The Goddaughters

Everybody is a princess at one point or another. Rich girls work it from birth to final crackup. Bourgeois girls play the precious-and-misunderstood game through adolescence, shifting it into ruthless ambition shortly thereafter. Poor girls can blow an entire lifetime just screwing up their hair and pretending they're Galadriel. As for boys (whose princely maladies have been covered sublimely in the cinema this season) the princess bug can strike at any age, provoking anything from satin thongs to music-industry mogulhood. Ultimately no one is immune. Common symptoms also include painfully acute emotional sensitivity, a passion for unicorns, and paralyzing shock at the discovery that pugnacity, not poetry, rules our reality. Trapped in a realm of overwhelming patriarchal oppression, what's a dreamy feminine spirit to do?

Sofia Coppola grapples with this rumination in The Virgin Suicides, her breezy adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides' wry novel (which is not about Richard Branson's company going bust). That this is Coppola's debut feature seems incidental; the movie is as sumptuous as her father's support could make it, and her vision and timing already match the skills of many veterans (perhaps this is through osmosis, as her family tree includes Talia Shire, Nicolas Cage, and Jason Schwartzman; she's also married to Spike Jonze). There's a massive machine behind Coppola, but she obviously knows how to get it into gear. She also understands the crisp, oblique horror and wistfulness of Eugenides' narrative, plunking down five enchanting princesses into an environment that is anything but magical.

It's the perspective that gives this material its weird edge. The Virgin Suicides is unlike Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures, despite sharing its basic paradigm: dewy, adolescent whimsy butting heads with stern, oppressive mores, resulting in tragic release. Jackson's sweet-gone-sour film, based on a bloody incident involving two young soul mates in 1950s New Zealand, ensnared us in the magnificent visions of its female protagonists -- pioneers, one might darkly prophesy -- who directed their rage outward, rather than imploding. In Coppola's take (and Eugenides' book), set twenty-odd years later in the tragic kingdom of suburban Michigan, the dreams and fantasies of the five Lisbon sisters are kept largely under wraps -- ironic given the director's comment that her movie is about "the line between reality and fantasy, which is a very cinematic notion to me." What we do see is hinted at in the random poetry of a purloined diary, or in stoner rock albums burned for spiritual salvation: hardly deeply revelatory stuff. To amplify the intrigue, we spend the movie outside with a gaggle of smitten boys, peering in on the shimmering, unattainable girls.

"Nobody could understand how Mrs. Lisbon and Mr. Lisbon, our math teacher, produced such beautiful creatures," comments Giovanni Ribisi, the dryly melancholic narrator who sums up the book's chorus of voices, as the adult incarnation of one of the boys, Tim Weiner (youthful Jonathan Tucker). It is quite a mystery, as the preternaturally straight man (James Woods) and impotence-inducingly frumpy wife (Kathleen Turner) have begotten a singular quincunx of ethereal, intellectual, lyrical waifs, including Cecilia (Hanna Hall), Bonnie (Chelse Swain), Mary (A.J. Cook), Therese (Leslie Hayman), and Lux (Kirsten Dunst). Apart from their innate Catholicism and all that implies (crucifixes linger throughout the house), one cannot even imagine how such conceptions could have been possible between these two cold fishes. Like any parents of adolescent girls, however, the old squares quickly find they've got more on their hands than they can handle.

The movie launches into its purpose with Cecilia, the youngest, in the bathtub, her little wrists slashed, clutching an image of the Madonna. Of course as soon as the girl is revived, a heavy blanket of denial descends over the incident, and the perilously sensitive child is sent to psychologist Dr. Horniker (Danny DeVito, looking more '70s than he did in the '70s). Horniker employs Rorschach blots on Cecilia ("a banana, a swamp, an Afro," she intones, bored), and applies a pretty Band-Aid for her parents' benefit ("Cecilia didn't mean to kill herself"). Once we infiltrate the Lisbon home -- a modestly tacky period set, illuminated by the girls' rooms, which are bursting with Smurfette-style kitsch, more Catholic detritus, and a complete set of Nancy Drew books -- we begin to feel the unease ourselves. Local lad and lucky dinner-guest Peter Sissen (Chris Hale) discovers it as we do: Something is off here.