'Milk Money' (PG-13)

"Milk Money" is a preposterous movie about a boy, a babe and a car, all of them functioning minimally in what is essentially a showcase for Melanie Griffith's body.

Griffith looks flashy and refurbished, and someone has come up with the perfect idea for displaying her: Cast her as a prostitute so she can wear skimpy clothes and peel some of them off occasionally. Unfortunately -- and there are many "unfortunatelys" about this enterprise -- her hooker garb makes her look just like Cowgirl Barbie. But it does show most of what there is to see.

The story is that these three boys who live in a generic white-bread suburb want to see a girl naked. They seem to be about 10 years old. One of them (cute Michael Patrick Carter) has no mom, because she died when he was born, leaving his dad (Ed Harris) to muddle through alone. The boys pool their milk money and come up with more than $100 to pay a prostitute to show them hers. They ride their bikes many miles over large highways to get to the city, where they manage to find the lovely V (Griffith) to hire.

What with one thing and another, V ends up borrowing her pimp's car to take them home, and then it breaks down, and there she is, stuck in the suburbs! With a bachelor dad who thinks she's a math tutor. What ensues is a lot of tee-hee boy humor, which is only a slight improvement from the fart jokes the boys exchange in the beginning.

Some bad guys go after her, the motherless boy wants her for his mom, and it all ends with a big car chase, a fire and a change of occupation for V, who also manages to find a big bag of money.

The really pernicious thing about this endeavor is not the cliched script or the goofy plot, credited to John Mattson. It's the way maternal love has been mixed up with sexuality, sending heaven knows what kind of message to the kids who are supposed to be allowed to see this PG-13 film. Griffith's character seduces both son and father -- the former with junk food and attention but also by allowing herself to be his guinea pig for a classroom sex education lecture. The way V relates to him, a child, is not very different from the way she relates to his father, whom she goes to bed with.

There is nothing wrong with portraying mothers as good-looking and sexy, or whores as having hearts of gold. But twisting a boy's need for a mother into a leer up her skirt (even if he does cover his eyes) is kind of sickening.

Perhaps a more skilled performer could have given this role more complexity. But Griffith is the kind of actress who lets the background music do most of the work, except when she cries. Her expression ranges from blank to breathing. Possibly as a result, Ed Harris is constantly in motion, acting for two. At least he knows what he's doing. Director Richard Benjamin seems to have been content to focus the camera on Griffith's legs, boobs etc., especially a lot of long shots of her walking in short skirts and high heels.

You could buy a lot of milk with the money you'd waste going to this movie.

Copyright The Washington Post

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