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If there's any merit to that Sarah Palin joke about
hockey moms, lipstick and pit bulls, then the suburban housewife
thriller While She Was Out might very well be the punch
line, in more ways than one. And stepping up to the plate
to play that grueling, get even uncharacteristic role is
Kim Basinger, who seems to have been a triumphant survivor
of some sort of similar abusive domestic ordeal in her own
life. Though without bringing Alec Baldwin into it, you
do the math.***
While She Was Out unfolds one dreary, rain-drenched
Christmas Eve in an upscale suburban gated community. Delia
(Kim Basinger) is a stressed out housewife and mother of
grade school twins who is too much of a nervous wreck to
keep a tidy house. And when her brutal hubby (Craig Sheffer)
returns from work he makes his displeasure over her disobedience
known by knocking her around, a state of affairs she seems
to have been enduring for some time.***
When Delia notices that she's run out of gift wrap
for the presents, she heads to the mall, where an unfortunate
confrontation with a gang of thuggish youths with names
like Chuckie and Huey, leads to a night of terror in the
woods. But lucky for Delia that she's filled her depressed
existence with distractions like Pilates lessons and car
mechanic classes, as she shows her stuff fleeing through
the woods from her tormentors with auto repair toolbox in
hand as potential weapons of ass-kicker destruction. And,
an imaginative knack for kissing her way out of a bad situation.***
Morphing in a dire emergency into a kind of Dirty Harriet,
Delia is up to trying her hand as a match for any madman,
in particular the head horny lunatic Chuckie (Lukas Haas).
It seems that if there's one upside to domestic violence,
it can hone the victim's repertoire of terror tactics, who
knew.***
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Final Words:
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Written and directed by an apparently
ballsy babe (Susan Montford), what else, and executive produced
by Basinger and that horror honcho himself, Guillermo Del
Toro, While She Was Out gets the creepy atmosphere just right,
despite stretches of predictability here and there. For instance,
why do victims always do dumb things like flee down deserted
streets when there are crowded areas of potential safety in
the opposite direction. In any case, Basinger proves with
her sorely tested character that she's not just a pretty face,
and up to juggling lipstick and pit bulls simultaneously.***
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