Oscar-winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black (“Milk,’’ “J. Edgar’’) turns director for “Virginia,’’ a bravely demented semi-autobiographical drama that never lives up to the potential of its high-powered cast.
Another Oscar winner, Jennifer Connelly (“A Beautiful Mind’’) stars as the title character, a childlike schizophrenic dying of lung cancer whose teenage son (Harrison Gilbertson) has become her reluctant caretaker.
Awkwardly structured as a series of flashbacks that follow a melancholy opening, this oddball film takes place in the 1980s in the fictional beach town of Oceana, Va. (unconvincingly impersonated by locations in Michigan).
Virginia’s illness comes at an awkward time — her longtime lover, the married sheriff (Ed Harris), is beginning to distance himself while he runs for the state senate on a family-values platform.
Our ailing heroine makes some pathetic attempts to get his attention — a feigned pregnancy gets some temporary cash payments. But an inept attempt at a bank robbery in a gorilla mask ultimately has more dire consequences.
Meanwhile, her son — who’s decided, based on a high school genetics class, that the sheriff isn’t his dad — decides to pursue the sheriff’s daughter (Emma Roberts), which makes the situation even more awkward.
The couple elope, with mom in tow, to Atlantic City, where they also try to find Virginia’s long-ago male nurse at a hospital where she was a patient after her parents’ death. Her son is planning a move to San Francisco that would be funded through another robbery — one not quite masterminded by his cross-dressing boss at an amusement park (Toby Jones) and an idiotic friend (Paul Walter Hauser).
The sheriff, a devout Mormon with secretly kinky tastes, is not happy about any of this — particularly since the governor, who is running for president, is coming to Oceana for a July Fourth photo op.
And the sheriff’s wife (Amy Madigan, Harris’ real-life longtime spouse) is even more displeased when she becomes apparently the last person in Oceana to learn about her husband’s philandering.
Black loses control of “Virginia’’ as it lurches from political satire to unintended black comedy to mom-and-son melodrama. But the performances and the movie’s sheer crazy audacity make it watchable.