For me, the release of new work by certain directors, screenwriters, and actors is cause for celebration. I'm not talking about the people who work all the time whose movies I like; Hollywood practically guarantees at least two Woody Allen movies a year, some great, some not so great.
No, I'm talking about the folks who don't work as often as I'd like them to (whether by choice or because no one wants to hire them): David Lynch, Noah Baumbach, Hal Hartley, Crispin Glover, Winona Ryder, the list goes on.
And that list also includes Christina Ricci.
I liked her in her film debut, Mermaids, though as a 17-year-old boy at the time I was far more interested in the aforementioned Winona Ryder. Christina's screen-presence was far more intense in her next film, The Addams Family, in which her deadpan portrayal of the creepy Wednesday Addams pretty much set the tone for a significant subset of her career choices thereafter.*
I lost track of her for a few years until she turned up for a tiny but cute role in the so-so comedy/drama Summer Fling. As an American high school cheerleader visiting Ireland, she made a big impression on me. And of course her memorable but stone-faced role in The Ice Storm made an even bigger impression. But it wasn't until I spent one Saturday afternoon in New York City, circa 1998, watching two Christina films (Buffalo '66 and The Opposite of Sex) back-to-back that I decided she was one of my favorite actors.**
Now that I was hooked, I was rewarded with four years of not-very-good movies (though there were a few almost-gems [Pecker, Prozac Nation] among the duds [Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Desert Blue, 200 Cigarettes, No Vacancy, Sleepy Hollow, Bless the Child, The Man Who Cried, The Gathering]). Then came Pumpkin.***
And that's pretty much the cycle Christina's movie career goes through: an occasional good movie (Monster, Black Snake Moan) surrounded by duds (Cursed, Speed Racer)--but even the duds are pretty spread out. So I take what I can get.
My feelings about After.Life are pretty well summed-up in that previous sentence. It is, in other words, not very good.
Christina is Anna Taylor, an elementary school teacher who dies in a car accident. Or did she? Die, that is. I suppose this is the question we're meant to believe is at the heart of the movie.
But really, it seems more like an excuse to film Christina in a skimpy blood-red slip and, later on, completely naked (not just for a scene or two, but for the final third of the movie). If the writer/director weren't a woman I'd be highly suspicious of the entire endeavor.
The movie had lofty aspirations, but in execution these aspirations devolved into pretensions. I can see how Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo wanted her horror film to be the next Sixth Sense, but it's just too sloppy to operate on a higher cinematic plane. After.Life is rife with gaping plot holes, silly dream sequences, fuzzy internal logic, pointless chase scenes, and minor characters who were clearly meant to serve as important clues to the central mystery but instead serve as unnecessary dead-ends.
The cinematography is nice, though.
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POINTLESS FOOTNOTES
*Many of the films she chooses to star in are, if not downright creepy, at least a bit odd (e.g., Penelope, Pumpkin, etc.).
**Ten-plus years later, The Opposite of Sex doesn't hold up so well on repeat viewings (a disappointment, particularly because I'd also put Christina's costar, Martin Donovan, on my list of actors who work seldom enough that I tend to receive his new projects with glee), but Christina's performance in that movie remains one of her better ones. And though I'm loath to admit this, my relationship with my wife (who, coincidentally enough, looks like Christina Ricci and Alexis Bledel's long-lost sister) in some ways mirrors the Billy-Layla relationship of Buffalo '66 (though not in a creepy way, I swear), so that movie remains close to my heart despite my mixed feelings about Vincent Gallo.
***Eight years later, I still don't know what to make of Pumpkin. Is it an indictment of vain sorority girls or an ill-conceived attempt to poke fun at our society's P.C. attitudes toward the handicapped? Or, worse, does it make the timid mistake of trying to be something in-between? (Probably the latter.)
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