Pumpkin

Pumpkin is one of those movies that wears its message on its sleeve front and center like a colored ribbon for a cause. It wants you to know what it stands for and is not afraid to be blunt, carving out that message with all the finesse of a sledge hammer. There is nothing inherently wrong with a message-heavy film but to make a successful one requires skilled writers and a director with a nuanced approach that can get the point across without having to rely heavily on genre stereotypes and generic motivations. Throughout the course of this overlong film, few things happen for reasons beyond the necessity to move the plot along. The plot is shallow and strains any real sense of logic and the premise has more than a little cringe factor to it. If you can get past all that then maybe this film is for you. 

Christina Ricci plays Carolyn McDuffy, a young woman attending her senior year at a Southern California university and is a member of an elite sorority. Her sorority has been in competition for a coveted award but has come up short the last few years so to change their luck they volunteer to help train a group of special needs young adults for their version of the Special Olympics. Carolyn is assigned Jesse “Pumpkin” Romanoff (Hank Harris) and is at first overwhelmed with the experience as she has never had to interact with anyone like him. All this starts to change, though, as she discovers a sweetness to him that is lacking amongst her sorority sisters as well as her boyfriend Kent (Sam Ball). Soon an affection grows between the two, one that is shunned by everyone around her including Pumpkin’s own mother who sees Carolyn as an interloper and an affront to her own images of who and what Pumpkin is. This growing affection eventually becomes physical, leading to questions about morality, indecency and even rape.

Pumpkin is not an easy film to watch. By relying on genre stereotypes it manages to give us a whole host of unpleasant characters, Carolyn included. The sorority sisters are portrayed as snobbish to a cartoonish level. Even Cici, played relatively beneignly by Melissa McCarthy, is so emotionally fragile that, while I felt bad for her, I couldn’t get behind her. Carolyn takes a long time getting over her self obsession that when she finally admits to herself and the audience that she is falling for Pumpkin it is too late. There is a moment midway through the film where she takes Pumpkin to the beach only to allow her emotions to drive her into forgetting him there for several hours. This is the character we’re expected to root for for nearly two hours?

By painting with such broad brushstrokes any sense of nuance is gone. Kent suffers the worst for this, although the sorority sisters don’t fare much better. His character spends most of the film either yelling at Carolyn, blaming her for his shortcomings, or using derogatory terms to reference Pumpkin. It’s ugly and disturbing, but it also rings hollow. Late in the story he will get his comeuppance in a fiery car accident that miraculously doesn’t burn him alive but leaves him in a wheelchair, perfectly set up to redeem himself amongst the physically challenged now that he is conveniently one of them.  There’s a lot of back and forth hemming and hawing with the sorority sisters, too, and their final moment doesn’t wash away all that led up to it. 

This film tries to throw in some morality questions into the mix but cannot stick the landing. After Carolyn sleeps with Pumpkin she is chased from the house by his irate mother who, quite literally has a case that what Carolyn did would be considered rape. The film wants to build a case that Pumpkin is more of a man than his mother gives him credit for but it doesn’t do a good job building this up or showing this after the fact. The primary issue here is that once Carolyn admits to herself that she is falling in love with him she immediately jumps to having sex with him. There is no building the relationship up to an inevitable intimacy. To make matters worse, she is sleeping with Kent right up to the moment she decides to move on to jumping into bed with Pumpkin. Carolyn is not a likable character and the final third of the film cannot erase that.

There are ways to tell this story and make it sweet and thoughtful-provoking. This is not that. This film is clumsily written and directed and expects audiences to just accept it and roll with it. It’s a lazy way to create characters we are supposed to be rooting for and it gives us little to grasp on to. It tries to have dramatic heft, like when Carolyn attempts suicide, but pulls even that dramatic punch immediately back like it was afraid to have any real consequences to such an act. It’s dramatically all over the place and unsatisfying on nearly all counts. About the only thing it did do right is Hank’s portrayal as Pumpkin which, while not eye-opening, is more grounded than anything else in this film. As a satire this film fails. As a romantic dramedy this film fails. As a message film this film fails. There is next to nothing here worth recommending. It runs too long and is unpleasant to boot. 

Release Date: June 28, 2002

Running Time: 117 Minutes

Rated R

Starring: Christina Ricci, Hank Harris, Sam Ball

Directed By: Anthony Abrams and Adam Larson Broder