Flower is a 2018 comedy/drama about a sexually curious teen who forms an unorthodox kinship with her mentally unstable stepbrother.
A lot of movies work hard to balance authenticity with entertainment, with most tending to mistake edgy for realism, overdoing it to such an extreme that it becomes distracting. This is really most symptomatic of films depicting modern teens and young adults, where filmmakers often think quirky ‘hip’ attitudes and raucous behavior equals real life. Max Winkler‘s new film Flower is guilty of this to a degree, featuring a sassy trouble-making woman ripe for an emotional tune-up, in a film that never rings all that true despite some good efforts by the cast.
In the front seat of a local police car, 17-year-old high schooler Erica (Zoey Deutch) is giving oral sex to a middle-aged cop, her two best friends Kala (Dylan Gelula) and Claudine (Maya Eshet) coming up with cellphone cameras to complete the sting, blackmailing the man to empty his ATM. It’s kinda their thing. She calls herself the ‘di*k-whisperer’ and has her eyes on a new target, that cute older guy named Will (Adam Scott) at the bowling ally. Meanwhile, with her father in jail, her mother Laurie (Kathryn Hahn) is dating single dad Bob (Tim Heidecker), whose older teenage son Luke (Joey Morgan), an overweight recovering drug addict is just released from rehab. Thing is, Luke is a sensitive, shy boy scarred by a troubling past, which Erica discovers is linked to Will. Now she’s on a mission to make it right.
Erica is the whole show here, pretty much dominating every scene in the movie, and Deutch teeters on an edge that’s either going to win you over with sheer hurricane force or utterly repel you with a contrived and artificial performance, trying to bring to life a character that is cobbled together from a checklist of all kinds of troubled movie archetypes. That’s not to say she doesn’t have some solid moments, as Deutch has a natural charismatic presence that makes her easy to watch, even if she’s at the center of a movie that loses its way in delivering the impact it intends.
Luke is a truly troubled teen, suicidal and depressed, awkward and suddenly thrust into the rapid-filled waters of Erica’s wildly messed world, one where she openly offers him oral sex as well, thinking it might draw him out of his shell. She then attempts to loosen him up by befriending him, using her suggestive and casually sexual dynamic to make him feel more welcome. For awhile, this sort has all the markings of a proper indie teen drama, but the film takes a pretty sharp tonal shift in the third act, where Erica and Luke make a huge mistake, sending the story into all kinds of strange territory that abandons much of whatever good will it managed to build.
There’s a lot in Flower that wants our attention, it’s characters bursting with potential. Unfortunately it deals all too superficially with matters that deserve better and rushes to a somewhat absurd ending that looks more to tie things up with a bow than truly be significant.
What’s sort of frustrating about it though is how good some of it really is, with the relationship between Erica and her mother the most convincing, with Khan straight-up walking away with film, having the movie’s single best gut-punch of a moment. She and Heidecker never slip into the typical aimless, clueless parents so often lumbering about in movies like this, instead grounding the whole experience so authentically, it’s like they are in a different film.
Deutch is going to have a big career. She’s fearless and empowered, so despite this misstep, is one most assuredly worth watching. That in mind, I have no doubt some are going to find this sort of trippy teen odyssey exactly what their looking for, but most will ultimately feel unsatisfied by its hollow end.