A Kinder, Gentler John Waters? By Michael O'Sullivan Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, September 25, 1998

In John Water's "Pecker," Edward Furlong is catapulted to fame. (Fine Line) Director: John Waters Cast: Edward Furlong; Christina Ricci; Lili Taylor; Brendan Sexton; Mary Kay Place Running Time: 1 hour, 25 minutes For profanity, sacrilege, exotic dancing by both genders and copulating rodents

It's also sweet, sentimental, rather funny and, as John Waters films go, surprisingly gentle. Over time, the Baltimore director of such early schlock classics as "Pink Flamingos" and "Desperate Living" has mellowed, and the castration, murder and excrement that he has loved so well have been gradually evaporating from his ever more mainstream work. In some ways, even movies like "There's Something About Mary" and "BASEketball" go further than this latest spoof, which may talk with a trashy bravado but deep inside has a heart of gold.

Taking his nickname for his childhood habit of nibbling at his food like a bird, Pecker (Edward Furlong) is a teenage shutterbug whose hobby is snapping pictures of the eccentric denizens of Baltimore's working-class Hampden neighborhood. In this cloistered world, Pecker wants nothing more out of life than to click away with his vintage camera and exhibit his out-of-focus photos of strippers and cockroaches on the walls of the Sub Pit, the sandwich shop where he works. Then one day a visiting Manhattan art dealer named Rorey (Lili Taylor) discovers his raw talent and proceeds to rock his complacent world.

When the attention of the national media comes crashing down on Pecker's subjects, his family and friends, nothing is ever the same. Sugar-addicted sibling Little Chrissy (Lauren Hulsey) is visited by child-welfare workers; big sister Tina (Martha Plimpton) loses her job when her employer, a gay male strip club called the Fudge Palace, begins to get too much business from straight clientele; his thrift shop proprietor mom (Mary Kay Place) must put up with celebrity photographer Greg Gorman (playing himself) as he commandeers her Bargain Hut shop for a fashion shoot; and grandmother Memama (Jean Schertler) is exposed when her shrine to the Virgin Mary – complete with a ventriloquist's dummy given to squawking "Full of grace!" – is revealed to be a hoax.

Even Pecker's relationships with girlfriend Shelley (Christina Ricci) and best buddy Matt (Brendan Sexton III) become strained when Shelley is mocked by the art press for her work in a laundromat and Matt's celebrity prevents him from being able to shoplift in peace.

So far, it sounds like any other John Waters movie, with its requisite cast of freaks. But Waters's once-abrasive edge has now been worn down to a nub of affable smoothness.

This is not exactly a criticism, since the filmmaker's infamous abuse of his audience was often difficult to take for those who had not acquired a taste for it. Here and there in "Pecker" are still deliberate attempts to shock – a shot of amorous rats, a close-up of female pubic hair and a Fudge Palace activity that may give new meaning to the term "tea bag" – but Waters's obvious affection for his home town and his fictional characters is so overriding that one can't help but love them too, not only the downscale urbanites of Hampden but the hoity-toity New York art snobs that the film indulgently mocks.

It's as if in his maturity Waters can't find it within himself to hate anyone anymore, least of all his public following who, in an aesthetic version of the sadomasochist relationship, adores him for the way he mistreats them. But "Pecker" isn't about hate anyway; it's about love and the end of irony.

When Shelley and Pecker return to Baltimore after their first disastrous trip to the Big Apple, she falls to her knees and kisses the ground of the bus station in relief. Now, I've never tasted the fragrant earth of Charm City myself, but "Pecker" is such a screwball hymn of praise to old-fashioned family values that I felt my own lips puckering up in vicarious affection for Waters's twisted Norman Rockwell vision of his hometown.