T's Take on BABY FACE

Babyface: vicious trollop or Machiavellian mastermind? I'm willing to classify her as both. The victim of abuse as a young woman, Babyface was given philosophic council, possibly in error. We follow Lily (Babyface) as she develops into something more than a user, more than a grifter or drifting boyhowdy. She becomes a kind of systematic, sociopolitical succubus who undertakes the dismantling of men as a full time job, a kind of double agent biding her time with tedious menial work on her arduous way to the top. We watch her slink from floor to floor in the only way she knows how: she hooks a man, she ensured the two of them will be caught together, and uses the opportune meeting with her beaux's immediate supervisor to shack up with him instead, discarding her previous occupant like a hermit crab having outgrown its shell.

This movie sends two messages, and I think I understand the reasoning. In her father's speakeasy she meets an elder, learned man. He introduces her to an edition of Nietzsche I can't be bothered to recall and councils to her exploit the men she finds Of Use. True, by simple virtue of her life experience and overall attitude toward life she seems virtually cut out to leave particles of business-types like the pathetic gaggle of management unfortunate enough to cross her path swirling in her wake... But there's something about her mentor/father figure that I just don't buy.

Like Nietzsche himself might of all life, the man assumes the young Lily completely beyond redemption or happiness. He assumes she could never be content or at peace contributing little and accepting little, working her way up a ladder legitimately, or depending on humanity as a means of self-propagation. No, the only way that the intelligent, self-reliant, infinitely resilient and capable young Lily could possibly make something of herself is by finding something previously established and rending it limb from limb as a means to an end. Very practical, but by all means extremely dim in his view of our young lass.

By the end of the movie we find Lily at odds with herself for the path she's chosen, and realizes the all that glitters isn't gold. She leaves the money she's accrued on the floor of an ambulance to comfort the only man she's come to care about. The man, of course, who attempted suicide after she left him hanging with a billion-dollar lawsuit hanging around his neck as a direct result of his involvement with her. Not the first man to try ending his life on her account, naturally. I hardly felt a sense of redemption watching her come rushing to the aid of this man, when two had fallen previous in their misbegotten flailings over her love-em-and-leave-em attitude.

I understand Babyface in her simplistic way, but I feel like the story was a little too realistically cold and opportunistic to leave me comfortable. I like that in a movie.