"Freeway" updates an old fairy tale with a tough, working class twist.

By CHARLES TAYLOR

when Vanessa (Reese Witherspoon), the teenage heroine of the wild and exhilarating black comedy, "Freeway," hunkers down to kiss her boyfriend Chopper (Bokeem Woodbine), she's voracious and blissfully content at the same time. Taking big sips from her honey's tasty lips, Vanessa has a blithe assurance. She acts as if nothing is going to change anytime soon, but life is about to turn into a pitching machine throwing her nothing but curveballs. Soon, to borrow a line from "All About Eve," she's got to deal with "everything but the hound dogs yappin' at her rear end." And before long, there's a big bad wolf ready to take up that position. Matthew Bright's smashing picture, a variation on, of all things, "Little Red Riding Hood," started life as a made for HBO movie. Roxie Releasing, which also gave a theatrical lease on life to "Red Rock West," picked it up, has opened it in San Francisco and New York and is slowly releasing it in cities around the country. With one foot in the grind house and one in the art house, the smarts in "Freeway" are more than equal to its visceral kick. Shortly after the movie opens, Vanessa's hooker mom (Amanda Plummer) and crackhead stepdad (Michael T. Weiss) are hauled off to the pokey. Rather than face another crummy foster home, Vanessa hits the road in a stolen car bound for grandmother's house, a mobile home in a Stockton trailer park. Along the way, her hot hot rod conks out and she's picked up by Bob Wolverton (Keifer Sutherland) a child psychologist who works with troubled youth and who encourages Vanessa to unburden her feelings. That he also happens to be the serial killer-rapist stalking California's Interstate 5 is just one more damn thing in Vanessa's very bad day. Like "Something Wild" or Brian De Palma's horror-comedies, "Freeway" takes delight in confounding our expectations, scrambling what's funny and what's horrifying until you're likely to be gasping and laughing at the same time. In other words, there are plenty of people whom "Freeway" is going to rile up. But if you're game, this is the sort of picture that uses lurid material to tap right into the unique sensual pleasures of the movies. Alive with the luscious turn-ons of sex and danger, "Freeway" is the most impressive debut film I've seen all year. In the credits, young women with round bosoms and buttocks (like the women in Crumb cartoons) are chased by drooling, lascivious wolves. But our Red Riding Hood, Vanessa, would rather fight than flee. Much of the fun of "Freeway" comes from watching how capable and canny she is at negotiating everything that's tossed at her. Vanessa treats the most awful things as annoyances to be briskly dealt with. When her creepy stepdad tries to feel her up while she's watching TV, she brushes him off as if he were a pesky mosquito. And when Bob, the wolf in kiddie shrink's clothing, whips out a straight razor and lops off her ponytail, she treats his sexual sadism as if it were a particularly revolting personal habit she could shame him out of. As played — spectacularly — by Reese Witherspoon, Vanessa is an utterly flabbergasting mixture of propriety and bluntness. After she's gotten the upper hand with Bob and left him for dead, Vanessa, covered in blood, sashays into a truck stop for breakfast. Realizing that the waitress is staring at her, she apologizes — "I must look a fright" — and heads for the washroom. Witherspoon, outfitted in funky, functional hip-hop clothes, rings endless variations on Vanessa's flat, nasal twang. But perhaps the trickiest thing she manages to do is to make Vanessa greater than the sum of her contradictions. She's both naive and wised-up, quick-tempered and unflappable, tough but not unappealingly hardened, ripe without ever going soft. Witherspoon and Bright keep us on Vanessa's side without ever soliciting pity for her. It's crucial that she's never a victim. At first she seems like every girl you see down at the mall or remember from high school who talks back and keeps talking back long past the point when she's gotten into trouble. Vanessa is exactly the sort of kid who leads teachers and parents and social workers to shake their heads and say, "she'll never learn." The juvenile detention facility where she's tossed after Bob claims she robbed him and tried to kill him (since this is a horror movie, and a fairy tale, the monster doesn't stay dead) labels her "antisocial." She's not. She's disarmingly open. But she doesn't take any guff. She'd like the cops if only they didn't throw her mother in jail and would believe her when she says Bob is the Interstate Killer. She'd gladly put out for the jailhouse lesbian if only the girl would have the courtesy to ask first. There's an explosively funny moment when Bob, horribly deformed after his encounter with Vanessa, is wheeled into court by his wife (Brooke Shields, in a witty caricature of outraged decency) and Vanessa greets him with "Hol-ee shit ... look who got beat with the ugly stick!" It's both heartless and heartening. Witherspoon makes you understand that Vanessa's refusal to shut up is integral to her ability to maintain her self-respect. Bright occasionally succumbs to po-mo cool. But the ironies in "Freeway" don't distance you from the action or make you feel superior, the way they do in Quentin Tarantino's films. Bright plays with stereotypes of lower-class life, presenting it as a calamitous cartoon of illiterates, whores, dopers and thieves. Then he arranges the movie so that we experience it through Vanessa. And no serial killer or molester pisses her off as much as the people who judge her for being "poor white trash." What's sly and subversive about "Freeway" is the way that Bright gets at the condescension that both conservatives and liberals show toward people who don't share their polite middle-class taste. Keifer Sutherland's Bob is the essence of the sympathetic liberal who claims to know exactly what's good for "them." It's a good joke that Bob's homicidal venom is the flip side of that paternalism. Bright pushes the envelope even further by making the sort of violent, uninhibited entertainment that sets visions of V-chips dancing in the heads of liberals and conservatives alike. His cinematographer, the gifted John Thomas, shoots the movie in the bright, primary colors of neon and comic strips, nighttime truck stops and sunbaked trailer homes. When Vanessa strides past the manicured lawns of Granny's trailer park, she might be a sheriff drawing out the bad guys on the streets of Dodge City. In his marvelous memoir, "Angela's Ashes," Frank McCourt writes that the working-class audience at the moviehouse he attended growing up in '30s Ireland cheered the Indians over the cavalry, the natives over Tarzan. In "Freeway," the underdog is queen of the kittens. The first scene shows Vanessa in remedial reading class puzzling out the sentence "The cat drinks milk." At the end, having outwitted everyone without ever apologizing for herself, she grins as if she's swallowed every drop. The surprises this Little Red Riding Hood pulls out of her goodie bag can damn near knock you flat, even as you're grinning right back at her. Charles Taylor is a regular contributor to Salon.