Meet Monica Velour | Film Review

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Kim Cattrall is over the hill in Keith Bearden's Meet Monica Velour. [Photo: Anchor Bay Films]

Meet Monica Velour ½

by Andrew Schenker on April 3, 2011 Jump to Comments (5) or Add Your Own

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Meet Monica Velour is a cruel movie. It's also cruelly unfunny. Part comic coming-of-age tale, part trailer-park melodrama, Keith Bearden's feature debut is the kind of film that spends its first half humiliating its actresses only to show in the end that, like its youthful hero after he learns his requisite lesson about female agency, the thing's all heart.

The film is likewise the type of comedy whose idea of "edgy" humor is to show its nerdy 17-year-old lead driving around in a "Weiner Wiz" hot dog truck that some redneck asshole has spray painted with the word "faggot" and an arrow pointing to the driver. The nerd in question is recent high school grad Tobe (Dustin Ingram), living in suburban hell with his grandfather and given to a decades-spanning love of geeky popular culture ranging from 1930s Tin Pan Alley music to 1980s porn. In particular, he's obsessed with one-time adult star Monica Velour (Kim Cattrall), whose videos fill out his ample VHS collection. When the opportunity to sell his truck to a fellow pop-culture nut in Indiana coincides with a nearby live appearance by his favorite porn actress, he drives off for the heartland only to stumble upon Velour as a 49-year-old has-been, struggling to survive by working sleazy strip clubs while dueling with her monstrous ex-husband for custody of her daughter.

Velour's is truly a hellish world, though the film would have us believe that no problem's too big to overcome as long as we adopt the proper attitude. The ex-porn star is introduced in a scene of utter humiliation—for Cattrall as much as for her character—in which she's forced to perform a striptease for a crowd of jeering hicks who make Depends jokes, before she's unceremoniously fired from her job for being too old and returns to her wood-paneled trailer-park home. None of which should be too much of a surprise in a movie that's already given us a scene where teenagers spy on a nerdy fat girl masturbating with a vibrator, but the relentlessness with which Velour's age (49) is used against her is less a comment on notions of female beauty than on the director's sadistic tendencies.

Our heroine's a tough cookie and she's got a staunch, if ineffectual, defender in Tobe, who, not the least bit fazed by her age or circumstances, continues to worship her. Still, the film milks her misery at least one too many times (when she swigs a just-purchased jug of cheap wine outside of a supermarket in broad daylight) before Tobe's generosity starts to set her on the right track. To be fair, the film is resistant to the young hero's attempts to shape Monica to his will (a more benevolent version of the tendencies of all the men in her life) and a stern life lesson delivered from the older woman to her young admirer is the film's least clueless moment, but ultimately what matters in this movie is that Tobe is allowed his initiation into manhood (both in the sexual and non-sexual senses), never mind what happens to Velour.

Finally, the film doubles as a celebration of geek culture, but despite the director's clear love for cornball Americana, his commitment seems as half-hearted as Tobe's attempt to posit Frankenbooty as an homage to Hammer Studio's classic horror films. In one scene, the young man visits the barn of his truck's buyer, outsider artist/kitsch collector Claude (Keith David). Amidst giant Pez dispensers and Big Boy figurines, the older man delivers an ode to "American culture." Claiming that we don't have any "Sistine Chapels" in this country, he proposes his junk pieces as the nation's authentic art. (Apparently it's either Michelangelo or Bob's Big Boy—never mind Rothko and Twombly!) But just to hedge his bets, Bearden shows us a poster of Thelonious Monk hanging on the wall, an unchallengeable claim for a legitimate popular American art should the viewer not subscribe to Claude's thesis. In the end, our kid must give up his Velouriana and embrace real life, but the filmmaker seems to be having so much fun coming up with fake adult movie titles and fabricated porn sequences that one imagines that this renunciation is one the newly enlightened Tobe would far rather make than Bearden himself.

Director(s): Keith Bearden
Screenplay: Keith Bearden
Cast: Kim Cattrall, Dustin Ingram, Brian Dennehy, Jee Young Han, Daniel Yelsky, Keith David, Sam McMurray
Distributor: Anchor Bay Films
Runtime: 97 min.
Rating: R
Year: 2010

Comments

elly c on April 4, 2011, 03:59 PM

I saw this at Tribeca with a laughing audience. I honestly don't know what movie you saw.

You've never been down to nothing if you think five thousand dollars "overcomes" anything. Are you writing from a junior high school lunch room? It's the American way to escape trouble by running away to more trouble, pioneer spirit. You are just begrudging a momentary shot of a happy child. The child of an uneducated, unskilled middle aged woman with $5000 dollars to her name and an angry ex husband in a different state. Oh god, if only I could be that. All my problems would be "overcome".

It doesn't end with who cares about Velour, it ends with her pushing him away because she is much more of an adult than he is. You're the one who said this is a coming of age movie. She already is an adult. And apparently not an abusive delusional one.

And Monica wasn't unceremoniously fired after a "crowd" mocked her. She was fired after her teen admirer starts a destructive fight for her honor with a single table, not a crowd, of uncouth youth. This boy is committed. Fights escalating to brawls, also the american way.

She was fired for bad timing not age. No admirer, or not that table, and her employment would have lived on. I've been to semi-rural strip clubs when it's still light outside, Velour is too pretty and pretty much age appropriate. Where exactly does the extra humiliation come from. It must cause you night terrors knowing that happy romantic couples over 30 are sometimes naked in bed, you know, where they might see each other.

How sweet of you to sum up the young female character as a fat nerd. Why? Because she wasn't at the party? And isn't thin? Again, are you writing from a junior high school lunch room?

And about american culture, what if I say the words Richard Serra (hell, I'll even add an exclamation point "!"), and that I lived in a house with an artist who worked for him and then committed suicide. Does that mean my review is better than yours. I don't get it, but it's your rules. Though I suppose by your rules it invalidates the point I made about having been to a semi-rural strip joint in daylight. People must focus on only one aspect of culture or they are not real.

Andrew Schenker on April 5, 2011, 09:43 AM

1.The tone of the ending is that Velour will be fine. The film isn't interested in the actual circumstances of her new life.

2. Of course, Velour is much more of an adult than Tobe is. That's why he has to learn his lesson. The fact that the final section of the film focuses on him and we hear about Velour only via postcard shows with which character the film's priorities lie.

3. The direct cause of Monica's firing may have been the fight, but it's clear that she was on her last legs at that joint anyway because of her age. In fact, she's told explicitly "you're too old" as she's being pushed out the door.

4. It's irrelevant whether or not Monica is better looking than most real-life daytime strippers at rural strip clubs. I'm sure she is. What matters is that in this movie's world, everyone but Tobe considers her too old to be viable as a stripper and uses that attitude to humiliate both the character and actress. Whether or not she would be deemed too old in "real life" is immaterial.

5. I do describe the young female character as a "fat nerd", but that is exactly how the film views her in the opening sequences. And, yes, watching her being spied upon while masturbating, not because she offers a titillating spectacle, but a pathetic one, is humiliating for everyone (filmmaker, viewer, character, actress) involved.

6. My point about American popular culture is that the film is mighty disingenuous about its attitude. It wants to have it both ways. And anyway you look at it, the comparisons between Michelangelo and roadside kitsch just don't make any sense—forget about distinctions between high and low art, they're just not valid points of comparison. It's as if Keith David's character is not simply making a point about pop culture, but seems unaware that there was ever any different artistic tradition in the United States.

7. Not sure what you're trying to say about living with an artist who worked with Richard Serra. But I can assure you that that fact, along with your attendance at a rural strip club has little to do with the ways in which women and art respectively are presented in the film. The "it's like real life" argument has little to do with the merits—or lack therein—of Bearden's work

elly c on April 5, 2011, 07:27 PM

Just to be clear, the scene you mention with what you call the fat nerd takes seconds, is not even remotely approaching the realm of even soft core porn, or titilation, and the (humiliating?) point seems to be that everyone does it. This scence takes seconds and nothing bad happens to her because of it. It's never even mentioned again. If you want to weirdly exagerate its importance it would be safer to say it is a scene about acceptance.

Andrew Schenker on April 6, 2011, 12:16 PM

Just to be clear, I said that the scene is not titillating, the reason being that the girl in question is defined as unattractive by the people spying on her (explicitly) and by the film itself (implicitly). In itself, the humiliation may be brief, but it's indicative of a general trend in the movie.

elly c on April 6, 2011, 10:36 PM

Just to be clear, the person you describe as implicitly defined as unattractive "by the film" (what you called a fat nerd, wasn't it?) is the lead teen character's final love interest, a person he had also courted before even starting his quest. What exactly is your definition of define.

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