'Banger Sisters' is rip roaring fun
By Marshall Fine
The (Westchester, N.Y.) Journal News
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| THE BANGER SISTERS (Rated R for profanity, sexuality, adult themes) Three Stars (Good)
A slight, witty comedy about the reunion of two women who were the premier groupies of the 1960s and have since gone distinctly different ways. A romp for its two female stars. Starring Goldie Hawn, Susan Sarandon, Geoffrey Rush. Directed by Bob Dolman. Fox Searchlight, 98 minutes. |
"The Banger Sisters" falls squarely into the latter category: a giggle-inducing comedy with snappy dialogue and winning performances by an unlikely team of Oscar winners: Susan Sarandon and Goldie Hawn.
Written and directed by Bob Dolman, "The Banger Sisters" hangs on the slimmest of story threads. But Hawn and Sarandon play those threads as though they were harpstrings.
Hawn is Suzette, a bartender at the legendary Whisky a Go Go on Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. She's been there, it seems, since the '60s: She's a fixture, a legend who, in her day, was one of the most famous groupies in Los Angeles. She was a confidante (among other things) to Jim Morrison and his contemporaries — although that doesn't impress her boss, who fires her for drinking on the job and her general bad attitude.
"I've been drinking rum-and-Cokes since before you were born," she says by way of argument, to no avail.
Broke and at loose ends, Suzette decides to drive to Phoenix and look up Vinny, her roommate from the old days, to ask her for money. Although they haven't spoken in decades, they were a team well-known as the Banger Sisters for their free and easy ways (a name given them by Frank Zappa).
Along the way, she picks up a rider: a failed screenwriter named Harry (Geoffrey Rush), who is going back to Phoenix carrying a gun with one bullet. He intends to use it on the person who ruined his life: his father.
But Suzette's reunion with Vinny doesn't go as planned. Vinny is now Lavinia (Sarandon), a society matron, mother to a pair of honor-student daughters and wife of a prominent lawyer with political aspirations.
After Lavinia's initial resistance to sharing old memories with Suzette ("They're no longer a part of my current reality," she says), they reconnect as the kind of friends they were 25 years earlier. Their character development isn't surprising: Vinny sheds some of her prim stiffness (to the surprise of her kids and husband), while Suzette learns the value of being responsible after years of avoiding it.
The film lives and breathes on the strength of the central performances by Sarandon and Hawn. It's been a while since Hawn had a comic role this good and she takes advantage of it.
It's not hard to see her as the adult version of the character played by daughter Kate Hudson in "Almost Famous."
Sarandon makes the perfect foil: Her large, expressive eyes capture the fear of someone afraid of being revealed as an imposter, staring at the one person who can blow her cover. But she also conveys the exuberance of rediscovering a part of herself she's kept hidden for too long. Rush, meanwhile, struggles with his American accent, but finds the persnickety humor of his cliched character.
You'll get a bang out of "The Banger Sisters," as cheery and engaging a comedy as you're likely to see this fall.
Rated R for profanity, sexuality, adult themes.
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