Forget Not the Afflicted: The Virgin Suicides (2000)
By Nick Sansone
This review contains spoilers
As society approaches a month-and-a-half of social distancing and self-isolation in response to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, more and more attention is being directed toward the mental health crisis that has resulted from people being stuck at home, unable to socialize with others in-person and unsure of when they’ll be able to do so again. Many teenagers, in particular, are losing out on the rites of passage that come as a result of time spent with friends at parties, school dances, and graduation ceremonies. For a generation of teenagers, which studies have shown is the loneliest and most isolated generation in America, this era of further isolation is bound to have a lasting and possibly tragic impact on their mental health.
It was hard not to think about this current generation of teenagers when watching the five Lisbon sisters—Cecilia, Lux, Bonnie, Mary, and Therese—in Sofia Coppola’s debut film The Virgin Suicides (2000), based on the novel of the same name by Jeffrey Eugenides, which just celebrated the twentieth anniversary of its U.S. theatrical release this past month (it had premiered a year earlier at the Cannes Film Festival). While these sisters grew up in the 1970s, before the digital age and social media and a global pandemic isolated people from each other, their emotionally damaged and closed-off nature resonates ever so strongly today, and should be reason enough for people to revisit this exquisite film, one that is brilliantly subversive, melancholy, and deeply moving, and simply one of the greatest teen dramas ever made.
The subversive nature of The Virgin Suicides (2000) is made immediately clear in the film’s opening images, which set the scene of 1970s Grosse Pointe, Michigan, in a very Rockwellian fashion; we see images of a teenage girl eating a popsicle, an old man watering his lawn, a mother and daughter walking their dog, a father and son playing basketball in their driveway, all while music plays subtly underneath and distant sirens start to draw closer. Suddenly, the music stops and all we hear are the sirens and water dripping, and we see thirteen-year-old Cecilia Lisbon (Hanna R. Hall) lying unconscious in a bathtub after slitting her wrists. An adult male narrator (Giovanni Ribisi) then tells us “Cecilia was the first to go.”
It soon becomes clear that this adult male narrator represents the collective memory of a group of men who, when they were boys growing up in 1970s Grosse Pointe, regularly obsessed over the Lisbon sisters, due to their natural beauty and their unattainability. Indeed, the sisters’ parents (James Woods and Kathleen Turner) are strict Catholics and keep their five daughters on a very tight leash, a leash that is only further tightened following Cecilia’s suicide attempt. Nonetheless, upon Cecilia’s return home from the hospital, Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon allow their daughters to throw a chaperoned party for Cecilia, an effort to cheer her up that fails miserably when she excuses herself, jumps out of her bedroom window and dies upon being impaled by the iron fence outside.
Following this tragedy, the remaining Lisbon sisters become increasingly isolated from their community, and consequently become even more obsessed over by the neighborhood boys, who get ahold of Cecilia’s diary in a desperate (and failed) attempt to understand her and her sisters better. When a new school year begins, the film’s focus shifts to the second-youngest Lisbon sister, Lux (Kirsten Dunst) and her relationship with Trip Fontaine (Josh Hartnett), a tall, handsome, popular football player who could get any girl he wants but focuses his efforts on pursuing Lux. He manages to convince Mr. Lisbon to allow him to take Lux to Homecoming as long as he can get dates for the other three sisters, and while he succeeds in doing so, his narcissistic and uncaring behavior the night of the dance results in Lux being left heartbroken. She and her sisters are subsequently pulled out of school and confined to their home.
From there, The Virgin Suicides (2000) begins to spiral toward the tragedy indicated in its title as the sisters’ mental health deteriorates. And it is here that the film elevates from a well-made teen drama to a superb example of art filmmaking and a powerful meditation on adolescent mental health. When I first saw this film over a year ago, it evoked a very specific feeling in me that reminded me of how I felt during my first viewings of The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012) and Eighth Grade (2018), in that I was watching a film made by someone who very clearly understands the inner lives of teenagers and the pain of being lonely and isolated at that point in one’s life. Not only is this a type of film that needs to be made much more often, but looking back to when this film was made in the late 1990s, it was a type of film that really didn’t exist at all.
At the time The Virgin Suicides (2000) was made, the films about teenagers that dominated the box office included such titles as 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), She’s All That (1999), and Never Been Kissed (1999). Watching The Virgin Suicides (2000) now, it could very much be read not only as a response to those films, and also as a dismantling of the happy and carefree teenage experience depicted in most Hollywood films. This dismantling is especially evident in one scene at the beginning of the film when Cecilia is in the hospital after slitting her wrists. Her doctor tells her that she’s not yet “old enough to know how bad life gets,” and Cecilia bluntly replies, “Obviously, Doctor, you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.”
Also, key to this subversive take on the teen film genre is perspective. As mentioned above, the film’s point-of-view characters are the neighborhood boys who find themselves increasingly obsessed with the Lisbon sisters. In the hands of a lesser filmmaker, this film could have easily adapted the boys’ mindset that these girls are mere objects for their romantic fantasies. However, what Sofia Coppola does brilliantly here is allow the audience peeks into the sisters’ lives that the boys cannot access, such as hanging out in each other’s bedrooms and fighting losing battles against their parents’ oppression, therefore forcing us to see them as fully distinct human beings even as the boys do not. It’s a wonderful subversion and decimation of the prevalent “male gaze” in teen films, one that strips attractive young girls of their identity and individuality and erases their personal struggles.
And it’s in the film’s depiction of the sisters’ personal struggles that it really shines beautifully. None of the drama that the girls go through ever feels off-key or melodramatic, but it is all underscored with a profound sense of melancholy, one that becomes more and more apparent as the film goes on and we come to understand that these girls have never really been taught what love is and, as a result, they either do not feel it or, in Lux’s case, they look it for in all the wrong places. And while the film never gives the audience a full picture of their upbringing, it does show the harsh nature of Mrs. Lisbon’s mothering and the quiet, detached, almost-emasculated nature of Mr. Lisbon’s fathering, and it soon becomes all too clear how profoundly they have failed their daughters.
But one of the other brilliant aspects of Coppola’s screenplay is how, beyond simply depicting how the Lisbon sisters’ parents failed them, it also shows how all aspects of society failed them in one way or another. This is shown through the cluelessness of the doctor and the child psychologist who talk to Cecilia after her first suicide attempt, the narcissistic local news reporter who routinely attempts to exploit the Lisbon family’s pain, and the various adults who either downplay their struggles or do not take them seriously at all (the latter epitomized by a drunken man at a party who mocks being a depressed and suicidal teenager). Whether intentional or not, these people all represent the society that minimized and ignored the Lisbon sisters’ pain, and then quickly forgot them after they were gone. And in this day and age, they all serve as painful reminders of the selfishness of some adults who minimize the mental health struggles of young people.
In addition to the film’s phenomenal screenplay, Coppola and her cinematographer, Edward Lachman, craft a beautiful and unique visual style that perfectly suits the dreamlike melancholy tone. The film’s color palette is infused with browns, greens, and blues that help to give it an earthly look, and various visual motifs are used throughout the film to powerful effect, most notably the face of Lux Lisbon imposed large on the screen, often backed by sunlight. This image especially evolves over the course of the film from being a standard image of young female beauty to being a bitterly ironic image after understanding the depths of Lux’s loneliness and depression.
And the performances in this film are wonderfully subtle across the board. Kirsten Dunst gives what is still the best performance of her career as Lux, quietly communicating her character’s repressed sadness in devastating fashion. While the other Lisbon sisters don’t get quite the screen time that Lux gets, they all hold their own very well, oftentimes expressing their own personalities and pain through simple glances and facial expressions. James Woods does uncharacteristically subtle work here as Mr. Lisbon, trying to support his family in the only ways he knows how to while quietly struggling with the emasculated role he’s taken on. And Kathleen Turner shines in the film’s most showy role as Mrs. Lisbon, transcending the “overprotective mother” cliches by infusing a good amount of suppressed sorrow beneath the surface.
Watching The Virgin Suicides (2000) again while being isolated at home, I was particularly drawn to the shots of the Lisbon sisters relaxing together in their bedrooms. Coppola herself once said that including these moments was important to her because she “didn’t feel like [she] saw that very much in films…in a way [she] could relate to.” This was obviously before much of the world’s population found themselves lazing around in their rooms, and the profound sense of loneliness and isolation found in these moments only hits home further in this time of social distancing. So while this film might not be the sort of lighthearted viewing people would prefer in this moment, it is still an absolutely remarkable and essential piece of cinema, one that has quickly earned its place as one of this reviewer’s all-time favorite films, and one that is currently available to stream on Amazon Prime.
Nick Sansone is a writer and aspiring filmmaker from Chicago. A recent summa cum laude graduate of DePaul University’s School of Cinematic Arts, he continues to study film independently and has appeared on different radio programs in the Chicagoland area to discuss contemporary cinema and the Academy Awards.