V.I. Warschawski Reviewed by Linda Lopez McAlister For The Women's Show, WMNF-FM, Tampa, FL I have to confess my secret vice this morning. When I want to kick back and relax and go into complete escapist mode, I succumb to my addiction to paperback murder mysteries that feature women detectives. It all started years ago with the first Amanda Cross mystery (imagine, Kate Fansler a young woman assistant professor of English at Columbia solving a murder on campus--that was heady stuff to me a young assistant professor of philosophy at a school not far away). But since Amanda Cross is a pseudonym for Carolyn Heilbrun--a real professor of English with classes to teach and "serious" books to write--she wasn't producing new Kate Fansler mysteries fast enough to feed my addiction. To the rescue came Sara Paretzky with her Chicago based woman P.I. none other than V.I. Warschawski--much tougher and more streetwise than Kate had been--and much better written (sorry Carolyn, but it's true). Like all addictions it continued to grow and I needed more mysteries more often, so over the years I've added Kate Delafield and Kinsey Millhone and a host of other women detectives, insurance investigators, medical examiners, etc. to my list. My heart, however, still belongs to the one I consider the best of them all: V. I. Warschawski. Imagine my mixed feelings when I heard V.I. was coming to the screen, to be played by Katherine Turner, an actor I've never really warmed up to. The Big Question was are they going to ruin V.I.--as so many feminist novels, pulp or otherwise, have been ruined being translated to the screen. The answer, to my utter relief, is NO they haven't ruined it. In fact the film V.I. Warschavski, even though it's a cut and paste job drawing elements from several of the Sara Paretsky novels, remains remarkably true to the spirit and feeling of those novels. Katherine Turner's V.I. is not the V.I. I have had in my imagination all these years, of course not, but she is an acceptable alternative version. She's tough, smart, warm, funny, and you can believe her in Reebocks and sweats and in her $200 Bruno Magli pumps. She can take a punch in the face and she can dish it out in some most unladylike ways, including, literally speaking, with a nut cracker. Which reminds me, this is one of those films where you should just ignore negative reviews coming from male film critics. I've been out of town so I don't know what the local guys had to say, but the reviewer for USA Today still hasn't recovered from his trauma over that nutcracker scene. I'm beginning to concoct a theory to the effect that anytime a female character literally or symbolically threatens a male character's private parts in a film, 75% of the male critics are going to hate the film no matter what. They see that and they go into shock or something and can't bring themselves to see anything else--even when the person on the receiving end of the kick or whatever is the grossest of villains, as is the case here. One of the most enjoyable things about this film is the relationship that develops between V.I. and Kat, a 13-year-old girl (played perfectly by Angela Goethals) left in V.I.'s care by her father, a hockey player for the Chicago Blackhawks, just before he gets blown sky high in a suspicious explosion. V.I.'s other female friends Sal, who owns and tends bar at the Golden Glow Tavern in the Loop, and Lottie a physician in a storefront clinic, play only minor roles in this film. Played up is her relationship with Murray, a newspaper reporter, and Lt. Mallory, a police detective and old friend of V.I.'s late policeman father. As in the V.I. Warschawski books the city of Chicago is a major character here, and the boat chase in the Chicago river is heady stuff. This is a summertime action-escape film. As with books there is trash and then there is good trash. V.I. Warschawski, the movie, lives up to its literary predecessors: it's good trash. For the WMNF Women's Show, this is Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and Film.