To Die For

365 Films

Entry #60

To Die For (1995)

Directed by Gus Van Sant

What inspires a director to take on a project that he or she did not initiate will always fascinate and confound me.  For every Steven Soderbergh directed all-star cast Vegas heist movie there is a Clive Owen/Naomi Watts political conspiracy stinker by Tom Tywker lurking in the mists.  While some directors blossom with a larger scale and a more accommodating budget, others wilt into a shallow pool of anonymity.  Gus Van Sant is certainly in the former character and if anybody needs proof, look no further than To Die For.  Nestled between the visionary triumph of My Own Private Idaho and his crowd-pleasing, Oscar-winning Good Will Hunting, To Die For stands now as a gateway drug to Gus Van Sant becoming a household name.  On second thought, I doubt very highly that Gus Van Sant is a household name even to this day, but just play along for the sake of argument.  I also realize that I have failed to mention the existence of 1993’s Tom Robbins adaptation, Even Cowgirls Get The Blues but that film remains unseen by me and from everything I’ve heard, it ought to remain that way.  To Die For tells the story of an ambitious wannabe TV personality who hatches a hare brained scheme to get some incredibly stupid teenagers to kill her husband in order to further her career.  Where Idaho was sympathetic and compassionate, To Die For is cynical and heartless.  While that may sound as a put down, I don’t mean it that way at all because this is the most entertaining and purely enjoyable film Gus Van Sant has ever made.  In re-watching it, I thought that it would make a perfect double feature with last year’s Bernie in terms of its zesty and satirical take on small town crime.  Bernie even apes a device from this film in the fake documentary style interviews with the characters.  To be fair, Bernie also includes testimonials from some actual people from the town where the real life story took place, but both take significant advantage of their colorful cast of characters to flesh out the various perspectives at play here.  Speaking of perspectives, the dexterity with which Van Sant moves between the different mediums and shooting styles inherent to cinema, reality TV, public access, and day time talk shows is truly remarkable.  Especially when compared to an over-wrought visual assault like Natural Born Killers, Van Sant proves his satirical hand is much more subtle and effective than the director for hire label would have you believe.  It’s not exactly groundbreaking, boundary pushing cinema, but it is simply way too much fun to ignore.  To Die For proved that Gus Van Sant is a much trickier, more surprisingly adaptive filmmaker than initially thought.  Little did we know how many more surprises he had yet to show us.