Sordid Lives
With names like Latrelle, Bitsy Mae, Noleta, Wardell, and "Brother Boy," the gum-smacking, chain-smoking, fried-chicken-eating rednecks in Del Shores' Sordid Lives suggest John Waters by way of Jeff Foxworthy, the Deep South as a carnival of Jerry Springer-ready grotesques. But where Waters (and Foxworthy, for that matter) shares an unabashed kinship with his trailer-trash subjects, Shores looks at his characters from a galaxy's distance, pitching his comedy to urbanites who like to feel smugly superior to the yokels in the sticks. When the jokes get too mean-spirited, he simply hoses the screen with sticky sentiment, a disingenuous reminder that he really cares about the quirky dopes he's so eager to humiliate. Adapting his own play with a stultifying absence of imagination and craft, Shores (Daddy's Dyin'… Who's Got The Will?) apparently bolted the camera down in five or six poorly lighted interiors, then directed his actors to shout like they were performing in Madison Square Garden. Set in a small, anonymous Texas town, Sordid Lives takes place over the course of one day, as a dysfunctional family gathers for the funeral of its tacky matriarch, who died after she tripped over her lover's wooden legs at a seedy motel. Carrying themselves with little more dignity, her descendents argue and fuss over the arrangements, while dealing with the latest round of small scandals that make up their daily lives. In a house stocked with fried food and custard pie, Beth Grant snaps her wrist with a rubber band to control her urge for a cigarette while refereeing the spats between her sister Bonnie Bedelia and her best friend Delta Burke, who's fuming over husband Beau Bridges' infidelities. Meanwhile, in Hollywood, Bedelia's closeted son (Kirk Geiger) visits his 27th therapist in three years to assuage his anxieties about returning home for the funeral and coming out to his mother. He has reason for concern, as community intolerance landed his drag-queen uncle in an institution, where a sadistic psychiatrist badgers him to overcome his homosexuality. The comedy in Sordid Lives is not so much character-based as it is cruelly anthropological, mining cheap laughs from silly behavioral tics like a grizzled barfly playing cat's cradle, Grant fanning her extremities from the heat, or Burke gnawing ravenously on a drumstick. Shores, who has called this his "coming out" play, isn't interested in debunking the hick stereotypes he sets up; he only insists that they learn to be gay-friendly jackasses, sweet-natured but still outrageously crass and stupid. It's no accident that the script makes mention of The Beverly Hillbillies: In spite of Shores' patronizing displays of affection, Sordid Lives thrives on the same unenlightened fantasy, a Hollywood South that cheapens and degrades the real one.