It’s rare for a headline-grabbing adaptation to fail to capitalize on the more bizarre aspects of its real-life counterpart. Yet that’s the case with Austin Peters’ “Skincare,” which, to be fair, claims to be a fictionalized version of a true-crime story about a successful celebrity beautician who allegedly hired a hitman to eliminate her rival. What’s there borrows from the real scandal to explore the female rage, jealousy, and madness festering beneath the girl-boss glamour of the early 2000s. With sleek aesthetics backed by a stirring soundscape, the filmmakers construct a captivating, atmospheric mood piece. But given a few omissions, it’s questionable why the storytellers didn’t go for the kill.
Skin is fragile (it’s the largest organ in the human body), and its job is to keep us healthy and our organs intact. It’s no surprise that the first image we see is an extreme close-up of Hope Goldman’s (Elizabeth Banks) tired face—more specifically, the cracks in the foundation covering it. It’s an apt metaphor for the wrinkles in her plan for world domination.
Her life was perfect just two weeks ago: one of the city’s top estheticians, providing slick skincare to the world’s biggest celebrities and wealthiest housewives, and her business is about to take off to the next level. Yet pressures are building. She owes her landlord (John Billingsley) back rent on her studio, located in Hollywood’s glamorous Crossroads of the World shopping complex—a fantasy setting befitting this fairy tale gone wrong. The impending launch of her home-grown skincare line (“From Italy,” as the running joke goes) is heavily dependent on the press she’s courted. And the self-proclaimed “glamour girl” is overly concerned about staying booked and busy.
Just when Hope thinks she’s got things sorted out, a new tenant moves into her apartment and turns her life upside down. Angel (Luis Gerardo Mendez) is a budding beauty stylist, and their first encounter is rocky at best. Soon after, Hope’s email is hacked, allowing someone to send explicit emails to her entire contact list. Finding herself on the receiving end of threatening text messages and personal sexual harassment, Hope enlists the help of Jordan (Lewis Pullman), a flirtatious, tanned, toned twentysomething she recently met when a client (Wendie Malick) brought him to her studio. Hope suspects Angel is the culprit behind this deliberate sabotage. But as the threatening events escalate, Hope is thrown into a tailspin, calling on her muscle, Armin (Eric Palladino), to put down her competition.
Peters and screenwriters Sam Freilich and Dering Regan don’t just satirize beauty as an industry. They also satirize the exquisitely polished lifestyle, which covers the darker dealings of the business with volatile trends, insatiable media cycles, and predatory people. Peters displays a confident sense of vision, weaving character details together with a disturbing unease, borrowing lightly from masters like Kubrick (a chase by a creepy bald man echoes Eyes Wide Shut) and De Palma (during a sporadic break-in at Hope’s house). Hope and Angel’s conflicting sensibilities are reflected in the contrasting color schemes of their inner sanctums, she in soothing light blues and white ovals, he in deep teal and youthful fuchsia. Fatima Al Qadiri’s score ranges from the haunting instrumentals you might expect to hear at a soothing spa to the thumping industrial beats, and it plays beautifully with the eclectic musical cues.
Among the film’s most glaring flaws is that Hope’s assistant, Marin (Michaela Jay “MJ” Rodriguez), is poorly written and comes across as a one-dimensional character. She has no internal character or story, and merely serves the scriptwriters’ artificial needs to move Hope from one pivotal place to another. The filmmakers are also clumsy in their handling of the revelation of who is behind Hope’s cyberbullying. The points at which we find out (years before any of the characters do), the points at which the filmmakers show us (an hour into the film), and the points at which Hope finds out (late in the third act) all come at staggered intervals. Had these details been consistent, there could have been a more poignant conclusion.
Banks gives a fine performance, though she’s played similar roles before (most recently in The Beanie Bubble ). Had this material been up to the talented actress’s standards, it could have allowed her to explore deeper aspects of the hallucinatory toxicity into which Hope was descending, a la Repulsion or Black Swan . With a razor-sharp specificity and a ripped body, Pullman (perhaps taking some cue from his father Bill’s brilliance in Ruthless People ) succeeds in embodying the kind of arrogant idiot who roams the sewer of this city. Mendes also gives solid work, polishing his character’s rougher edges with sophisticated finesse.
While creative liberties are to be expected, especially given its roots as a tabloid-style news story, it’s surprising that the filmmakers chose to omit details that would have enhanced their portrayal. Not only was Hope’s inspiration, Dawn DaLuise, a more complex and deeply flawed human being, she was someone who seemed to believe in giving people second chances, as evidenced by her associations with convicted criminals, one of whom was Nick Prugo from “The Bling Ring.” The detectives investigating her fail to believe her—an aspect that is shockingly underexplored in a film with such a markedly feminist bent. Additionally, by making Hope’s attacker a hybrid of two characters, the filmmakers confuse the bully’s motivations for targeting her: is it pure greed, preying on single women of a certain age, or simple revenge? Perhaps none of this matters in the end, and that is in itself a sentiment packaged and sold for our consumption. But it makes for a frivolous reading of showbiz.
