"Rickey, put the cat down!"      

SLUMS OF BEVERLY HILLS (R) 

Reviewed August 29, 1998 -- Check out the Slums of Beverly Hills Website.

It's 1976 Southern California, and the Abramowitz family is on the move again.  They are "nomads" in Beverly Hills, as down-on-his-luck Murray Abramowitz (Alan Arkin) moves his daughter Vivian (Natasha Lyonne) and his two sons Ben and Rickey (David Krumholtz and Eli Marienthal) from one cheap, tacky apartment after another in an attempt to evade rent payments.  Nope, this isn't 90210...instead, Slums is a seedy, musty and grainy portrayal of Beverly Hills, offering a dark comedy that is an odd mix of smart, funny and disturbing slices of lower-middle-class '70s American life. 

The central character in this tale is young Vivian, a teenage girl just discovering her womanhood.  While living with her strangely dysfunctional family, Vivian deals with everything from her father's financial troubles, her own insecurities about womanhood, a young Charles Manson-obsessed neighbor (Kevin Corrigan) who happens to like her, and the adventures of their wild cousin Rita (Marisa Tomei).  If nothing else, there's definitely a lot of weirdness going on in Slums, and its humor is often biting and direct.  Sometimes unbelievably ridiculous and sometimes unbelievably real, the overall effect of first-time writer/director Tamara Jenkins' film is both funny and unsettling, consistently highlighted by great performances from Lyonne, Arkin and Tomei.  Indeed, it isn't long before we find ourselves empathizing with these odd people, rooting for them as they attempt to break out of their unsettled circumstances. 

Unfortunately, however, these poor souls never do break out of their life in "the slums," a fact that may well be both one of the film's greatest strengths and one of its most disappointing weaknesses.  As can sometimes happen, hope for a better life gives way to resignation at the status quo, and this is where the Abramowitz family seems to settle.  This in itself is fine as film endings go, but its handling in Slums leaves something of a bitter, unsatisfying aftertaste.  To see such rich, vibrant characters ultimately fall back into dull passivity is a disappointment, and though this may have been Jenkins' intent for them all along, it results in a dark comedy that in the end winds up surprisingly more 'dark' than it is 'comic.'

Responses from cyberspace--thanks for writing!

abm40877@aol.com gives this movie  stars: "It was a really great movie, not at all what I had expected though." (9/28/98)