Nobody knows quite what to do with Goldie Hawn these days. She used to be a great bubble-headed comedian, from "Laugh-In" to Private Benjamin, but time's swift arrow can wound a great bubble-headed comedian ' witness Lucille Ball ' turning her from a happy clown into a sad clown. With her generous curves, her golden tresses and her California complexion, Hawn has always looked wonderful. The thing is, she now looks wonderful "for her age," as magazine profilers insist on adding. And like the rest of us, she just keeps getting older. There's a huskiness in Hawn's voice now, and it's hard to be daffy and husky at the same time. There's also a tightness around the eyes, and it's hard to be tight and loose as a goose at the same time. In her mid-50s, Hawn is arguably as sexy as ever, just not as funny. Unfortunately, The Banger Sisters asks her to be both. As Suzette, a rock groupie from the '60s who, like Austin Powers, is still stuck in them, Hawn packs herself into a variety of get-ups involving spandex and leather. She's also stuffed a couple of breast enhancers down her tops, which are supposed to indicate plastic surgery. If you ask me, the overall effect is less hippie chick than biker chick, but I'll be the first to admit that Hawn pulls it off. As a woman who's still handing out free love some three decades after Woodstock, she looks at once sexy and trashy, cheerful and pathetic. And it all might have made for one hell of a performance if writer-director Bob Dolman had come through with either the writing or the directing.
When she gets fired from her bartending job at L.A.'s Whiskey a Go-Go and needs some instant cash, Suzette turns to Susan Sarandon's Lavinia. Suzette hasn't seen "Vinnie" in years, although they have quite a history together, having balled just about every rock star they could get their hands on back in the day. But Vinnie has subsequently cleaned up her act, tending to her husband and two teenage daughters in how-dry-I-am Phoenix. If Suzette, all these years later, is still a hothouse flower, Vinnie is wilting on the vine, but not for long. And I must admit, I was all but salivating at the prospect of these two actresses going at each other, the one up-front and laid-back, the other uptight and down beaten. Let it all hang out, sisters.
Alas, there's little to hang out, Dolman's connect-the-dots script being almost devoid of humor. Doesn't he realize that with a story like this all the good stuff is supposed to be between the dots? Hawn gets laughs only when she cusses or talks crudely, which she does often, admittedly. "When he came, it was like someone in an electric chair," Suzette says about Geoffrey Rush's Harry, a suicidal writer she picked up on the way to Phoenix and then coaxed out of a writer's block. Rush is screamingly unfunny, whereas Sarandon, who's not much of a comedian, is quietly unfunny. The movie never explains why Vinnie changed or why Suzette didn't, but it's in stranding these two glorious actresses that Dolan has some real explaining to do.
