Movie Breakdown: Pixie (Noah)
Pre-Screening Stance:
Olivia Cooke was fantastic in both Thoroughbreds and especially Sound of Metal. Pixie looks a little like a pastiche of ’90s indie crime flicks but here’s hoping if so that Cooke can elevate the material.
Post-Screening Ramble:
I have a tendency when I’m reviewing to scribble down other movies that the movie I’m watching reminds me of. I don’t believe a movie lives or dies on its originality, but the more films I write down is usually a fairly decent indicator of how derivative (purposefully or not) a film is. I wrote down a lot for Pixie and then when I got tired of doing so, I just said them out loud. Set in Ireland, the film bounces around between low-rent criminals as they make terrible decisions involving a bag of drugs and a bag of cash that leads to murder and mayhem. Pixie (Olivia Cooke) is the precocious daughter of a local crimelord (Colm Meany) who’s just trying to get out of the small Irish town that’s holding her back. It’s the type of film where the bad choices pile and pile and pile until someone or something knocks everything over. This film feels so situated in a certain era of crime films – the late ’90s – it almost feels like a parody, with the director’s clear adoration of Tarantino, Boondock Saints, the Coen Brothers and even Martin McDonagh visible on every frame and every wisp of dialogue, each scene a knowing wink to the audience as if asking, “Remember this type of movie?” It’s really only saved by Cooke’s performance as Pixie. The actor is so good at playing a certain type of fragility, the kind held up by sheer attitude but not too many hits away from shattering. Her Pixie just wants to get out of dodge, but the world transpires to keep her moving, plotting and being a badass, just to survive. It bodes well for Cooke that she can manage to cobble together a memorable performance from a film so steeped in its influences it’s barely memorable on its own.
One Last Thing:
Even some of the like “morality” jokes in this film feel dated. The shock on a character’s face when he learns another character takes pictures of herself having sex feels dragged out of the mid-90s. Same with a handful of recurring jokes that border on homophobic. C’mon fellas, it’s 2021.
