Thinner and dryer than burnt Ryvita, Laurent Cantet's Foxfire is an artistic statement protracted over a runtime edging two and a half hours. It's a statement that could just as simply (and more succinctly) be made in two and a half minutes, which explains why this adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates' novel is initially engaging and eventually tiresome. What a wondrous thing, the imagination, that it bestows upon us the ability to conjure up images in our minds as we read the text on a page, the words and our thoughts uniting to transport us into a world as palpable as our own, and more evocative, somehow. It's like instant nostalgia. To see these images reproduced, on a flat screen, the gritty greys and pallid whites so inert, it takes a certain skill to be able to instill in these images the same spirit that existed in the original verse. Cantet employs no distinct style, he just stages rote scenes in a rote fashion, possibly relying on the cast to enliven the content they have to work with. There ought to be a blaze of feverish intensity as these teenage girls devise their own gang, to rebel against those who take advantage of them for their age, sex or apparent innocence; in a poor, drab small town in rural 1950s America, the stale cinematography, the commonplace scenarios... surely no cast could be relied upon to breathe life into this. There's obvious value in much of what's on display here - fair artistic intention, some decent performances - yet it never quite lifts Foxfire up from the floor, where it basically lolls around until the novel ends and, thus, so too does the film. It's at approximately the hour mark where Foxfire begins to dry out entirely, as the engine runs out of sustenance, and your attention may soon follow.
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