Film School Dropouts: Trouble in Paradise

It's easy to portray fantastical situations, faraway lands and times, heroes and villains and people whom a normal person would never normally meet. It's a lot harder to portray convincingly the tiny frustrations and desperation of normal, everyday people. The subject of suburban distopia will come up again, but here is a sample of three films that deal with this issue.

Ghost World

This should have been a really hard movie to make, considering how difficult it is to like the main characters sometimes. Enid and Becky are two disaffected girls who, upon graduating from high school, vow to not do the same boring thing everyone else is doing, and instead to get an apartment and find jobs. They also play varieties of cruel pranks on the losers of their town, not realizing, of course, that they are headed down to the road to join them in a few years. Through one of these jokes, they meet Seymour, a bookish bachelor with a large, meticulous jazz vinyl collection, and Enid, sensing a kindred soul, becomes more and more involved in his life. Becky, on the other hand, is still proceeding with their plan to get an apartment, and is becoming increasingly impatient with Enid's wasting time with Seymour and inability to keep a job. The two girls begin to grow apart, and Enid is soon forced to confront who she is and who she wants to be.

However, this is a somewhat timeless film despite its portrayal of adolescent despair, for as people outgrow the ability to identify with Enid, they can still identify with Seymour, the shy, jaded dork ("You think it's healthy to obsessively collect stuff? Can't connect with people, so you fill your life with things..."). And Thora Birch, pre-American Beauty, does a wonderful, heartwrenching job of playing the cynical, callous Enid and all her insecurities -- her experimentation with different aesthetics of clothes that no one understands, her sarcastic treatment of customers that gets her fired from her concession stand job, and her ultimate loneliness when she realizes that everyone she loves has grown apart from her. This is a very truthful story about one girl trying to find out what she wants to be instead of who she doesn't want to be, and if the truth is ugly sometimes, then so be it. I should also mention that Seymour is played to perfection by Steve Buscemi, and Scarlett Johannsen, speaking as if she hadn't yet had voice training, plays the zeroing-in-to-normalcy Becky.

Revolutionary Road

Speaking of American Beauty...

This movie had a lot going for it -- Sam Mendes directed it, and brought along Thomas Neuman, also from American Beauty, to write the score. It had the cinematographer from No Country for Old Men. It even stars Leonardo Dicaprio and Kate Winslet. How could this movie suck?

While American Beauty may have been better in that the technical aspects of the film stood out more, I think this one is the better movie overall, not because it's a lot darker (which it is), but because it feels more truthful. The performances are all top-notch. Winslet's role is that of April, a failed actress turned housewife who clings to a fanciful idea that she and her husband Frank are not destined for the obscurity and mediocrity that plagues the people around them. Somehow, they are special, they are destined for something greater. Her eventual revelation is that Frank is not the man she thought he was -- and that she doesn't love him. In fact, she loathes him. She thinks he's an inexcusable coward. Dicaprio gets to play Frank, who must live with the reality of all his failures.

Despite its idyllic setting, it is a dark and brooding movie that does manage to convey the tone of quiet desperation extremely well.

Donnie Darko

Everyone's seen this movie by now, so I probably don't have to explain the plot. I was introduced to the movie by a friend who described it as "a darker version of American Beauty". And it's true. The movie is filled with a sense of foreboding, probably because most of it never actually happened -- or did it? Donnie is given over to sulking and fits of unprovoked hostility, saved from being a completely unsympathetic character by Jake Gyllenhall's dark dreamy eyes that seem to portend a deeper meaning, a redeeming layer of fear and frustration and despair beneath the surface. The movie is gorgeously filmed and has the dreamy atmosphere of unreality, which fits in very well with the events of the movie. A few of the small ridiculousnesses of suburban life get stirred to the surface and revealed for all to see, but unlike Ghost World, they're only backdrop events to the real story -- loneliness, powerlessness, and fear. It's darkly humorous and sad, ultimately the story of a boy so overwhelmed by his powerlessness over the things in life which intimidate him that he invents an entire alternate future in his head that allows him to do things he would not normally do in real life; or, in an even more unbelievable turn of events, he is actually given the power to travel through time and is able to influence events, and so sacrifices himself in order to save his girlfriend.