Boxing Helena (1993)

Director: Jennifer Chambers Lynch                   Writer: Jennifer Chambers Lynch
Film Score: Graeme Revell                              Cinematography: Frank Byers
Starring: Julian Sands, Sherilyn Fenn, Bill Paxton and Kurtwood Smith

Julian Sands is NOT a good actor, period. For some reason his role in A Room with a View worked for him, his spaced-out lack of facial expression was just what the part needed and made him an overnight sensation. But everything since has sucked. You look at his face and you don’t know what he’s thinking. He has all the animation of a department store mannequin. It’s that bad. In the late eighties he was a hot commodity and starred in dozens of films, but by the early nineties he had been relegated to mostly mediocre horror and suspense films, and since then has languished, justifiably so, on television. Boxing Helena is a case in point.

I had heard the name of the film at the time, but never had the opportunity to see it. Watching it recently it’s clear the film is simply a sexually charged version of Stephen King’s Misery, or if you want to go back even further, The Collector by John Fowles, although I’m sure there are hundreds of stories with a similar captive theme. This one suffers primarily from its reliance on Sands to create a credible protagonist, which he doesn’t have the skills to do. Casting him as the simpering, spurned lover is ludicrous. At least in his malevolent parts his blank expression brings a shred of believability. Here we’re supposed to believe that he is tortured in his desire for Sherilyn Fenn, but we get absolutely nothing from him emotionally. He looks like as if he’s just “pretending” and doing an incredibly bad job of it.

Fenn, who had her start in television, was good in Gary Sinise’s Of Mice and Men and scored roles in a few films after this before returning to the small screen. But she is given nothing to do here, except be a bitch. After attending a party that Sands has set up just so she’ll be in attendance, she becomes fed up with his stalking and manipulation. Walking away from his house in a huff, she is suddenly hit by a car. He brings her back to his home and, brilliant surgeon that we’re supposed to believe he is, he uses his medical skills to keep her imprisoned with him until she submits. Sigh. Bill Paxton is wasted as a horny player, as is Kurtwood Smith playing a doctor and Art Garfunkel as the improbable friend of Sands. The whole thing is weird, and not in a good way.

This was writer-director Jennifer Chambers Lynch’s directorial debut, and she tanked so badly that she didn’t get another film project for fifteen years. She was attempting to draw on the same kind of mysterious obsession present in the work of her father, David Lynch, but with her incredibly weak script and even worse actors the project was doomed from the start. Parts of it are little more than soft-core porn, the rest is very un-suspenseful suspense, and the ending is utterly abysmal. Ultimately Boxing Helena, while trying to be edgy and provocative, simply winds up flat, an unentertaining waste of time.