Chabert Watch! Tart (2001)

Watched:  05/05/2025

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  First

Director/ Writer:  Christina Wayne

Watching Tart (2001) feels very much like when you're a middle-class kid with middle-class experiences  and you get stuck in a conversation with someone your age who has no idea that they're upper-class starts telling you about their lives and has no idea that every sentence coming out of their mouth is dripping with privilege, classism, and unearned self-pity because Mumsie and Daddy left them behind and when to St. Bart's for two weeks during which time they were left with a stack of money, a huge house and just the butler and maid, and it was so unfair and they better get to go to (insert place middle class kids never heard of) next year!

Watching Dirty Deeds, I may not like the way they executed the main character, and I thought the cartoon he was was badly done.  But Tart has a lead who is charmless and unsympathetic from start to finish.  Paired with a boring story with a dumb ending, it's not exactly a slam dunk.

The movie is marred by the lack of self-awareness that's usually shown ironically, but here seems to be both part of the film - intentionally - as the character's naivete, and yet feels mirrored by what the filmmaker really thinks is a story that must be told.  And she wants to do it through the focal point of a lead who is roughly as interesting as a pack of beige carpet samples.  

Curiously, for an indie feature by a rookie writer/ director, the movie is full of recognizable faces.  Brad Renfro plays the romantic interest.  Mischa Barton plays a British girl?  Nora Zahetner.  Bijou Phillips.  Scott Thompson.  And our lead, Dominique Swain, has been doing things steadily for decades.  And, of course, Lacey Chabert as the nerd girl no one likes for absolutely no reason (she's a couple years off Lost in Space here).  But, like, Melanie Griffith shows up randomly in a scene, and it's so confusing I missed what the scene was about.

I have a hypothesis that, as the movie is written/ directed by Christina Wayne, and that her scant Wikipedia presence states she tutored in the business under Robert Evans - and that she had worked on one episode of E! True Hollywood Story before making a movie with, like, real actors in it, shot in Manhattan - and adding in that that the movie just feels horribly unaware of itself when it comes to class issues - I kind of have to guess Ms. Wayne is just making a movie based loosely on her own privileged upbringing.  I could be wrong!  But kids from the 'Burbs rarely happen upon Robert Evans and can get Melanie Griffith to do a couple of hours of work on their indie film.  Or have any perspective on attending an elite, small school in a tony part of Manhattan. 

Our lead is Cat, a high school junior (Swain), who hangs out with her pal (Phillips) who is more of a wildchild - and they think they're freaks and outsiders.  Which is never really shown to be particularly true before Phillips is kicked out of school for having drugs or something.  Frankly, she seems like a pill, but clearly she's just "free" or some shit.

This opens the door for Cat to join the cool kids at school, to do drugs, to hang with a sketchy adult guy who tries to have sex with the boys and give them cocaine.  

Eventually William, the guy Cat has a crush on (Renfro) is outed as being poor.  He's been stealing everyone's jewelry and selling it.  He's also bisexual (which is bad here).  And a murderer.  He is is many things.  But mostly he's poor, and we don't like that, so might as well keep piling things on.

It just feels like a high schooler rambling on, full of the naive and ignorant things a teenager is going to take for granted in their world, and then making some shit up at the end to try to give it some depth the story fully did not earn.  

Is it stupid?

I don't think stupid is really how I feel about it.  It's just... pointless.  It has iffy dialog, bad character moments, a woe-is-me storyline that, really, provides no insight into anything, has no real conclusion to speak of, and I am unsure what our dopey lead has figured out on her journey that isn't embarrassingly obvious.  But, really, it's just boring.  Metropolitan covered young people up to shenanigans and a Nick Carraway thrown in with the youthful uppercrust to at least try to contextualize and give us a POV that made some sense.  And if you want to worry about the kids, Kids had been out six years earlier and actually captured something about youth up to no good.  

Tart has one good scene.  I'll give it that.  What's interesting is that two of the movie's most interesting scenes don't really actively include our lead.

Chabert is barely in it, but she's a stand out in the crowd - and, frankly, her character and her relationship to the rest of their social circle seems more interesting than the one we follow. And I was never clear on why we weren't supposed to like her.

By the way, the poster and title seem to have nothing to do with the movie.  There is no girl in the film I'd consider a tart, a wannabe tart or an accidental tart.  There's one scene where our lead accidentally shows some leg when her skirt flips up, but it's an incident of about three seconds at the start of the film.

Curiously, Christina Wayne would find herself an executive at AMC and helped usher in Mad Men just five years later.  Must be nice.