Single White Female
First screened and reviewed in July 2022
Director: Barbet Schroeder. Cast: Bridget Fonda, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Steven Weber, Peter Friedman, Stephen Tobolowsky. Screenplay: Don Roos (based on the novel Single White Female Seeks Same by John Lutz).
Yuck! Hard to find much to admire in Single White Female, which might have stood a chance with a less self-serious director—someone satirically attuned, say, to how much insanity New Yorkers will accept to retain a rent-controlled apartment or how long some women, especially, will indulge a destructive friendship out of misguided "politeness." The script is an early effort by The Opposite of Sex's Don Roos, which oughta be a signal of some comic or at least ironic possibility.
Instead, producer-director Barbet Schroeder takes a flatly lugubrious "thriller" approach, lacking the electric emotion or enriching subtexts or precision with actors that made Fatal Attraction work so well, and too heavy by design to entertain in a lighter Hand that Rocks the Cradle register. Bridget Fonda seems at sea about whom she's playing, and Jennifer Jason Leigh contributes one of her early 90s dark-star performances more notable for a risky sensibility than finessed execution. Both actors are forced repeatedly into the kind of casually gratuitous nudity that suggests an unpleasant working experience, as if it weren't bad enough that Schroeder gives his actors so little to play and turns so many scenes into near-duplicates of each other; it's not just the two leads who take on an uncanny resemblance. The movie somehow dawdles too long and arrives too quickly at its inevitable climactic standoff, which it then protracts for 30 needless minutes. Pace, tone, layering, camera placement, scene construction, insight into personality: all the baselines of a director's job seem mishandled. That means that even the crafty contributions of composer Howard Shore, cinematographer Luciano Tovoli, and others amount to much less than they might have.
Everyone involved, most visibly the smallish cast, seems willing to go along with bad ideas, misplaced focus, and missed character opportunities, trusting that the newly Oscar-nominated Reversal of Fortune guy knows what he's doing. In fairness, the Barbet Schroeder who extracted such arch, slippery tension from that movie's best passages or who observed Mickey Rourke's and Faye Dunaway's character explorations in Barfly with such a keen but nonprescriptive eye might have made something of Single White Female. I'll also grant that Columbia may not have wanted the more interesting, ironizing movie that Schroeder's past work suggests he might have achieved with an admittedly patchy script. But it's at least as true that this director's work post-1990, of which Single White Female and 1996's Before and After are especially dispiriting nadirs, suggests either drastically depleted creative reserves or plausible grounds for re-scrutinizing his better films, which don't always hold up. We sadly can't assume that Schroeder's misfires are the anomalies, at least in his Hollywood career. Grade:D
