The Virgin Suicides: drama. Starring James Woods, Kathleen Turner, Kirsten Dunst, and Josh Hartnett. Screenplay by Sofia Coppola. From the novel by Jeffery Eugenides. Produced by Francis Ford Coppola and Julie Castanza. Directed by Sofia Coppola.

For her directorial debut, Sofia Coppola, daughter of Francis Ford and unfairly put-upon co-star of Godfather III (I actually liked her in it. So sue me) bravely tells a fairy tale of adolescent trauma that sometimes is a little hot, but, more often, is as confused as a teenager in love.

Set in Grosse Pointe, Michigan (here misspelled “Gross”) sometime in the 1970s, The Virgin Suicides” (also, the opening night selection of the 43^rd San Francisco International Film Festival) is about the romantic fixation of four teenage boys on the five mysterious, beautiful Lisbon sisters who live in suburban splendor across the street.  Like all suburban films, there’s more to this placid peaceful exterior than is glommed by the eye. Hollywood seems fixated right now on seeking out corruption under the calm, pretty face of suburbia. While no anthropologist myself, I imagine the territory is more complex than Coppola or the makers of American Beauty would have it.

We often like more what we can’t get and things are more beautiful from far away. The unreachable beauty and enigma of these girls fires the appetites of these four boys, who do their yearning teenage best to achieve the glories of love. What they don’t know about them (which is plenty) they strive to make up for with their testosterone-fueled imaginations.

Sadly for everyone, the closer they get the worse it looks.

Their religious and zealously protective mother (Kathleen Turner) and their diffident, socially inept math teacher Dad (James Woods) dominate the Lisbon girls.  It is they, the film tells us, who are responsible for the girls’ crumbling state of mind. After one daughter commits suicide, they retreat deeper into the padded cell of their lives, where their insanity feeds on itself in isolation. Except for the four boys, the world passes this doomed family by.

Unfortunately, it sounds creepier than it is. The film reminds me of the Brothers Grimm’s “Rapunzel” by way of Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, instead it’s five girls with golden hair and none of them are letting it down. The boys desperately try to get close but are turned away at every gate.  Only one, school stud Tripp Fontaine (Josh Hartnett) achieves the impossible and makes it with the oldest and most beautiful Lux (Kirsten Dunst), only to find what he wanted isn’t what he wants.

What’s good about The Virgin Suicides is how tyro director Coppola has carried off her task. The film is very well made, using many of the bright primary candy-colors I associate with that era. Even though she gets a few details wrong (the girls’ too sexy underwear for example: big no-no in a Fundamentalist household) the lyrical compositions and camera work evoke the raw painful poignancy of adolescence. While the performances of the young cast are at best uneven (with Josh Hartnett, the standout as Tripp), they make up for inexperience with ragged enthusiasm. Especially engaging is the sequence of Tripp’s gawky courtship of Lux.

But The Virgin Suicides skates on the thin ice of confused and undernourished writing.  Coppola’s screenplay (improperly given a “written by” instead of “screenplay by” as would befit this adaptation from a Jeffrey Eugenides novel) fails to develop rich characters. It hangs clumsily between the fairy-tale aspects and its yearning to relate to something wider. As noted earlier, it feels like a horror story about isolated eccentrics strangled by their own madness but Coppola strains for social significance and casts the Lisbon sisters as symbolic of all teenage girls everywhere, a collection of feminist Holden Caulfields combined, perhaps, with Jonestown.   

Unfortunately the material at hand is too watery to float these broad romantic notions.  Kathleen Turner’s Mrs. Lisbon is a hamfisted barnacle-brained fundamentalist. Her behavioral tics (forbidding dating, forcing Lux to destroy her record collection) are retreads from other better stories. She’s not so much crazy as simply a stiff-backed neurotic square.  The result is the girls’ final melodramatic collective act makes as much sense as killing yourself over bad hair. We need a stronger sense of the Lisbons as being truly insane, but we don’t get it.  James Woods, as Dad, at least understands he’s going mad (he has a funny moment chatting up the plants in the school hallway), but like Mom, Coppola gives him nothing to work with, no depth to his madness. We’re never afraid of them.

Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Lisbon is crazy enough to make me believe them capable of infecting their mild psychoses on their daughters. I’ve known my share of psychotic Moms n’ Pops and this couple is simply not worth killing yourself over. Why none of the girls simply run away or elope with the four pining lads across the way is never explored. When faced with the opportunity they disdain it for a worse choice.

At one point Cecilia (Hannah Hall), the first to attempt suicide, responds to a doctor’s comment that she’s too young to know how bad the world can be with, “You’re not a thirteen-year-old girl, Doctor.”  Where a girl as shut-in as this one would glean such profoundly glib insights is a question Coppola never sufficiently answers. Is the extrapolation merely symptomatic of her own madness? Never mind the feeble assumption that all thirteen year-olds are similarly depressed. It’s the kind of comment that sounds heavy and cool when you’re thirteen and corny and solipsistic at forty. I’m glad I threw my diaries away.

Lord knows being a teenager is hard, but The Virgin Suicides is more a feeble fairy-tale of teenage angst than a true picture of it.  In taking a story of isolation and angst and trying to remold it as a metaphor for the wider world, Sofia Coppola stretches the material so it breaks. Still, her filmmaking is often lovely and lyrical. Her parents at least have given her good wings.