Pumpkin

Schizophrenia is never pleasant to observe, but Pumpkin, a dark-as-pitch comedy that frequently veers into corny sentimentality, probably would not improve much after a therapeutic zap of shock treatment. It's an odd and difficult pairing, like horror and humor, and while this “Romeo and Juliet meets the ugly duckling” tale manages to elicit some genuine laughs (most of them of the sort that catch you off-guard, such as the scene in which the two lovers frolic and fumble to a sugary Belle and Sebastian tune), it nonetheless leaves you scratching your head at the same time. You're never entirely sure if the film is laughing with you, or at you. Ricci, her hair dyed a lustrous blonde (surely the first sign that we're traveling through strange comedic country), is Carolyn McDuffy, a Southern California sorority princess who has the requisite Volkswagen Cabriolet, rich family, and tennis-star boyfriend (Ball). She's the darling of Alpha Omega Pi, the perkiest, sexiest, most oh-my-gosh of the fortunate ones; in short, she's Reese Witherspoon with a gleam in her eye. When her AOP president decides the best way to beat a rival sorority house for the coveted Sorority of the Year is by having the AOP sisters mentor physically and mentally challenged young men participating in a Special Olympics knockoff, Carolyn is initially repulsed. So is her catty roommate Jeanine (Swain, her Lolita years far behind her now), who notes that it's just as difficult for them to be placed among all these “normal” people, as it is for the pristine sorority girls to put up with their uncoordinated bodies and minds. Carolyn's pupil is the wheelchair-bound, silent Pumpkin (Harris). The two eventually bond over that most romantic of sporting events, the discus, and before you can say “gee whiz,” the pair begin to display outright affection for each other, which quickly blossoms into love. If that were all there were to it, Pumpkin would have made a fine afterschool special, but the film, which begins as a satire of Waspy sorority mores (as well as poking plenty of jabs at the handicapped), never quite jels comedically -- Pumpkin and Carolyn's love, which dare not speak its name lest someone lose their social standing, is treated alternately as a joyous celebration of possibility and redemption, and then as one big joke. Harris, who begins the film mute and stuck in his chair, ends up running in a relay race and chatting to his mom about affairs of the heart. “I'm not retarded,” he tells her, and maybe he's not, but then why the hell has he been acting like a short-bus candidate since scene one? The script, by Broder, wants to be both a touching love story (and at times it is genuinely affecting) and a Farrelly Brothers-style satire of PC mores. It skewers the status quo one moment and then reverses tack and tugs on your heartstrings the next. It's one of the most emotionally conflicted films I've ever seen, and the odd hybridization makes you wonder what could have been. There's the shell of not one but two excellent films in Pumpkin, but as it is the one we have here is just too bewildering to puzzle out.