Teeth

In writing reviews, I try very hard to write about the movie I saw, and not the movie I wanted to see or thought I was going to see. For one thing, it’s not fair to overwhelm the real movie with the one in my head, and seeing past my expectations can often reveal something entirely different and better than what I could otherwise have seen. For another, if I’m such a smartypants I should be making the things rather than writing about them.

But sometimes it’s hard. I’ve been excited about Teeth for quite a while now, checking and rechecking the movie’s website hoping for widened release, and eventually giving up and buying a bus ticket to New York, making it by far the most expensive movie I’ve ever seen (OK, OK, I went to New York for other reasons too). It’s just such a great concept—reclaiming* the vagina dentata! So much possibility!

And so the fact that Teeth only rises as far as “pretty good” was a big letdown for me. The first act of the movie, leading up to the scene where Dawn (Jess Wexler) discovers the dentata’d nature of her vagina, is a non-stop, overlong sequence of fundamentalist bashing. Now, I despise Christian fundamentalists every bit as much as the next gay atheist, but the kind of mockery the beginning of this movie engages in is simply unnecessary and mean—they make mockeries of themselves better than anyone else could, and besides, it’s mostly children and teenagers we’re dealing with here, and the children of fundamentalists deserve our pity, not our scorn. Satirize them, sure—Saved!, for example, is a brilliant movie—but straight-up, unclever mockery just fails to amuse me.

All that out of the way, the movie does pick up after Dawn accidentally claims her first victim, in a scene which works with exactly the right combination of funny and disturbing that the whole movie seems to strive for. Still, though, even as it gets better, the movie doesn’t successfully hit that note very often, and in general stays too bogged down in jokiness to create either real comedy or real horror. There are exceptions—I particularly liked the scene at the gynecologist’s (which, if you’ve seen the trailer, is pretty significantly different from what you see there, and is both hilarious and terrifying) and the moment where Dawn finds a diagram of a vagina in a sex ed textbook and is startled by what she sees—but they largely serve as reminders that, OK as what we’re watching is, it could have been much better.

I also wish that the movie had examined its narrative a little more closely. Rape-revenge fantasies can be very satisfying, but I’m not so sure they’re healthy, particularly ones as uncritical of the revenge itself as this one is. I know, I know, here I go again complaining that this wasn’t the Teeth I would have made, but nevertheless, a little more ambivalence would have made the whole thing a lot more interesting. Paradoxically, because I’m demanding, I also often found myself wishing that the movie had a clearer idea of where its horror comes from, whether from the men who attempt to victimize Dawn or from her own, strange body. I’m not suggesting that it can’t be both—indeed, I think it should be, because Dawn is the character we identify with and both naturally horrify her—but the movie seems to have trouble containing both at once, opting instead to flit uncomfortably from one to the other, moment to moment.

But despite all my negativity, there’s an awful lot to like here. In addition to the great moments I mentioned already, there is the simple fact that the whole thing looks great, particularly the big landscape shots of the town, the silly nuclear plant looming ridiculously close, billowing clouds of, I suppose, tooth-growth stimulating radiation. And there are many subtle touches that show that director Mitchell Lichtenstein is very aware of, and very clever about, the kind of subversive work he’s doing here—my favorite being that this movie that turns misogynist tropes on their heads features significantly more male nudity than female.

There’s quite a bit of potential here, and I will certainly be keeping a close watch on the careers of both Lichtenstein and Wexler, as I expect great things from both of them in the future. And yes, if it’s convenient for you to see Teeth, by all means see it. It’s very worth seeing. I would just suggest that if seeing it involves spending $80 and six hours, round trip, on a bus, you might be better served by waiting.

*Or I guess just claiming. You can’t reclaim something that you never claimed to begin with.