© 2024
NPR for Northern Colorado
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

'The Little Pink House' Isn't For You Or Me

Korchula Productions

Alfred Hitchcock used to say that only dull people cared about plausibility in movies. And if you look at Vertigo, for instance, there’s barely a whiff of plausibility in its story. The Little Pink House, on the other hand, is entirely plausible – its major events are true. But somehow, it’s not at all believable. Characters walk through the film like robots, doing all the correct things, but rarely do they come off with the richness to make them matter.

The story begins in New London, Connecticut in 1997. Susette Kelo (Catherine Keener) is getting a divorce. She’s an EMT—an emergency medical technician. She finds herself a little bungalow on the river, fixes it up, paints it pink and moves in as if she’s finally found warmth and comfort.

Meanwhile, trouble lurks. While the story is essentially true, a few names are altered. The renamed governor of the state gets in touch with renamed Charlotte Wells, president of renamed Walthrop College (Jeanne Tripplehorn). They hatch a redevelopment plan for struggling New London that will bring money to the town, votes to the governor (who wants to be president), and unstated benefits to nasty Ms. Wells, with her greedy, Cruella de Vil ways. She persuades the president of actual Pfizer Pharmaceuticals to move a big operation to New London, and the project grows – to bring life, jobs and lots of pie in the sky to make the town hip, as they say. The town just must condemn the Fort Trumbull neighborhood, a sweet community of working class people, which includes the pink home of Susette Kelo.

It’s a good story. The Kelo case went to the Supreme Court, where the decision infuriated people of many political attitudes with its exuberant support of a town’s legal right to condemn properties. But director Courtney Balaker has done everything but paint thin, slimy moustaches on her villains, and a halo on Susette. The setup would make a good moralistic ballad, like “Pretty Boy Floyd,” or a slogan to rally around to go after big Pharma. But it’s the most limited kind of melodrama that leads the audience to make easy superficial judgments and feel satisfied for being on the right side of the battle between greed and goodness.

The picture makes you think about Erin Brockovich, which gives the full-out Hollywood treatment to a fight between little folk and a big corporation. Yet, The Little Pink House has neither that kind of big film attitude, nor that kind of budget. The Little Pink House is also missing an eye for complexity. It feels more like an earnest documentary, in dire need of irony, and conflict beyond the good folks versus the greedy SOBs. Even heartfelt documentaries need healthy skepticism. A story limited to “look what bad guys did to these poor good people” earns a big “so what.”

It’s not that you don’t care; it’s that a story this neat is finally a lie. The Little Pink House fills the screen with bloodless characters. I have no idea about the actual Susette Kelo. I don’t know what her story is, but the character needs some serious quirks, to give her texture, to suggest why she got into this fight, or why she moved into this house. A couple of quick and uninspired scenes of her looking comfortably settled don’t cut it. I hope she’s a big pain in the neck – anything that might put some disruption in her character.

People don’t have to be coated in honey to deserve justice and decency. In movies, perfection and utter goodness make you look at your watch. There’s a silly cliché that lead characters are supposed to be likable that we must identify with them. Baloney. They must be interesting; the audience must want to know about them. Are Hamlet or Mrs. Dalloway nice? Scotty Ferguson in Vertigo is an arrogant, pushy, delusional jerk. And fascinating.

Howie Movshovitz came to Colorado in 1966 as a VISTA Volunteer and never wanted to leave. After three years in VISTA, he went to graduate school at CU-Boulder and got a PhD in English, focusing on the literature of the Middle Ages. In the middle of that process, though (and he still loves that literature) he got sidetracked into movies, made three shorts, started writing film criticism and wound up teaching film at the University of Colorado-Denver. He continues to teach in UCD’s College of Arts & Media.
Related Content