‘My First Mister’ Strays From Emotional Challenge

In its first two-thirds, “My First Mister,” which marks Christine Lahti’s feature directorial debut, looks to be a winner. But it takes a disastrously wrong turn toward the end that all but destroys the good work that’s come before. Leelee Sobieski’s Jennifer is a dedicated 17-year-old Goth with the requisite piercings, dark makeup and clothing and gloomy attitude. Her bedroom looks like a dungeon, and she holds profoundly negative feelings toward her ditsy mother (Carol Kane) and dull stepfather (Michael McKean). She would rather spend time in the cemetery, convinced that she is communing with the spirit of her dead grandmother.

She is the least likely individual to be hired as a stock girl at an ultra-conservative men’s clothing store run by Albert Brooks’ Randall, a paunchy, meticulous 49-year-old. Under the surface, however, they gradually discover they’re pretty much alike: lonely individuals of high intelligence and considerable wit and slow to trust others. Randall was married briefly, but his wife left him 19 years ago. Randall and Jennifer click long before they realize it themselves but soon enough for him to be persuaded to take a chance on her if she’s willing to change her image--and stay in the stockroom.

Working from Jill Franklyn’s script, Sobieski and Brooks, under Lahti’s astute direction, persuade us that two such seemingly total opposites could actually discover themselves in each other. For all intents and purposes, both have no real friends except each other, so it is perfectly normal that feelings of love blossom from both sides.

So far so good, but it is at this point that Franklyn seems to have suffered a thudding failure of nerve or imagination, or both. Before Jennifer and Randall have a chance to discover whether their deepening emotional bond is that of a father and a daughter or of a romantic nature, or perhaps both, Franklyn pulls out one of the movies’ hoariest devices, a dark development that turns the film into a shameless, contrived and manipulative heart-tugger.

The emotions it starts churning up so relentlessly are unearned, and “My First Mister” seems simply evasive, not wanting to come to terms with a relationship between a young girl and a middle-aged man. Jennifer and Randall are so distinctive and forthright with each other that it would have been rewarding to see how they could have worked through the challenge of their feelings for each other.

Just about any scenario that Franklyn could have come up with would have been preferable to the one she cooked up. Presumably Lahti went along with her, because when the material turns specious, she never loses her commitment to it nor do her actors. Thus “My First Mister” offers the curious experience of being able to believe in a screen full of first-rate actors yet not believe in anything that’s happening to the people they’re playing.

Despite the wholly lamentable swerve the film takes, Sobieski and Brooks are downright heroic in their fidelity to Jennifer and Randall.

There’s good work, too, from John Goodman as Jennifer’s comically crude, aging hippie father and from the invaluable Mary Kay Place as a canny and kind acquaintance of Randall’s.

That Jennifer’s mother and stepfather are such cliches perhaps should have been a tip-off to trouble ahead. How refreshing it would have been if this couple would have simply come across as ordinary and normal; as it is, Kane manages to find poignancy in the mother, and McKean brings an amusing quality to the stepfather. Also on hand is Desmond Harrington, who plays a young man yanked into the proceedings who reacts with understandable perplexity.

With “My First Mister” lots of talented people on both sides of the camera remain true to a project that ultimately rings false--and loudly, too.

*

MPAA rating: R, for strong language and sexuality. Times guidelines: language, adult themes.

‘My First Mister’

Albert Brooks: Randall

Leelee Sobieski: Jennifer

Desmond Harrington: Randy

A Paramount Classics release of a Total Film Group presentation, in association with Film Roman Inc., of a Firelight/Apollo Media co-production. Director Christine Lahti. Producers Carol Baum, Jane Goldenring, Mitchell Solomon, Sukee Chew, Anne Kurzman. Executive producers Frank Hubner, Gerald Green. Screenplay Jill Franklyn. Cinematographer Jeffrey Jur. Editor Wendy Greene Bricmont. Music Steve Porcaro. Costumes Kimberly A. Tillman. Production designer Dan Bishop. Art director Gary Kosko. Set decorator Kathe Klopp. Running time: 1 hour, 49 minutes.

At selected theaters.