Does romantic love transcend age? Harold and Maude said “yes”, and for doing so it’s become something of a cult classic. Altering that formula, Meet Monica Velour shows a teenage boy’s infatuation with a female porn star long past her prime and his inability to connect with his peers because of it. Though Kim Cattrall as the titular Monica Velour undoubtedly provides a lot of the drawing power, the film is peppered with other seasoned pros like Brian Dennehy and Keith David, but the film gets its main drive from Dustin Ingram, the visual epitome of stereotypical movie geeks, who gives an impressive performance with only a few issues here and there. It’s an interesting drama and a great lead debut for Ingram, but he barely holds his own against the veterans in a story where the emotional investment feels entirely one-sided.
No one really understands the fascination Tobe (Ingram) has with porn star Monica Velour (Cattrall). Most think he’s weird for watching porn as an art form and collecting it like one would baseball cards or stamps, and save for young Kenny, who hangs around out of what seems like curiosity, Tobe doesn’t really have any friends. His grandfather (Dennehy) never misses an opportunity to point this out, but then again, he’s the one pressing Tobe to take over the family hotdog vending truck business, and we all know how popular that makes a kid. In an act of rebellion, Tobe decides to sell the truck to an old man a ways away (David), and, as he waits for Monday so the buyer can get cash out of the back, tracks down Monica at her floundering stripper job. Circumstances find him sleeping on her couch and the next morning he begins breaking down her defenses. Through conversations and kind acts Tobe endears himself to Monica, each showing a side of themselves to one another that they’ve closely guarded for years.
As the relationship between Tobe and Monica evolves, a few walls remain obvious to the audience even as Tobe seems to charge blindly forward. The story passes it off as his youthful naiveté that could let him make such painful mistakes, but it really just comments on the severity of his obsession and the credibility of her reaction. There’s a difference between having a teenage crush on an actress (which could still lead you to drive to see them, if they’re near enough) and latching on to her life with an encyclopedic knowledge of her accomplishments, failures, and medical data. With the former, the star shrugs it off and offers a smile and an autograph before sending them on their way, but when the guy picks up your child from school or begins reciting your most intimate secrets as if it was trivia, you don’t just smile and accept it as enthusiasm.
The relationship still feels entirely unbalanced, even as Cattrall gives a decent performance as an objectified woman who’s finally found another human being content with just sharing her company and not controlling her. God knows that Hollywood has programmed us to think that the nerdy teen is supposed to lead a rich inner life with no romantic entanglements despite their propensity for connecting with the girl in a deeply emotional way that the jocks of the world can’t, but the writer’s desire to take that to an extreme ultimately sabotages the story. In this case, there’s nothing Monica can really do to reciprocate such a cultivated fever pitch of lust and love. So instead of ever expecting it to blossom, you wait for the breaking point. Maybe it will devolve into some pale iteration of Fatal Attraction, and there are many similarities, but the more obvious end result is that the film just keeps stewing with themes of rejection and incompatibility, and so Monica never develops beyond the initial setup of her character and thus never feels as complete as her opposite. Thus making it impossible to understand Tobe’s single-minded purpose and how she could ever elicit such passion.
That lack of exploration makes the ending feel like an inevitability and not the bittersweet lesson that it’s framed as. With the comparison of Harold and Maude on the table, the duo in that film had a way to reciprocate, there was a mutual appreciation that could be both believed and adequately fleshed out. Here, there’s only one character that seems to have the capacity for undying love and genuine emotion, and so neither the objective nor the endpoint feel complete or insightful.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
There are no extras on the disc.
"Meet Monica Velour" is on sale August 16, 2011 and is rated R. Comedy, Drama. Written and directed by Keith Bearden. Starring Brian Dennehy, Kim Cattrall, Dustin Ingram.
