Metro Pulse/Movie Guru/Crossroads

Movie Guru Rating:
Bad Karma (2 out of 5)

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No, Crossroads is not great art. But it isn't as bad as you might think.

by Adrienne Martini

Ah, the conundrum that is Britney Spears. Pre-teen and teenage girls want to be her. Boys of all ages want to do her. Parents preach about the evils of her scandalous outfits while proselytizing about her decision to remain a virgin. Hipsters mock her; slick fashion mags and Rolling Stone idolize her. Not bad for a little girl from backwater Louisiana who just turned the ripe old age of 20.

Now Miss Britney has moved from pop music and book publishing into the verdant field of the movie industry, starring in Crossroads, a coming-of-age vehicle that was written and produced to show off her ample assets. Mainstream critics have teed-off on Crossroads— "a lame soap opera," according to Robert Ebert (who then peevishly complains about the lack of a sex scene starring Spears), or "a movie so pathetically lame that hopefully even her most ardent young fans will give a big thumbs down," from the New York Post's Lou Lumenick—and each writer after the next seems to be rubbing his hands with evil glee with the joyous opportunity to take a potshot at it.

It's almost sad, really, that this movie-writing mass can't resist the opportunity to kick an easy target in order to maintain their cred with people who wouldn't have been caught dead at Crossroads in the first place. Wow, how very inspiring and informative.

In the larger sense, though, these writers have a valid point—Crossroads isn't a great movie, nor is it even a very good one. Surprise, surprise. Britney Spears will not set the world on fire with her acting skills, nor will the screenplay win any more awards for writer Shona Rhimes, who also penned the resoundingly good and Emmy winning Introducing Dorothy Dandridge. Director Tamra Davis (Guncrazy, Mi Vida Loca, and the unfortunate Billy Madison) has created the best movie she could under the circumstances.

The plot is predictable to a fault (except, apparently, to the two women sitting behind me who gasped with shock at every well-marked twist). But is Crossroads any more predictable than, say, Hart's War or John Q, two other star-driven features that opened last weekend? You'll have to be your own judge on that front, simply because the idea of spending two hours watching that much machismo ooze from the screen, with the enduring suspicion that the good guys will certainly prevail in the end, appeals to me even less than having to sit through Crossroads for a second time.

Predictability aside, the script does try to tackle some pretty big issues, like teen pregnancy, date rape and drinking, without ever descending into schmaltzy, after-school-special condescension. In Rhimes' script, these issues are, like cotton, just part of the fabric of the lives of Spears and her friends and are not the focus of the film as a whole.

Spears' need for independence from her over-bearing father—played by Dan Aykroyd with one of the most bewildering accents since Costner took on Robin Hood—drives Crossroads. Motivated by a girlhood pact, the now graduating Spears and friends Mimi (Taryn Manning) and Kit (Zo� Saldana) decide to take to the road to find their bliss in L.A. Ben (Anson Mount), a vague acquaintance of Mimi's who was heading west anyway, agrees to take the girls with him. Hijinks, implausible plot twists, costume changes, and personal discoveries, of course, ensue.

Surrounded by solid actors like Manning, Saldana and Mount—as well as the always sharp Kim Cattrall (Sex and the City) and the lovably geeky Justin Long (Ed) who put in cameos—Spears' lack of acting experience shows. On the continuum of pop stars turned movie stars, Spears falls closer to Madonna in Who's That Girl than Cher in Mask. Her best moments in Crossroads are the most spontaneous ones, in which you can't see her consciously trying to portray any emotion besides her own good-natured ebullience. Her high emotions feel hollow, as if she doesn't quite have the life experience to back up the classes she has taken about the craft. The outtakes that run beside the closing credits show Spears at her finest—engagingly goofy and remarkably self-possessed.

Perhaps Crossroads should engender abject scorn and derision in any right-thinking movie critics who can thoughtfully dissect Aquirre: Wrath of God whilst simultaneously holding forth on the Lynchian meme of severed body parts and how they change meaning w/r/t the Jungian subtext of Satryicon. Yet, having been a teenage girl in the not too-too distant past who was enraptured by Olivia Newton-John in Xanadu (and, yes, I find it hard to watch now) and who knows a few teenage boys who couldn't get enough Conan or Beastmaster (crap on toast to adult eyes), I find it too hard to get too sanctimonious about Crossroads. In the end, it's about what you'd expect it to be—a bit of mostly harmless fluff, which has a very, very few flashes of goodness, that will mean a great deal to a certain segment of the moviegoing population while it bores or baffles the rest.