Pumpkin
With Christina Ricci, Hank Harris, Brenda Blethyn, Dominique Swain, Marisa Coughlan, Sam Ball, Harry Lennix, and Nina Foch.
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Little did I realize that this pessimism would remain in the culture while the German films heralding it would be forgotten even faster than the earlier French ones. I have to admit that I was won over by the sarcasm of at least one Fassbinder movie, Martha (1973), a parody of bourgeois marriage and Douglas Sirkean Hollywood melodrama that tells the horrific story of a virgin librarian marrying a sadist and remaining a dutiful hausfrau until she winds up in a wheelchair. But 20 more years would pass before another film, Satantango, by an apt pupil of Fassbinder, Bela Tarr–ignoring Hollywood and melodrama because he didn’t need them–would convince me that sarcasm can be a lethal weapon for the left when confronting spectators with their own hypocrisy.
Disability is a subject that often wins people Oscars, chiefly because it makes audiences feel virtuous. So I’d be dumbstruck if Pumpkin earned any nominations, because it makes us feel like clods. The title is the nickname of a disabled teenage athlete (played by Hank Harris, who isn’t disabled), sometimes called a “retard,” but only by people who don’t know any better. We aren’t told the source of his disability–a lack of coordination that requires him to spend much of his time in a wheelchair and sometimes affects his speech patterns–but we can infer that he was probably born with it.
Piling on the cheesy overkill, the movie sarcastically implies that we require this kind of exaggeration if we’re going to accept such an impossible romance. But accepting any alternative is made to seem equally ludicrous. Carolyn writes two awful poems that chart her moral progress: the first is “Ode to Pasadena,” and the second features the line “I once had a dream that I could turn pumpkins into coaches, but the world said no.” In other words, by presenting an impossible romance in an impossible world, Pumpkin dares us to say why either is impossible–which forces us to confront what’s possible and what we might do to make it so.
