Ron Krauss’ Gimme Shelter is a social-problem film, the sort of earnest exploration of a tendentious topic that Stanley Kramer might have made — if Stanley Kramer were a 21st-century Tea Partier. Or maybe a 20th century John Bircher, because none of the film’s targets feel especially new.
Either way, the drama’s dog-whistle conservatism is so pernicious that it eats away at its well-meaninged core like termites. Aimed at impressionable young viewers, Gimme Shelter doesn’t kill us with kindness so much as brainwash us with it.
The subject, which Krauss insists in interviews is not really the subject, is teen pregnancy, embodied here by Vanessa Hudgens’ Apple Bailey, a 16-year-old New Jersey runaway inspired by the girls Krauss encountered in his research for this project. If there’s a reason to see this film, it’s Hudgens, the former High School Musical star re-branded as a dirty, feral creature living on the streets, surviving on whims and wiles. She’s barely recognizable at first, and the transformation she undergoes throughout the course of Gimme Shelter provides for a laudable spectrum of colors on her acting palette.
At the beginning, Apple flees her single mother, a degenerate drug addict, whom she’s finally summoned up the will to abandon. By the time she vomits on a sidewalk a few scenes later — Hollywood’s universal symbol for pregnancy — so begins the film’s descent into creeping didacticism.
Let’s start by looking at the antagonists Apple is forced to confront. Her mom, June (Rosario Dawson, seriously slummin’ it), is a ghoulish junkie with yellow teeth, an over-the-top caricature of maternal monstrousness who will stop at nothing to get her daughter back because … wait for it … she’ll get a higher welfare check. And with a baby on the way? Well, that’s even better! The word “welfare” is mentioned so many times in Gimme Shelter, and always in a negative context, that its usage deigns to compete with the Republican Party platform.
On the other side of the economic stratum, there’s Apple’s forever-distant father, Tom (Brendan Fraser), a stockbroker living with his perfectly pale nuclear family in a guard-protected mini-mansion. He bailed on his unborn child those 16 years ago; now, meeting Apple for the first time, he and his wife (Stephanie Szostak) could do without this unwanted intrusion, and they become the film’s next right-wing piñatas by trying to force Apple into an abortion. Szostak’s soulless housewife drags Apple to a dank, poorly lit clinic with a callous nurse — a conservative fantasist’s image of a scary baby-killing mill — which the girl promptly escapes.
You can probably see where this is going, and where salvation lies. Apple had spent her tortured young life shuttled between cold-hearted shelters, abusive foster parents and an irredeemable mother. But it isn’t until she discovers the Bible and lands at the doorstep of a faith-based shelter — Krauss makes a point to show us a grip-and-greet with Ronald Reagan on the shelter’s walls — run by the real-life Kathy DiFiore (Ann Dowd) that she can finally begin to turn her life around.
Krauss originally intended Gimme Shelter to be a documentary about DiFiore’s commendable work at providing a vital home for pregnant teenagers with nowhere else to turn. This would have been a better approach, and perhaps it wouldn’t have been so tainted by this feature’s twin grievances: its melodramatic hysteria and its political moralizing.
Not all viewers will recognize this film as right-wing propaganda, and that’s exactly the problem; the messaging is covert enough that Krauss can surely deflect all of these accusations. But make no mistake about it: So much of Gimme Shelter is transparently calculated to make Republicans tsk-tsk at all of this cultural decay, where broken homes and welfare queens and abortions-on-demand are corroding our morals ‘n’ values.
As for the movie’s title, if Keith Richards weren’t still inexplicably alive, he’d surely be rolling in his grave.
GIMME SHELTER. Director: Ron Krauss; Cast: Vanessa Hudgens, Rosario Dawson, Brendan Fraser, Ann Dowd, Stephanie Szostak, Emily Meade, James Earl Jones, Dascha Polanco; Rating: PG-13. Opens: Friday at Muvico Parisian 20 in West Palm Beach, Regal Royal Palm 18, Cinemark Palace 20 and Regal Shadowood 16 in Boca Raton, Regal Cypress Creek Station 16 in Fort Lauderdale, Cinemark Paradise 24 in Davie, and more.