"Crossroads"

Not a girl, not a woman and definitely not an actress -- but Britney Spears does have something besides that jailbait pout.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Feb 15, 2002 | It's easy to trash Britney Spears, she of the twitching rump and prefab warbling. What's harder is coming to grips with the reality that no matter what you think of her as a musical performer or as an actress, she has more than a spark of genuine likability.

In "Crossroads," her first film star vehicle, she's already beginning to coast on bad habits, like winkling and twinkling adorably and manipulating her preternaturally glossy mouth into a jailbaitish pout. At moments, though, she shows traces of the devilish naughtiness that makes Heather Locklear -- a gifted and largely overlooked comic actress -- so much fun to watch. Spears doesn't have Locklear's zonked-out braininess or her stopwatch timing, and she most likely never will. But her performance in "Crossroads" suggests that there's something going on behind those schoolgirl-vixen eyes -- something that she actually has to shut off every time she gets up to sing.

You see that switch going off twice in "Crossroads," as Spears launches into the picture's two big musical numbers, and that alone is a fascinating sight to behold. The movie is a lumbering load of hokum, but unlike those other recent pop star white elephants, Mandy Moore's ultrachaste "A Walk to Remember" (which makes the Early American practice of bundling look like a Hieronymous Bosch orgy) and Mariah Carey's visible panty line of a movie "Glitter" (a picture that screams "I've fallen off my platform shoes and I can't get up"), it's at least watchable.

Just don't pay too much attention to the writing. Spears, Zoë Saldana and Taryn Manning play three young women who used to be childhood best friends but have grown apart by the time they graduate from high school. Spears, bright and effervescently sensible, has become the class valedictorian; Saldana is now the school's most popular girl, whose chief interests are clothes, shoes and her college-freshman boyfriend, in that order; Manning, the slightly rough around the edges girl from the other side of the tracks, has gotten herself pregnant and isn't sure how she wants to deal with it.

The three come back together, warily, leaving their Georgia hometown for a California adventure. Spears, for her part, plans to bail out in Arizona to visit her mother (Kim Catrall), who left her and her father (played sweetly if unmemorably by Dan Aykroyd) when she was 3. There's a fourth member of their party: The car they're riding in belongs to a hunky but dangerous older boy, played by the stupendously named Anson Mount. (And you can bet that by picture's end, one lucky girl will ascend the peak.)

"Crossroads" is most enjoyable in its most offhand moments, like the early scene in which Spears jumps around her bedroom, clad only in a skimpy cami-and-panties outfit, singing along with gusto to Madonna's "Open Your Heart." Manning -- who played Kirsten Dunst's tough-cookie sidekick in "Crazy/Beautiful" -- sharpens and brightens every scene she's in. She's got that great cat's tongue roughness that the young Jodie Foster used to have.

But "Crossroads" only deteriorates as it rumbles along. At one point Mount catches Spears furtively scribbling poems in a notebook and asks her to read one aloud to him. Until that moment, Spears has come off as a reasonably intelligent being; when she begins reading the words she's written ("I feel like I'm caught in the middle/That's when I realize/I'm not a girl/Not yet a woman"), it's a bad moon rising -- you can almost see that dopey mist rolling in over the Bimbo Mountains as Spears feels a song coming on.

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