'Pumpkin' --A Real Riot of a Movie
by Anne Finger.
Anne Finger is the Poetry/Fiction Editor of Ragged Edge.
Pumpkin's own publicity bills this movie as "an inspiring comedy about fitting in," but rest assured it, is anything but. Instead, directors Adam Larson Broder and Tony Abrams have given us a savagely funny movie about the nondisabled's attitudes towards people with disabilities.
Christina Ricci plays Carolyn McDuffy, a sorority sister at a southern California university who manages to look simultaneously matronly and adolescent with her flipped up blonde hair and tasteful short-skirted ensembles. Carolyn's sorority is locked in a bitter competition with the sorority across the way for the coveted Sorority of the Year award. Carolyn's house has an ace-in-the-hole: they've picked a "killer charity" that's sure to score them lots of points: they're going to mentor athletes competing in "The Challenged Games." The special athletes who take part in the Challenged Games are, of course, as the less politic of the sorority sisters put it, "retards."
Carolyn is assigned to Pumpkin Romanoff (Hank Harris), a young man who is a wheelchair user and is, as Ricci later puts it is "retarded, retarded." Carolyn's first reactions are fear and repulsion. She gets lectures from people -- including several of her sorority sisters and her boyfriend, Big Man on Campus Kent Woodlands (Sam Ball) -- the gist of which is: "these people" are "just like us" and are "special," with "something wonderful to share."
Of course, when Carolyn actually takes these words to heart and finds herself falling in love and forming a romantic relationship with Pumpkin, all hell breaks loose. Kent is not so much hurt at losing Carolyn's love as he is appalled at whom he's been replaced by. (His teammates tell him, with mock sympathy, that they've known guys to lose their girls to another woman, which is bad enough -- but to a retard -- now that must really hurt.) Pumpkin's alcoholic and controlling mother Judy (Brenda Blethyn) chases Carolyn from the house after she's spent the night with Pumpkin, screaming, "Slut! Pedophile!" And Carolyn's sorority sisters stop speaking to her, as their entire sorority becomes the laughingstock of the campus.
Every character in this comedy is broadly drawn, so we can hardly complain about the depiction of Pumpkin -- whom love propels out of a wheelchair, although certainly not into a state of non-disability. No one would call this film subtle, and it will make plenty of people uncomfortable in its barbed revelation of what lies beneath condescending attitudes and a veneer of acceptance. But Pumpkin is a riot, both in the sense of something that makes us laugh, and in the sense of an event during which things are shattered and overturned.
