Review: Even the movie itself is having a bad hair day in ‘Permanent’
The bad perm, an unfortunate rite of passage for a generation of girls, is the mildly diverting starting point for “Permanent,” which teases, sprays and irons the concept to painfully diminishing returns.
Written and directed by Colette Burson, co-creator of the HBO series “Hung,” the wan comedy is set in nondescript small-town Virginia in 1982. It clearly draws upon personal memories as it strains to drum up hilarity and life lessons from the aftereffects of a disastrously cut-rate hairdo. But whatever affection the filmmaker might have for her characters, she does her actors no favors, leaving newcomers as well as seasoned talents flailing.
There are glimmers, though, of Kira McLean’s unforced charm in the role of 13-year-old Aurelie, who has just moved to a new town with her exuberantly square parents, waitress Jeanne (Patricia Arquette) and aspiring premed student Jim (Rainn Wilson). In a school full of mean kids, her tonsorial nightmare makes her an easy target.
Aurelie believes she’s found a kindred spirit in another outcast, Lydia (Nena Daniels), one of the school’s few black students. It’s a potentially rich idea that’s pushed to simplistic, cringe-worthy lengths, like pretty much everything in the movie. That includes Jim and Jeanne’s sex-life impasse and his belabored toupee anxieties. Poetry, martial arts and a New Agey family therapist (Michael Greene) are thrown into the sputtering mix — which, unlike a bad perm, never quite relaxes the way you hope it might.
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‘Permanent’
Rated: PG-13, for crude sexual references, language and thematic elements
Running time: 1 hour, 33 minutes
Playing: Laemmle Monica Film Center, Santa Monica
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