Mark Reviews Movies: MDMA

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 13, 2018

There are a lot of excuses made by and for the main character of MDMA. She's Angie (a good Annie Q.), a Chinese-American college student in California, by way of Newark, who, in the mid-1980s, synthesizes and sells the eponymous party drug as a way of paying her bills—and buying herself and a few other people some nice presents. First-time filmmaker Angie Wang, who wrote and directed the movie, can't quite decide if her main character is a role model or a warning.

This might be because the movie is supposedly based on Wang's own experiences in college, and since it's based on a true story, we're constantly looking for the line between reality and fiction. Some of it seems accurate, even, in a way, how Angie and her actions aren't so simply categorized. The way that the story is framed, though, does a lot of work to turn the character into a victim of circumstance, a young woman whose heart is really in the right place, and the sort of person who, despite the ultimate consequences of her actions, is someone whose combination of ambition, intelligence, and cut-to-the-chase attitude is worthy of praise.

The particulars of Angie's trade are intriguing—volunteering at the science lab to make ecstasy, sell it at college parties, and move up into the local club scene. The specifics of Angie as a character, though, are alternately overlooked and overblown. There are hints of her family life as a kid, going between two parents whose hatred for each other turned violent, and the strong suggestion of sexual abuse by her mother's new husband. These details are related in hazy flashbacks, so it's the present-day Angie who makes the bigger impact.

She's more or less a no-nonsense, strong-willed, and rough-talking saint, despite a healthy sex life, which at one point includes her roommate Jeanine (Francesca Eastwood) and star swimmer/sometimes-boyfriend Alex (Pierson Fode), and the whole drug-dealing thing. She tries to save a poor, African-American girl from her drug-addicted parents and is a good friend to Tommy (Scott Keiji Takeda), who seems to exist primarily so that Angie can have a tragic wakeup call.

She may look complicated, but MDMA desperately wants us to like and respect Angie, even if for contradictory reasons. She comes across more like a string of arbitrary characteristics than a real person.

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