Career adjustment

Mike Leigh's Girls just wants to have funk

by Peter Keough

Written and directed by Mike Leigh. With Katrin Cartlidge, Lynda Steadman, Kate Byers, Mark Benton, Andy Serkis, and Joe Tucker. An October Films release. Opens Friday

at the Avon.

Had Mike Leigh been given the opportunity to direct Romy and Michele's High School Reunion, the results might not have been much different from his delightful and skewed trifle Career Girls. Two misfit college roommates, Hannah (Katrin Cartlidge) and Annie (Lynda Steadman), reunite 10 years later at their old college stomping grounds in London. In the intervening time they have smoothed over the rough edges of their personalities, but like Romy and Michele, they learn that those rough edges perhaps made them what they are.

Leigh certainly believes as much, because the characters in Career Girls, even by his standards, are a mess. College-age Annie incorporates so many tics, flaws, and deformities that Leigh almost seems to be parodying himself. She stoops, stutters, and avoids eye contact in an attempt at self-effacement undone by her asbestos-like hair and a case of technicolor dermatitis raging across her face at moments of stress and anxiety, which is all the time. The first day she moves in with Hannah, Annie seems fair game for her prickly, disturbed roommate, whose inability to resist the hilarious and mean-spirited quip quickly sends Annie to her room in tears. But opposites attract, at least on the screen, and Hannah's no self-control and Annie's no self-esteem balance out. They attain an oddball stability, strength, and wisdom through their ragged four years together soul-searching, swapping boyfriends, and listening to the Cure during the benighted Thatcher era.

That might have made a more interesting movie than Career Girls turned out to be, especially with the manic spin Cartlidge and Steadman give their college characters. But Leigh chooses the uncharacteristic flashback form to tell their tale, and the retrospective detachment tempers the vitriol and the raw passion with sentiment. With her skin condition under control and her hair done up in a dull bob, the latter-day Annie seems prim, insipid, and whiny rather than pathetic and sneakily insightful. Hannah at least retains enough of her edge to make the loss of the rest more pointedly regrettable. But Leigh has an awkward time interweaving the time periods; he's reduced to such rickety devices as letting a poignant name dropped in conversation serve as the springboard to a past anecdote.

Some of his narrative ploys do work as subtle, revelatory scenes. Condo-hunting with Annie, Hannah suddenly recognizes the slick, cynical real-estate agent who's giving them a tour of a unit. Back then Adrian (Joe Tucker) was a shiftless, beer-swilling frat boy whom Hannah had lured to the apartment. Adroitly intercut with the unwitting Adrian's peremptory present-day attempt at a sale is the sad, sordid triangle of Adrian, Hannah, and the surprisingly aggressive Annie, which ended when he callously dumped the both of them and nearly ended their friendship. In its few minutes this sequence says more about male predation and female victimization -- and the reverse -- than the whole of In the Company of Men.

For the most part, though, Leigh seems to lack confidence in his material. Not only does he add the unnecessary if amusing present-day framing tale, but he piles on melodrama and sardonic humor to the point of grotesquerie. Such is the case with Annie's would-be boyfriend Ricky (in a sometimes brilliant, sometimes infuriatingly mannered performance by Mark Benton), whom she meets at a psychology lecture. At first Ricky's imperfections evoke laughter and sympathy -- he's obese, has a bad haircut, is subject to ritualistic twitches and stutters, and has the temerity to offer Annie and Hannah psychological advice. Unfortunately, Leigh aspires to pathos, as well, and Ricky loses all of his wry, cock-eyed dignity in a dénouement involving a stuffed elephant.

Such caviling seems ungenerous for a film that offers Cartlidge in the most brilliant comic performance of the year (when she utters such lines as "You look like Snoopy dressed up as the Red Baron" or "On a clear day you could see the class conflict from here," you wonder what the world sees in Julia Roberts), plus the most ingenious cinematic use of a 19th-century novelist to date. Career Girls might not place high on Leigh's résumé, but it shows that even when subpar, he's up to the job.

---

Girls talk

---

Peter Keough can be reached at pkeough[a]phx.com.