Watched: 11/29/2025
Format: DVD
Viewing: First
Director: Andrzej Sekula
Editor's note: we've decided to Thelma and Louise our way through the remaining Chabert filmography. I've been looking to see if I can find the Chabert films I haven't seen yet via very cheap used copies or online one way or another. This one set me back about $5.
Truly a product of a particular decade, somehow The Pleasure Drivers (2006) arrived about seven years after that decade. It's another LA-based low-budget crime movie, with this one peppering itself with vague philosophical aspirations, but what they are saying lacks any insight and is dumb. And, the movie is entirely populated by characters who take their cues from how human beings behave from other movies, leaving us with weird third-generation xeroxes of motivation instead of anything identifiable as human.
Everything about the film feels late-90's, part of the post Pulp Fiction indie boom. It's three stories that loosely intertwine, and, of course, collide at the end. But none of the three stories is very interesting and none of the characters terribly watchable.
One story is a completely undercooked segment or two about a hitwoman who was just dumped by her girlfriend. That's it. I never caught the character's name, why she was dumped, or what her deal was, if she had one. She appears at the beginning and again at the end.
The second story is about a college prof who teaches what I gather to be Freudian/ Jungian psychology, but as if psychology is still stuck in 1905 or so. He's a peculiar stock character from the indie era, one that is obviously a fool to the audience, but espouses expertise, and meets someone who hasn't caught on to the fact he's a fool so we can see him be a fool. And we just know he can't please a woman sexually.
Professor Fool's wife kicks him out of his house as she's taken a female lover. He then stumbles across Lacey Chabert in a hotel bar as he waits for a room in the hotel, and the two hit the road? For reasons?
Chabert plays a nymphomaniac sex worker. Kind of a turn for those of us who know her better as the Queen of Hallmark Christmas.
The third and main story (and the only story that should have been in this movie, honestly) is about Lauren Holly who is a paid in-house caretaker for the son of a now famous religious/ cult leader. It seems the cult leader has stopped paying for his son's care, and when his representative (Billy Zane) rejects Holly's demands for money, she kidnaps her client's twin sister, who is a sort of oracle for the church.
She grabs her client, Tom, and the pair drive out to the desert. For a connective tissue sequence with Meat Loaf, who gives her a motel to hide out at, while he calls the cult, and they hire the lady-assassin from Story 1.
The movie wants for Lauren Holly to be white trash, but... this is Lauren Holly, and... while she's very good, if the box didn't say "she's trailer trash!" on it, I would literally not know that was her character's trait. It is not her fault she looks like a million bucks when trying to dress down, I guess.
What's most irritating bit is that at least Holly and Chabert are doing their best with what they have, and for Holly, I think she's basically acting by herself in front of the camera in 85% of her shots, which is kind of hard to do, but she does it well. Her major scene partner is supposed to have brain damage and isn't reacting (which I understand is still acting), so she's kind of on her own. Oddly, she's in a much more plot-driven arc than Chabert, who is in more of a character driven-arc.
Chabert is playing opposite Professor Fool, and this is from her "I don't want to play high schoolers" era, when the 00's were offering her mostly sex pot roles. Here, she's supposed to be maybe the apotheosis of what Prof Fool teaches and studies: a 20-something nymphomaniac who gets turned on by... being driven places? She's turned her issue into a career as a hooker. And, of course, he seems blind to the fact she should be perfect for him.
Why she's in the car with the guy makes no sense... he was literally getting a hotel room.
And, ho ho! When it comes time to seal the deal, the guy can't get it up. Which anyone could have seen from a mile away. Because this is a specific kind of movie.
Frankly, I have no idea what this movie is trying to do or say. The tag line is
The Pleasure Drivers energetically explores the shadow side of Los Angeles and how it gleefully relates to the gasoline of libido.
But more than half the movie is not about that at all. It's Lauren Holly kidnapping two people and her federal crime going sideways. If there's an implied sexual relationship with her client, I missed it altogether.
The movie also has brief appearances by an early-career Rachel Dratch as a gas-station attendant in a pointless scene where Holly buys cigarettes. And then Meat Loaf plays someone who seems brain damaged, too.
Mostly, the pacing is absolutely deadly and meandering - which leads one to the inescapable conclusion this movie is boring. There are lots of shots of people looking at LA, which maybe means something to people in LA, but to the rest of us... not so much. Characters go about their business in ways that don't advance anything (note the scene with Rachel Dratch) and which aren't really character moments. Scenes seem to begin to early and end too late. But it feels like a director's decision, not that of the editor.
It's a movie with about a 100 minute runtime that felt like 2.5 hours.
The movie was directed by the cinematographer of Pulp Fiction, and you can't fault the look of the movie (or at least what I gathered of it from the transfer I got, which seemed imperfect). You've never heard of anything else the person who wrote the movie wrote. And the producers all have a minimum number of credits. So how and why this got made is a mystery.
Further, the movie shares at least three actors with the 2006 film Fatwa, which we also watched (Holly, Chabert and Angus Macfayden). And I can only think Lauren Holly, as an exec producer on Fatwa, recruited those actors to that movie or brought them to this one. Also, Chabert would work with Billy Zane on Ghost of Goodnight Lane, but that would be about eight years later (and she shares no scenes with him in this film).
I've previously said that after Mean Girls, Chabert entered into a very weird career twilight zone that I don't really understand. Moving away from teen roles, she wound up leaning hard into the indie movie world, only resurfacing in another big studio movie with Ghosts of Girlfriends Past in 2009. But she hung in there in a variety of parts, making sure she was playing a college student or an adult until she landed her first Hallmark movies. This role (and her role in Fatwa) definitely has that vibe of "I'm going to prove I can take risks and do whatever needs to be done". But, oddly, this movie really feels like it's failing her, like the filmmakers just come off as dirty old men rather than honestly looking at what the character is while hand waving the movie's depth.
Is it stupid?
It's a movie that literally includes a guy getting pegged by a gun (and loving it) as the culmination of his eros/ thanatos dichotomy he introduces at the end of the movie. But it doesn't... mean or say anything other than a big "see what we did here? Clever, right?"
There's movies like Possession that are baffling, but keep you interested and make you want to stick with it and sort it out because unlocking the movie is just out of grasp. And there's movies like this that feel like pretentious nonsense that mistake what they're saying with profundity and what feels like bad editing with edginess.
Neither funny, nor action-packed, nor particularly clever nor interesting, you're going to just be left with the vague knowledge that you once saw this movie, and it absolutely was a thing you once saw.
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