Cynical gone wrong

There’s a scene in “Pretty Persuasion,” Marcos Siega’s broad swipe at high school, the entertainment industry, racism, dog love, local news, bad parenting and pretty much you name it, in which a teacher berates a student while standing in front of a chalkboard with the definition of “satire” written on it. “Irony, sarcasm or caustic wit used to attack or expose folly, vice or stupidity,” it reads, even though by then the movie is too neck-deep in cheap psychology to qualify.

The bit with the chalkboard is intended as a wink to the audience, but it’s more like the dramatic equivalent of serving guests a culinary failure alongside the picture-perfect magazine photo of the dish that inspired it. It’s too bad that the satire is not more pointed, because “Pretty Persuasion” is outrageously funny in short blasts, mainly thanks to James Woods at his most gleefully depraved.

Screenwriter Skander Hadim descends on his characters with all the avenging fury a baby cynic can muster, and erstwhile music video director Siega renders them in a stylish pop-Goth way that’s all form, no discernible function. The movie begins at an audition (where else?), as rows of cantilevered aspiring Jessica Albas await their chance to writhe and swirl like soft-serve ice cream in front of a team of producers of a show called “Dysfunction.” Cool and beautiful 15-year-old Kimberly Joyce (Evan Rachel Wood) delivers a creditable bad-sitcom version of a sexy French exchange student, then goes back to school at the prestigious Roxbury Academy in Beverly Hills, a gloomy monument to privilege where the very rich pay top dollar to dump their unloved kids.

Kimberly, whose home life makes “Mommy Dearest” look like a child-rearing manual, has taken a new Palestinian student, Randa (Adi Schnall) under her wing, instructing her on the finer points of popularity, celebrity, sex, bulimia and which ethnicities are most likely to succeed in the entertainment industry. Last on her list, “no offense, is Arab.” People are too prejudiced against them, she says. Then she tells an off-color racist joke to illustrate her point.

“It starts with the parents,” the school’s squirrelly principal is fond of saying. And Kimberly’s dad Henry (Woods), an anti-Semitic pig-on-wheels who spends his days roaming his slovenly lair in his underwear and bathrobe like an unkempt Hugh Hefner, is the type who conducts business on the phone between phone sex and cocaine breaks. Absentee mom misspells Kimberly’s name and gets her age wrong on a birthday card. Stepmom is a human Barbie doll.

With such a family, in a school run by cynics and perverts and in a city where, by the movie’s lights, even winding up on the local news for perjury counts as heat, it’s no surprise that Kimberly soon devises a splashy way to lash out. Enlisting Randa and Brittany (Elisabeth Harnois) to back her, she trumps up a sexual harassment charge against their English and drama teacher, Percy Anderson (Ron Livingston), whose not being guilty doesn’t exactly make him innocent. Seething at an assignment to do a fluff piece on the school, local news reporter Emily (Jane Krakowski) sleazily pounces on the story as a way to advance her career.

What differentiates the filmmakers from Emily, of course, is their blanket disdain for everything and everyone in the film, including its tragic victim. Their scorn may set them apart from their characters, but it hardly elevates them -- or the movie. “Pretty Persuasion” is too flip to be serious and too smug to be rousing. And by the time we get around to the big reveal, which feels shoe-horned into the ending, the idea that a puppet master like Kimberly would expend her considerable gifts on the most banal of high school dramas feels ludicrous.

Wood is an intelligent actress, and her canniness emanates like a hard light, but the cynicism rubs off on her, making her vulnerable moments look like the virtuosic performances they are, rather than real emotions. Is she a victim or a perpetrator? Bright, slick and exploitative, “Pretty Persuasion” wants it both ways. Not pretty we can handle. Not persuasive is another thing altogether.

*

‘Pretty Persuasion’

MPAA rating: Unrated

Times guidelines: Nudity, strong coarse language and sexual themes.

A Samuel Goldwyn Films release. Director Marcos Siega. Screenplay by Skander Halim. Producers Matthew Weaver, Carl Levin, Todd Dagres. Music by Gilad Benamram. Costume designer Danny Glicker. Editor Nicholas Erasmus. Production designer Paul Oberman. Director of photography Ramsey Nickell. Running time: 1 hour, 44 minutes

In selected theaters