Pumpkin

Wheelchair athlete Pumpkin Romanoff (Hank Harris) lethargically dropped his discus at his feet rather than tossed it each year at the Challenged Games. This year is different. Alpha Omega Pi, in its bloodlust to win Best Sorority honors, selected the event as its off-campus charity and co-ed queen Caroline Duffy (Christina Ricci) as Pumpkin’s mentor. Caroline inspires her enamored charge to overcome his disabilities and begins a relationship that shocks their Country Club parents, her tennis hunk boyfriend (Sam Ball), and the entire Southern California State University. So it goes in this ambitious but rather shallow and moth-eaten satire. This sort of taboo chaser with Heathers and The Stepford Wives elements has two directors (Adam Larson Broder and Anthony Abrams, co-writers of Dead Man on Campus) and too few enthralling or hilarious moments. It clumsily telegraphs messages about hypocrisy, conformity, nobility of misery, hollowness of the privileged, self-serving benevolence and pity versus compassion. With one foot stuck in a Farrelly Brothers handicap farce and the other in one of Todd Solondz’s inflammatory storytelling themes (malady is the gateway to a deep soul).