Crime & Punishment in Suburbia Reviews

If you recall high school as four seemingly endless years of torment, you'll recognize the emotional landscape of this melodramatic look at alienated California high school students. Don't invest too much time in the Dostoyevsky connection; there's a crime, there's punishment and there's an overall sense of anomie, but that's about it. Our guide through the suburban angst is disaffected, androgynous Vincent (Vincent Kartheiser, looking uncannily like Italian actress Asia Argento), a scrawny oddball who relishes his status as resident weirdo. He's nursing a hopeless crush on pretty, popular Roseanne Skolnik (Dawson's Creek alum Monica Keena), and slinks around secretly taking her picture, the better to worship her profanely in the privacy of his room. But Roseanne's pedestal is shaky; sure, she's a cheerleader who lives in a lovely house, dates a jock (James DeBello) and has a to-die-for wardrobe. But her mom (Ellen Barkin, the queen of harsh glamour) and hard-drinking step-dad (Michael Ironside) are at each other's throats; her home vibrates with tension, and her parents mortify her by getting arrested for public fighting. Snubbed by her fickle friends, Roseanne is left alone when mom decamps with a bartender (Jeffrey Wright), and suffers the brunt of her stepfather's drunken rage. First-time feature director Rob Schmidt gives this familiar story a cold but stylish look, the way a pop-culture-saturated teenager might imagine the story of his or her life, right down to the hand-scrawled headings that divide the story into chapters, like entries from a moody misfit's self-mythologizing diary. Schmidt makes a pep rally look like a fascist assembly, and captures the slightly scorched look that mars the otherwise perfect suburban development in which his characters are trapped. The casting of B-movie baddie Ironside stacks the deck against his character, but the younger actors — notably DeBello — are full of small, poignant surprises.