The Forgettable 2002 Crime Drama Artworks Illustrates Why Star Virginia Madsen Needed a Comeback
For the record, at no point in Artworks does anyone hang upside down on a rope.
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As a pop culture writer I am a connoisseur of meaningless coincidences. Last week, for example, I watched two Rosario Dawson movies back to back that were sold as lighthearted comedies but that were actually about a tortured protagonist still grieving the death of his child in a car accident in Clerks III and The Haunted Mansion.
I kicked off this week, in sharp contrast, by writing up an episode of True Detective in which Matthew McConaughey plays a tortured genius eccentric who never got over the death of his baby AND 2002’s Artworks, an excruciatingly inessential Virginia Madsen movie where, you guessed it, her character is tormented by the death of her baby.
It will surprise no one to learn that a generic, forgettable Virginia Madsen vehicle from the early oughts does not handle the sensitive subject of a baby’s death in a more sensitive and mature fashion than True Detective, one of the most acclaimed television shows of all time, does.
Artworks is particularly clumsy in its handling of frustrated protagonist Emma’s grief. The movie even has the appalling taste and questionable judgment to begin with a lurid flashback, shot from Emma’s perspective, of her preemie being taken away from her for unknown reason.
The impossibly melodramatic scene is filmed and edited like a horror movie and while having a baby die upon leaving the womb would, indeed, be a horrific experience it probably wouldn’t feel like something out of a lesser Saw sequel.
Artworks returns again and again to Emma’s grief over her baby’s death as a catalyst for everything that follows. Emma and her worthless, no good, barely in the movie piece of shit husband erected a nursery for the baby that was not to be that Emma visits when she wants to experience the purest, most intense form of sadness imaginable.
The death of a baby leads very directly to the dissolution of Matthew McConaughey’s marriage in True Detective. In Artworks, however, the death of a baby also leads to the dissolution of a marriage.
Then again it’s never exactly clear why she married this dolt in the first place. He seems very annoyed by his impossibly beautiful wife’s grief. He apparently thinks that an afternoon is the appropriate time to grieve a dead baby, or a full day at most.
This ignoramus glares at his wife in excruciating psychological pain with an expression that silently but incontestably conveys, “Could you stop the womanly weeping? It’s distracting me from what’s important in life, which is playing golf with my colleagues in the insurance game.”
Emma is also a talented artist, or at least we are led to believe she is. The almost impressively unsympathetic creep she’s married to is equally unenthused about his wife’s artistic endeavors.
Emma’s crappy hubby is barely in the film. He exists only to be insensitive and give his wife an excellent reason to cheat.
Earlier in her career Madsen specialized in playing beautiful femme fatales who engaged in flagrant infidelity and committed crimes because they were bad down to the core.
In Artworks, however, Madsen plays a beautiful older woman who engages in flagrant infidelity and commits crimes because she’s a good woman who has been dealt a bad hand and deserves better.
She may do things that are technically illegal but she’s doing them in order to escape her dreary old life and enthusiastically pursue a richer, more satisfying existence.
Emma’s first inkling that life might have more to offer her than a sexless, loveless marriage to a hubby who seems to have already forgotten about his dead baby comes when she visits an art gallery run by hunky Brett (Rick Rossovich).
Rossovich rose to modest fame in the 1980s largely, if not exclusively, on the basis of his towering frame and rugged good looks. He’s best known as the simpleton heartthrob who woos Daryl Hannah’s character with Steve Martin’s honeyed words in the hit Cyrano De Bergerac riff Roxanne.
Rossovich was also killed by the title character in The Terminator and played a handsome man in uniform in Top Gun. According to Wikipedia Rossovich apparently retired from acting shortly after making Artworks. I’m not sure if the two are related but I can see how even an actor of modest, or even non-existent ambition could look at a movie like Artworks and wonder why they even bothered making more movies when he could quit acting altogether and live comfortably on his investments in Italy.
Rossovich is understandably attracted to Emma. It isn’t long until Emma is betraying her wedding vows for ecstatic romps in the hay with the art-loving stud.
Artworks is not quite an erotic thriller. It’s not much of anything but it does feature a LOT of sex scenes of extremely low quality.
They’re the usual blur of decontextualized male and female body parts writhing about in simulated ecstasy. I could be wrong but it sure seems like the leads did not do their own sex scenes. They may not have even been in the same country when the filmmakers were having two anonymous body doubles half-ass it through sex scenes that wouldn’t even excite a fourteen year old boy.
Emma works in security. Bret works in art. The two decide to join forces by robbing the valuable paintings of Bret’s clients, selling them on the black market and then replacing them with forgeries.
Bret recruits a worker at his gallery who has been to jail and consequently has criminal skills he and Emma lack. It isn’t long until the trio are committing all sorts of crimes.
Dabbling in the criminal world has a wonderful effect on Emma’s mood. She’s happy and excited and, perhaps more than anything, horny for the first time in ages. Also I’m pretty sure she no longer cares about her baby daughter’s death.
Okay, that might not be true but she does undergo a dramatic transformation. One might even say that this gorgeous middle-aged woman gets her groove back by shtupping a man who can’t get enough of her and her body.
Unfortunately Emma and Bret aren’t very good at doing crimes so they attract the attention of Emma’s cop father Howard (Daniel von Bargen). Howard loves his daughter but, being a lawman, he does not love that she’s breaking the law.
Emma wears a wire to bust her partner in crime and horniness despite still very much being into him.
Artworks is a nothing burger of a movie with a deeply empty happy ending where Emma and Bret smooch lustily after he’s done serving an exceedingly light sentence.
This is sadly indicative of the wildly unimportant movies Madsen was making at this stage in her career. Thankfully a comeback, the role of a lifetime and an Oscar nomination lurked in the very near future in the form of 2004’s Sideways.
Like the character she plays here, Madsen deserved much more than the crap life was tossing her way. Thankfully she would be getting her due tantalizingly soon.
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