Well-meaning 'Pumpkin' is just embarrassing

A love story that repeatedly crosses the line between well-meaning and offensively inept, "Pumpkin" matches a shallow sorority girl, Carolyn (Christina Ricci), with a disabled boy, Pumpkin (Hank Harris), who turns out to be not so challenged as he appears.

Indeed, though he's introduced in a wheelchair and he seems incapable of speech, he's soon walking, talking and flirting with Carolyn, whose sorority is coaching handicapped athletes for the regional Challenged Games. Carolyn already has a hunky boyfriend, she writes vacuous poems with titles like "Ode to Pasadena," and she's addicted to questions like "Why can't everything be beautiful and perfect?"

But she's taken with Pumpkin's vacant stare and his newfound abilities to engage her boyfriend in a fistfight and sprint toward the finish line in a relay race. "Only people who suffer can grow into beauty," she prattles as Pumpkin grows into an athlete who hardly seems handicapped at all.

This is wish-fulfillment fantasy at its most ruthless. When Carolyn tries suicide by downing every pill in her parents' home, there are no consequences. When one character drives his car off a cliff, the car bursts into flames and crashes on a rock, yet he's somehow alive and conscious in the next scene.

It's hard to believe that Ricci not only accepted this role but co-produced this movie, while taking Oscar nominees Brenda Blethyn (as Pumpkin's mother) and Nina Foch (in a cameo role) along for the ride. Perhaps she saw the script as a twisted variation on "Clueless," in which she plays the meddling Valley Girl who makes a mess of matchmaking (in the film's most embarrassing scene, she takes Pumpkin, her boyfriend and a girlfriend on a double date to the beach). Perhaps she intended the movie to be a plea for understanding, but here's where well-meaning turns into offensive.

The film's co-directors cannot allow Pumpkin to be loved for what he is; they almost immediately remake him in the image of a more acceptable boyfriend. All the potshots they take at sorority sadists and Carolyn's philistine mother (who thinks the "mystery" Carolyn finds in Pumpkin "sounds terrible") fail to hit their marks because the stakes keep changing.

Under the circumstances, almost no one comes off well. Ricci is most convincing when her character is being particularly idiotic, but she strains to make Carolyn add up. Harris and Blethyn are trapped in one-note parts. The movie is shot in a broad, obvious style, including over-the-top reaction shots and banal romantic montages (complete with a ghastly explanatory theme song), that suggests it was made for a smaller screen. It certainly belongs nowhere else.

John Hartl can be reached at johnhartl@yahoo.com.