-nighter, when he follows her to her car and forces her to drive despite being dangerously over the legal level of intoxication. Due to strange and disastrous circumstances, Zoe ends up hitting a police officer with her car and killing him, with the stalker sneaking away, leaving her to take the blame.
Because of the nature of her case (the accident has understandably caused an uproar among SF police), Zoe’s attorney decides to delay the trial until things have cooled down, and Zoe finds herself under house arrest and wearing an electronic bracelet to keep her honest. Aside from knowing she’s innocent, she is also bored, with little access to the outside world and no discernible way to clear her name.
CHERISH is a gem of a movie with many funny moments, and some suspenseful ones too, as she must invent ways to find out who really committed the crime for which she’s been charged. But what the film is really about is the way Zoe becomes comfortable with herself. So many films about young women today are about how they want to be accepted by others (the man of their dreams, the popular girls, etc.), that it’s refreshing to see a movie about a woman who asserts herself by learning to inhabit her own skin.
Much of the credit for the movie’s success lies, naturally, with Zoe herself. Robin Tunney has never been an actress I’ve liked much, having been mostly apathetic with her performances in movies like THE CRAFT, NIAGARA NIAGARA, and END OF DAYS. Here, however, she finally gets a wonderful character to play, and she’s just about perfect. She gives Zoe an offhand goofiness that gradually shifts from her awkwardness in the early scenes to a laid-back charm later on, as in her scenes with Max, her dwarf neighbor. She exhibits a certain amount of “life force”, a kind of energy that can’t be faked.
Writer-director Finn Taylor’s previous film, DREAM WITH THE FISHES, remained unseen by me, but on the basis of his work here he shows great promise. His screenplay manages to balance the comedy of the scenes with Zoe stuck in her apartment with the suspense created by the stalker plotline, without letting either throw the film out of balance. There are also some wonderful scenes with Zoe and the representative of the bracelet company (Tim Blake Nelson, the dopey Delmar from O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU?), which I feared would turn into a romantic plotline, but Taylor is content to let the mutual feelings simmer since he knows that the movie isn’t about them, but about Zoe’s independence and self-esteem. And there is a crafty chase scene near the end of the film which, for once, actually worked for me instead of simply feeling like a tacked-on action sequence.
Then there’s the music, which is like another character in the film, and an important one at that. Zoe surrounds herself with romantic hits from the 70s and 80s, listening to the local “love songs” radio station and calling in a request on occasion under the assumed name “Natasha”. At one point, the stalker played Hall and Oates’ “Private Eyes” for her over the telephone, and the film’s title comes from an Association song, and a creepy one, if you actually listen to it. There are many other songs in the film as well, from bands like Soft Cell, Human League, and 10cc. Sure, reading those band names may make you chuckle, but unlike so much today from the soundalike boy-groups and navel-baring nymphets, you can hum along to the stuff. It’s almost an hour after the movie ended, and I still find myself humming Climax’s “I Love You”, yet another FM-radio standard from the film.
I’ve grown weary of much of the comedies put out by recent American “indie” directors. So many slackers, so many wannabe crooks, so many single women struggling with modern courtship rituals, I almost can’t bear the quirkiness anymore. But CHERISH resists easy pigeon-holing and in the end is an inspired film unto itself. The film won me over, made me laugh, kept me in suspense, at in the end left me quite unreasonably happy.
Get ready to fall in love with one of the year s most original films. Cherish is a roller-coaster romance about a woman accused of a crime she didn t ...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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