REVIEW - PARADISE

A good advertisement for good directors. No, Diablo Cody's script for Paradise isn't that strong either, but it's several notches above her direction. With a better lead actor and a runtime cut at least in half, this may have been a respectable venture. Cody blends her bite and her bitchiness with a dull, and extremely jumbled, dose of moralising, which she attempts simultaneously to promote and to parody. Her skin-deep philosophising can't withstand even that most meagre of aspirations. A young woman from a deeply conservative church in Montana loses her faith in god after a plane crash, and takes a trip to Las Vegas to experience a life of debauchery and disobedience, one that she embraces with glee, or reluctance, or that she rejects with conviction, or hesitancy - I think it depended on Cody's mood as she put pen to paper each day. She makes frequent and unsubtle reference to the fact that Paradise is a comedy (it won't do any more to use that as an excuse for some proper crummy dialogue), which comes at you like a slap in the face as you sleep; the rest of the time, she's operating at half speed, stretching out already unnecessary scenes, allowing for the development of baffling pauses in conversation, filling the screen with images of lethargy and desolation, and directing with a near-thorough absence of spatial perception. So it's a comedy in slow motion, and it doesn't work - just one of the many contradictions in this peculiar film. Such peculiarity actually starts to grow on you, at times, like it's a distinctive little quirk of Cody's style, but mostly it just grates and frustrates. Julianne Hough is like a soggy slice of white bread in the lead, and that's nothing to do with the character she plays. Russell Brand and Octavia Spencer barely seem to try in their roles, and just look uncomfortable.