The Babysitters (2007)

In all of contemporary cinema, there may be nothing more disheartening than seeing a uniquely gifted and brilliant actress who opts to settle by debuting in sensationalistic, tawdry garbage. Those are the thoughts that come to mind while watching Katherine Waterston (daughter of actor Sam Waterston) portray babysitter-turned-high-school "madam" Shirley Lyner in neophyte director David Ross's lurid melodrama The Babysitters. The film, as it were, follows the travails of high school junior Lyner, who culls the moneymaking opportunity of her life when she accepts a job sitting for the son of suburban couple Michael (John Leguizamo) and Gail Beltran (Cynthia Nixon), then lapses into an affair with Michael on the way home and accepts a substantial amount of payola for the babysitting assignment. One or two payments and a word to her friends later, and she's setting up business as the resident high school madam, with eight or ten fellow students working for her, "barely legal" prostitutes masquerading as babysitters. The picture feels as sleazy and as icky as it sounds, but suffers from too much naïveté to become genuinely shocking, an effect it seems to desperately crave. Instead, it leaves one with a sense of inescapable depression and nausea. And though it obviously could have been much more explicit (the majority of the sex is implied and not seen), the exploitative way in which Ross films Waterston feels wholly unforgivable. Consider the first shot, the expository one that introduces Shirley to the audience - where she waltzes in slow-mo into a room full of unbridled teen-on-adult kinkiness, wearing an undersized, presumably wet t-shirt with her breasts semi-transparent - or a topless lovemaking scene with Waterston and Leguizamo that leaves little to our imagination in terms of foreplay. (We may feel, at times, that we've wandered into Bilitis by mistake). Equally unforgivable is the complete lack of competence on the part of Ross, who seems incapable of providing coherent insights into his characters. In terms of dialogue, several scenes from the first 40 minutes of the film feature characters stumbling through exchanges with one another, communicating virtually nothing, and leaving the audience baffled. Everyone seems lost in a daze - what are their motivations, and what are they thinking? It is obvious, from the making-of interviews on the DVD, that Ross and most of his cast seriously wanted to impart depth and thematic resonance to the material; as commendable as those intentions are, this never happens, and even the central theme that Ross cites in the making-of materials (using the film to explore the distinction between physical and emotional intimacy) feels two-dimensional and sophomoric. The director displays visual ineptitude as well - on many occasions, he'll cut to an obscure look shot (such as Leguizamo's character staring at a napkin holder that Lyner has rearranged, or staring at tiny wooden figures outside of a toy house in his basement) and we scratch our heads trying to determine what the characters are looking at - not a promising sign. To an astonishing degree, Waterston manages to rise above this material, and she reveals such subtle emotional changes in numerous scenes that one realizes she's inherited the acting chops of her peerless father. (She carries Sam's suave elegance, has an equally distinguished countenance, and projects a similar aura). If this film heralds the arrival of Katherine as a gifted new actress, one can only hope that she finds material more worthy of her abilities and intelligence, that doesn't threaten to overshadow her dexterity as a performer. All told, The Babysitters represents a significant compromise on every level. ~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide