Movie Review: Karla just doesn't wash

The Toronto Star, GEOFF PEVERE, Movie critic, Jan. 20, 2006

Karla

Starring Laura Prepon, Misha Collins, Patrick Bauchau, Tess Harper. Directed by Joel Bender. 99 minutes. At major theatres. 18A

Presumably operating on the assumption that what's good for the courts is good for drama, the fleetingly (and locally) sensational low-budget true-crime movie Karla tells the story of the 1990 St. Catharines "schoolgirl killings" from its infamously dead-eyed namesake's point of view: a more honest title would be Karla's Case.

But what worked for the real Homolka, who managed to negotiate one of the most outrageously light sentences in Canadian legal history in exchange for testifying against her multiple rapist-murderer ex-husband Paul Bernardo, doesn't necessarily float in terms of movie logic.

While the legal professionals who bought Homolka's story of coerced domestic victimhood may have had ulterior motives for doing so, disinterested movie audiences will probably just look on in stupefied disbelief. You mean, we're really supposed to buy this?

Opening at a Saskatchewan correctional facility one sunset afternoon in 2000, and framed by a psychiatric evaluation to determine Homolka's eligibility for parole, the movie unfolds as a series of voice-over recollections. Such staple intensity-signifying devices are employed as handheld camera and video flashbacks from the coolly cigarette-puffing inmate (played by Laura Prepon, formerly of That '70s Show), intermittently punctuated by the understandably skeptical queries of the quietly authoritative presiding physician (Patrick Bauchau).

It begins with her initial meeting and fatal attraction to Bernardo (Misha Collins, scary but not nearly as suburban-psycho creepy as the real thing), a grinning, drugstore-blond preppie whom she describes as "beautiful" before jumping into bed with him in front of startled friends. Veteran TV director and writer Joel Bender's competent but unremarkable ready-for-cable movie moves through episodes of increasing luridness in the lovers' relationship while maintaining its narrator's attitude of helpless detachment.

(Incidentally, the movie's first-person testimonial approach has been charged with making Karla sympathetic. It doesn't. Like the real Homolka's testimony, the battered victim story is simply too preposterous to be believed.)

Although Bernardo quickly establishes himself as a moody sexual sadist and Vanilla Ice wannabe who regularly slugs his fiance to the sound of synthetic sturm-und-drang on the soundtrack, Karla stands by watching it all in a state of slightly mortified docility. (Most frequently repeated shot: Karla standing paralyzed in a bedroom doorway.)

Needless to say, the doctor finds this attitude particularly as it maintains itself through the gathering atrocities of the murder of Karla's sister and the kidnapping, torture and murders (in her own home) of two teenage victims, a little hard to swallow.

At one point, he interrupts one of her accounts of sex with Bernardo. The doctor asks just how normal she thinks it is to egg on a sexual sadist by participating in acts of sexual sadism. In sultry Sharon Stone fashion, she peers from beneath hooded eyelids and wonders if the doctor himself has never indulged in dirty fun.

While Karla's Homolka-eye view has already made it a powerkeg of flashpoint pre-release controversy (which will probably fade within days of the movie's release), the most surprising thing about it is how comparatively restrained it is. All of the atrocities take place offscreen, and there's nothing to be seen or heard in the movie that isn't easily trumped in the shock department by much of the mainstream coverage of the case over the past 15 years.

But crediting Karla for what it doesn't show would only be warranted if something resembling a larger strategy was evident behind the film's dramatic selections if it had, that is, a point of view of its own.

Naturally, there's a lot it does not show, and not just for reasons of taste or civic conscience: there are at least a dozen or so larger stories contained within the Bernardo/Homolka case like the controversial initial investigations, the so-called "deal with the devil," the role of developing forms of media and technology (video, the Internet) in the case, and the three-ring circus atmosphere surrounding Homolka's release that Karla touches on barely or not at all. Indeed, it almost never leaves the house.

Obviously, to expect all of this from a single movie is absurd. What is not absurd is to expect some reasonable accounting for the choices that it does make.

And this is where Karla falls flat. Having settled on Karla's version of events as its own, it makes nothing of that choice. You can call it guilty of exploitation, tastelessness or insensitivity if you like, but its greatest failing is a certain deadly pointlessness.

Instead of bridging the gap that opens between Karla's posture of meek subjugation to the sick Bernardo's will and our incredulousness like the doctor, we keep asking "Why the hell are you just standing there?" with some form of irony or critical distance, Karla just lets it open like a hole collapsing over a poor foundation.

So the ultimate issue isn't whether or not the movie demonstrates some kind of gross abnegation of moral responsibility by taking Homolka's story as its own the fact that it makes this perspective clear may be one small stroke in its favour but why does it do so? To what possible dramatic purpose? In the end, Karla is just mediocre, half-baked moviemaking inspired by a locally sensational criminal event. And, like the character whose story is allowed to unfold, it's paralyzed by its own logic-flummoxing lack of resolve.

Like Karla the movie character, it stands back and watches from a distance and expects us to buy that as the whole story. And, as thousands of outraged people already know too well, that tale just doesn't wash.