"Full of grace! Full of grace!"
This quote from John Waters' smash hit, Pecker, sums up the movie very nicely. This movie is positively charming, and surprisingly deep for a director labeled "The Prince of Puke". Waters' films tend to be very tongue-in-cheek. While it is still true with Pecker, there is actually a serious morale behind this film. To true film purists, it would be easy to see that this could be the John Waters film with the highest cinematic merit.
Leave it to John Waters to come up with a movie named after a part of the male anatomy! The movie stars Edward Furlong as the optimistic young photographer, Pecker, who ends up getting lucky when a talent scout sees his interestingly mundane pictures. Pecker is skyrocketed to fame, but soon realizes fame has a very dirty price. Pecker's family is hysterical, with his sister Chrissy being addicted to sugar, his mother being a thrift store specialist, and his grandmother insisting she is speaking to the Virgin Mary (but is really performing a ventriloquist act). Christina Ricci plays Pecker's girlfriend who is slightly anal retentive regarding her job managing a Laundromat. With this cast of misfits and John Waters sense of satire, this film is wicked good fun.
I feel that this review would not be complete if I didn’t mention John Waters' fabulous writing style. This film is one of the most beautifully written pieces of satirical humor I have ever had the pleasure of witnessing on the big screen. While this film is few on the laugh-out-loud perverted humor jokes that we have grown accustomed to
with Waters, this film is sure to keep you smiling from beginning to end. Not to mention, that this is perhaps the only film in which we see a dramatic side of Waters. At times, this film can be very serious which allows the intended morale of the movie to shine through. This is the first time ever in a Waters film we actual see one of his character's suffer emotional pain (though slight as it might seem) without using that pain as a platform to comedy. I've seen many, many film reviewers cite this as the best Waters movie ever. Due to the spectacular writing, the sense of drama that Waters developed, the casting, and the incredibly entertaining finished product, I can't deny that claim. Nice, nice job, John.
All of John Waters' movies end pretty happily (even Female Trouble, though the happy ending is incredibly twisted, in a good way of course). The good guys win, and evil is ultimately punished. The difference with this film, is that the cast isn't divided into "good guys/bad guys", yet the Pecker gang still ends up triumphant. This film makes a lot of really good assumptions about the price of fame, and the movie ends on a spectacular note. As a Waters fan from way back, I can't say enough good things about this film. So go take your "happy-go-lucky self" to the video store and rent this gem. You'll be smiling long after the credits roll. As Memama would say, "It's a miracle!".
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