Things To Do In Denver When Your Dead

Graham Fuller

A jewel of an actress who makes us ache for her characters and care for them too.

Twenty-year old Fairuza Balk has only five short scenes in this month's Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead and none of them are integral to the story. Yet if those scenes had been left on the cutting-room floor, it would have ripped the heart out of the movie. As this jaunty thriller spirals into hell, Balk's never-say-die portrayal of the punk prostitute Lucinda carries its burden of hope. At the end of a year that has seen serious American movies become progressively dank and pessimistic, we need someone like Balk around. This amazing actress has specialized in surviving dark or depressing scenarios in her films, which suggests a core optimism in Balk herself, something directors latch on to when they cast her. At ten, she stepped into Judy Garlands's ruby slippers as Dorothy and brought some modern pluck to Return to Oz. She was more child than adolescent, and dreadfully vulnerable, as the fifteen-year-old Cecile in Valmont. And, no matter how dreamily naive her character, a trailer-park kid, seemed in Gas, Food, Lodging, she was still the most sensible person in the picture. In Balk's repertoire, naiveté is a strength. What makes her Lucinda indelible in Things to Do in Denver is the way she makes palpable the nervous energy of a sweet woman who's destroying herself. With her permanent sniff, her phony sister swagger, and her jittery giggle, Lucinda is a mass of defensive tics. By the time her self-appointed savior, Jimmy the Saint (Andy Garcia), nearly throttles the john who has empurpled Lucinda with bruises, we see it as the movie's most significant act--because Balk has made us hate anyone who would hurt a hair on her dyed, cropped head.