Foxfire Movie Trailer. When the camera first notices Legs Sadovsky (Angelina Jolie), the catalytic central character of ”Foxfire,” it mythologizes her with the kind of worshipful shot traditionally reserved for the grand entrances of macho gunfighters. Focusing on her black motorcycle boots, it travels slowly up her body, appreciating her black leather jacket, then settling on a face that is beautiful enough to stop traffic.
Cool, quiet, poised as a fashion model, with translucent skin, huge liquid eyes and a voice that echoes the calm authority of the performance artist Laurie Anderson, Legs represents the movie’s absurd fantasy of a contemporary bad girl.
Like the teen-age female equivalent of the Man With No Name, Legs appears one day at a high-school biology class in upstate New York, ominously sloshing in out of the rain. As she watches the teacher, Mr. Buttinger (John Diehl), humiliate Rita (Jenny Lewis), a shy, squeamish student who resists cutting into a live frog, she does a slow burn. Just as the teacher is about to force the scalpel in the girl’s hand into the animal, Legs snatches the frog from the table and tosses it out the window.
This small act of defiance quickly boils up into a revolution once Rita confides to Legs that Mr. Buttinger has often made sexual advances to her. Kept after school, Rita is conveniently rescued from his fondling by Legs and three friends — Maddy (Hedy Burress), Goldie (Jenny Shimizu) and Violet (Sarah Rosenberg) — who stalk into the classroom and beat him up. Naturally, the school principal doesn’t believe the girls’ accusations against their teacher, and they are suspended from school. Holing up in an abandoned house outside of town, they acquire matching tattoos and become a giggling, squealing outlaw gang of five.
”Foxfire,” directed by Annette Haywood-Carter, from a screenplay by Elizabeth White, updates Joyce Carol Oates’s novel from the 1950’s and upgrades its characters from bleak working class to comfortably suburban. In doing so, it transforms a mythic fable of pre-feminist rage into a sleek Hollywood fantasy of girlish rebellion only slightly more daring than ”The Craft,” the movie about a coven of teen-age witches that opened last spring and disappeared quickly.
The film, like Ms. Oates’s novel, is narrated by Maddy, a nice, sensible art student who falls in love with Legs but shrinks in terror when the opportunity for serious smooching presents itself. The movie zigzags nervously between telling the chaste love story of Maddy and Legs (whose eyes well up whenever Maddy’s around) and recounting the gang’s adventures, which escalate from breaking and entering to car hijacking to kidnapping.
”Foxfire” has the bad timing to open two days after the cruder but more powerful ”Girls Town,” which has many of the same plot elements. Both films are about teen-age girls who lash back at the awful men who abuse and oppress them. Where ”Girls Town” captures the hysterical pitch and hyperkinetic rhythm of actual teen-age conversation, the voices in ”Foxfire” are generic teen-age suburban, without accent or personal inflection. We are in Anywhere, U.S.A., which is really the same place as nowhere on earth.
Foxfire (1996)
Directed by: Annette Haywood-Carter
Starring: Hedy Burress, Angelina Jolie, Jenny Lewis, Jenny Shimizu, Sarah Rosenberg, Peter Facinelli, Michelle Brookhurst, Dash Mihok, Elden Henson, Cathy Moriarty
Screenplay by: Joyce Carol Oates, Elizabeth White
Production Design by: John Myhre
Cinematography by: Newton Thomas Sigel
Film Editing by: Louise Innes
Costume Design by: Laura Goldsmith
Set Decoration by: Marthe Pineau
Art Direction by: Alan Locke
Music by: Michel Colombier
MPAA Rating: R for teen nudity, drug use, strong language and some violent situations.
Distributed by: The Samuel Goldwyn Company
Release Date: August 23, 1996
Hits: 390
