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Do porn movies really have read-throughs? This is probably the least impolite question raised by Finding Bliss, a movie supposedly based on the experiences writer-director Julie Davis, who toiled as an editor in adult entertainment while scrambling for a break as a legitimate filmmaker. I say supposedly because the scenes in which the cast and crew gather to practice their groaning and grunting are just a handful of the endless moments that fail to provide insight into the porn industry, filmmaking, or basic human behavior.
The read-through conceit could have been included for comedic effect, but Davis lacks a satirical or even lightly comic angle on her promising idea. Instead, she uses the scenes to establish ham-fisted situations: Jody (Leelee Sobieski), the earnest young filmmaker who can't catch a break, has sexual hang-ups and is squeamish about her new surroundings at Grind Productions; Jeff (Matthew Davis) is a cynical director, himself a former wunderkind now unsatisfied with the boilerplate pornography screenplays he must work with (I won't ask if porn movies have screenplays; I'm sure some of them do. Davis, though, does a thorough job of convincing us that these particular screenplays are wholly unnecessary).
In exchange for use of the facilities at Grind to work on her own non-porn project, Jody agrees to perform script doctoring, too. Based on their conversations, the Jody-Jeff collaboration may be a case of adding zero to zero: they speak in poorly phrased exposition like "I may be a loser at the dating game, but I have an Ivy League education!" and "How's that Best Film award holding up?" For that matter, Jody's film, a feature-length dithering jag about the loss of virginity is, by all limited evidence, deadly (it's also called On the "Virge" -- a title that must have been kicking around either Jody's or Davis's notebook since at least tenth grade). We only see her shooting the same pivotal scene over and over -- just as, when editing pornography, she seems stuck on a single (and relatively chaste) sequence, so limited is the movie's imagination -- and it appears roughly on par with the self-financed go-nowhere cult disaster The Room.
The idea of porn actors drafted into a serious film is amusing and even sort of sweet, and Jamie Kennedy, playing the dim performer stage-named Dick Harder, grasps this, tossing off some funny dumb-guy lines. Then again, maybe they just sound funny in comparison to the heroine spouting stilted, meaningless Woody Allen-ish jargon (her point of view, we're told, is informed by "nuanced romanticism") and Davis missing comic opportunities with punishing regularity. Instead of having fun with Denise Richards and her former starlet image, for example, she miscasts her twice: first as a twentysomething and then as a stellar actress. It's not just Richards, though; Sobieski also plays noticeably below her actual age while acting wooden enough to pass as someone with far less experience.
The age disparities make a kind of fumbling sense. In many ways, Jody suffers from an arrested adolescence, perched awkwardly between fascination with and fear of sex. But unlike Judd Apatow or even some of his imitators, Davis doesn't find reality-based hooks, nor does she particularly encourage her characters to grow up, instead relying on sub-sitcom farce. She previously made Amy's Orgasm, another attempt at a frank, sex-positive romantic comedy that wound up being almost unbearably dopey. I applaud her ambition if not her skills.
So it's not much fun to beat up on Finding Bliss. It appears to be a low-budget labor of love like Jody's film, or at least I assume that's why it looks like a cheap cable sitcom and, once in a while, sort of like a PowerPoint presentation. But if this is Jody's ending, heartfelt as it wants to be, it's not a very happy one.
