Is it premature to start campaigning for the 2012 Academy Awards? Because if not I’d like to nominate Amanda Seyfried for your consideration for Best Actress for her performance in
Red Riding Hood. Oh, I know she can’t win. Her portrayal of the titularly cloaked Valerie has none of the hallmarks of Oscar success. She doesn’t play a historically or culturally significant character. She didn’t transform her shapely figure in deference to her craft or with disregard for her beauty. She delivers no rousing monologue. She adopts no quirky accent. She refrains from dissolving into a puddle of tears. And she doesn’t so much as lay her tongue on the scenery to see if it’s worth chewing. Instead, Seyfried does something all the more remarkable: she delivers a performance that’s unfailingly watchable and convincing within a film that can only be described with those words when she is on screen, and usually not even then. It isn’t the stuff of Oscar, but if you think about it, maybe it should be.
Red Riding Hood is a mess, sometimes in entertaining ways but mostly in befuddling ones. The direction is unproductively busy, the dialogue is awkward and most of the bit parts are so stiffly acted that they could be mistaken for product placement for Viagra. The biggest problem, though, is that the film doesn’t seem to have a clue what it’s about. Written by David Johnson,
Red Riding Hood has elements of gothic horror, fairy tale fantasy, tribal fear-of-the-other and even playful farce, but it wears those threads like a tightwad trying on dress shirts at Banana Republic – which is to say not for long and without ultimate investment. Instead the film settles for its Shakespearean-cum-Meyerean romance, not so much because it appears to have any ideas about the genre but because the
Twilight books and films have proven there’s a market for that stuff. Better films weave together multiple genres seamlessly;
Red Riding Hood bounces around like an actor struggling to find its motivation. In short spans, the film is almost Lynchian, although without the mindfucking boldness or twisted symbolism. Some of the earliest printed versions of
Little Red Riding Hood, dating back more than 400 years, are thought to be cautionary tales about a woman’s coming of age – the red cloak representing menstruation and the wolf’s ultimate triumph emphasizing the danger of trust and lost innocence, but there’s no deeper meaning to this cinematic adaptation. What you see is all that’s there.
