artflickchick.com

I wanted to let In Her Shoes shrivel and die a quiet death in a dark corner of my mind, but the sheer annoyingness of its reception continues to rankle me months later, and so I can’t. Even more irksome than its mediocrity is the critical embrace - it’s been popping up on many a year-end notable list - which most frequently qualifies its alleged quality as surprising, a back-handed compliment which praises it for rising above its chick flick heritage. I guess what bothers me about this is two-fold: that the phrase “chick flick” is still used pejoratively by supposedly sophisticated critics and that the one hailed as transcending the type sucks. Retrospectively decrying its shameful box office returns, this perplexing air of faux prestige around it is similar, if less fervent, than that circling Cinderella Man (still haven’t seen it and don’t plan to). Oh, how the mainstream media love to gang up on the moviegoing public, snobbishly shaking their collective head at our presumed stupidity for not glomming on to the latest piece of assembly-line crap they deem worthy with their magic pens.

That Curtis Hanson is the poster-boy for Hollywood product masquerading as artier fare has now been firmly established. I was never on the bandwagon with LA Confidential and, though I liked Wonder Boys upon its theatrical release, I’d be willing to bet money that if I saw it again now I’d easily dismiss it as one more in an uninteresting line of glossily canned features primed for critical accolades. I mean, the man even managed to take the prickliest of subjects – Eminem – and turn him into a palatable persona ala 8 Mile wherein everything that makes the rapper so fascinating - including the incongruity between his fierce intelligence and some less-than-enlightened views – gets smoothed down in a pat characterization that erases any of his hard and intriguingly frayed edges. In distilling Eminem’s fucked-up complexity into nothing more than a little boy lost syndrome – he only wants his mom to love and take care of him and his younger sister - Hanson reduces him to what he emphatically is not: trite, easily psychologized. Sure, the director’s celebrated restraint proffers a sense of cohesiveness, but this is the problem – his movies are too damned tidy; every bow tied up, nothing left to resonate in the disorderly fashion of humanity.

Likewise, In Her Shoes. It begins from as clichéd a premise as ever there was: beautiful blond Maggie (Cameron Diaz) is dumb, and frumpy Rose (Toni Collette) is smart and successful but on her way to spinsterhood. This wouldn’t be an issue if writer Susannah Grant (adapting from a novel of the same name by Jennifer Weiner) and Hanson had proceeded to plumb the more interesting depths of grey that animate any stereotype if you look closely enough - but they don’t. Quite a waste, given the considerable talent of the two lead actresses, both of whom I’m a fan but find wanting here given nothing but cardboard cutouts with which to work.

We’re instead forced to undergo a by-the-numbers progression as each finds a way out of her respective low self-esteem pit, with a little help from a feisty grandma (Shirley MacLaine). Rose starts letting her inner anal-perfectionist of a lawyer go and takes action to get herself into shape. (Unfortunately, listening to her whine about how “disgusting” she is when what we see before us is a perfectly attractive woman - even with the extra 25 pounds she gained for the role - made to look mousy via unflattering cheats like severe pony-tails and oversize sweatshirts, feels false and quickly wears aggravatingly thin.) Meanwhile, Maggie grows in the opposite direction in the movie’s most cloying storyline as she realizes she has more to offer than her body and learns to read. Has ever the elegance of an e.e. cummings poem been rendered so corny as it is in the last few minutes of In Her Shoes? (For comparison, see the lovely moment in Hannah and her Sisters where Lee silently reads “somewhere i have never travelled” from the book Elliot bought for her.)

Worst of all, the familial relationship doesn’t for a moment feels real, as the most telling aspects of the bond - silly in-jokes and unselfconscious behavior – never find organic expression; there’s something too clinical about the movie’s clean lines. To see how much is missing from In Her Shoes, one only need turn to the films of Nicole Holofcener ( Walking and Talking, Lovely and Amazing), whose realistic descriptions of female insecurity, friendship, and sisterhood show up Hanson’s as the glib, overinflated bore it is. Her deep affection for her flawed and beautiful characters evidences itself in every scene, and this love impresses itself upon the spectator. You care about them not just because you identify with them, but because you feel how much the director does. The women of In Her Shoes seem underappreciated and misused by contrast - we never get the sense that the director so much as likes them - in which case, how could we?

- km

With her portrayal of “Angela Chase” on the short-lived TV show My So-Called Life, Claire Danes expressed with more depth the intricacies of middle-class teenage angst in a single self-consciously awkward gesture than the Dawson’s Creek kids could muster in lines and lines of self-aware analysis. I was at exactly the right age to appreciate it when the series aired during my senior year in high school, and her Angela’s continuous and thoughtfully-inflected internal monologues conveyed with startling accuracy the introspective interiority of adolescence, the loneliness and longing which so dramatically define those years. For this alone, I loved her, and harbored high hopes to which, sadly - aside from her rendition of a realer, less romanticized Juliet in Baz Luhrmann’s post-modernist update - she has yet to live up. Out of loyalty, I’ve followed her career, but with T3 I started letting go. What once seemed the brilliant underplaying of an insightful actress has revealed itself as simply a more subdued kind of shtick, and the recycled lip quivers and expressions of wide-eyed naiveté no longer carry the same emotional impact they once did.

This is nowhere more apparent than in Shopgirl, which almost consciously takes up the story of Angela Chase years later; reincarnated as twentysomething Mirabelle, she even shares the same trademark bobbed reddish-brown hair, not to mention an identically insecure and introverted nature. Her depression has been ratcheted up a notch or two from typically-teenaged to pill-popping, and she continues to chase that elusive guy who will never truly give himself to her. Only now, it’s the older, wealthier Ray Porter (Steve Martin) she wants, a more mature if as equally misguided an object of desire as the beguilingly confused Jordan Catalano. But Mirabelle is Angela Chase stripped of the specificity and inner life. And the narrative no longer belongs to her, but to him.

I didn’t read Martin’s novella, upon which he based the screenplay, so I have no idea how that work functions, but since both versions derive their title from Mirabelle – who works at the glove counter in Saks Fifth Avenue - the fact that Martin narrates becomes more than off-putting. It’s not just that his omniscient voiceover distances us from and mildly objectifies the movie’s core character, but that it arises infrequently out of nowhere. This is textbook bad usage - disorienting and superfluous, it also disturbingly feels like a structural attempt meant to retrospectively keep Mirabelle under Porter’s/Martin’s thumb, a narcissistic way to wrest attention from her - this suffering creature whom he proclaims needs singling out - and place it back on himself.

Comparisons to the Bill Murray-Scarlett Johansson pairing of Lost in Translation have inevitably been made, but the parallel is off the mark and insulting to that far and away superior film, which captures feelings of displacement and isolation with a waftingly beautiful precision Shopgirl can only dream about. The largely positive reviews the more recent release has generated, replete with descriptions of an allegedly “bittersweet” quality, confound me as I find its most defining trait to be an utter ickiness.

Witnessing Martin, whom I usually admire but here find repellent - looking a tad too artificially fresh and plumped up, particularly around the eyes - kissing Danes, as gawkily youthful-looking as ever and with a pubescent body to match, makes for severely uncomfortable viewing. Anand Tucker’s clumsy direction only exacerbates this, as he offers close-ups of Martin lurking in the shadows leering at Mirabelle (meant, I’m sure, to be taken as his lyrical contemplation of her loveliness), and musical overlays implicitly inject an air of the mystical into the lovemaking scenes. Even more repulsively, Tucker frames Danes as if an objet d’art herself, in pretentiously cheesy shots as she, for example, throws her head back in rapturous orgasm (in slow-motion, of course) against a completely black background, or else sits motionless mistily in the background as Martin lights a candle, a prelude to their sexual rites (certainly the reverent tone of the scenes indicate they’re meant to be taken as such) despite a glaring lack of either chemistry or connection between the pair. Minus the money, Ray would just be a dirty old man, but the film conceives him as gentle and debonair, if emotionally-stunted; this gap between intention and perception yields numerous moments of unplanned, cringe-inducing creepiness.

And what’s up with Six Feet Under’s Frances Conroy’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it role as Mirabelle’s mother and what the hell was that brief, silent interlude with her family in Vermont supposed to represent?

Lazy, and unwilling to do any of the emotional digging, Shopgirl feels more like a sketch than a realized work. It relies upon montages to accomplish character and story development, and plays off the older-man-with-commitment-problems/younger-woman-who-wants-more clichés instead of forging ahead with a more complex variation. And although Mirabelle stands out from most of the other LA tartlets with her particular style of dress – modest and modern but vintage-y – not much else distinguishes her, though, interestingly, this superficial element does suggest the reasons for her initial attraction to the old-world romancing of Ray over the hipster casualness of Jason Schwartzman’s Jeremy. But without any further fleshing out, this point remains moot. Angela Chase was marvelously distinctive in her yearnings and this is what made the character special; but Mirabelle is so flat a description she never becomes the similarly poetic portrait her creator so badly wants her to be.

- km

By the time I’d finished college, my parents had divorced, as had most of my friends’. Because it’s become such a taken-for-granted part of modern life - just one among other expository details in most movies - Noah Baumbach’s in-depth exploration of the subject feels thrillingly familiar and foreign at the same time. Strange that it’s taken so long for someone to cinematically trace the minutiae of emotional hardships the legal break-up inflicts on those involved given the high failure rate of marriage in this country, yet I can’t think of another that attempts such a dismantling; the ones I can think of are dramatically exaggerated (The War of the Roses) or else dwell on tangential issues (the custody battle of Kramer vs. Kramer), a far cry from Baumbach’s wonderfully close and realistic evocation.

Of course, this realism owes much to the fact that his is an admittedly autobiographical description, with Jessie Eisenberg as Walt serving as Baumbach’s stand-in, and this specificity ascribes The Squid and the Whale an achingly authentic tenor. Everything is gloriously idiosyncratic, from Joan’s (Laura Linney) terms of endearment for the boys – “Chicken” and “Pickle” – to the setting of the scene in Park Slope, Brooklyn, 1986. As a professor I had used to say: Make it specific enough and you eventually hit the universal. Not everyone will be able to relate to the fairly niche experience of children born of New York writers, but the intensely recognizable aspects - heightened rather than dampened by Baumbach’s individualizing details - remain, including the distress which accompanies parental mud-slinging and the tendency towards side-taking, the subtleties of which the director captures with an exacting naturalism. The mapping of these emotional shiftings makes for a pleasurable kind of pain - Baumbach asks that those with personal experience remember the anguish - and that those without bear witness - even as he inspires exhilaration with his talent for communicating the intricate messiness of it.

With its washed-out graininess and non-studio lighting, it’s lovely how lived-in everything in the film looks. This light touch captures with an insightful sensitivity the changes in perspective which divorce confers upon the kids. Walt’s relationship with his father, Bernard, played by a bearded and brilliant Jeff Daniels (the term “grizzled” has never cried out for application more so than here) takes center stage, as the teenager sides with the family patriarch against his mother and younger brother, Frank (Owen Kline). Walt is a daddy’s boy par excellence, his worship translating itself into an annoyingly recognizable mimicking, as he apes with pseudo-intellectualism his father’s worst traits: cruel snap judgments of his mother and snobbish regurgitations (acclaiming or decrying works of fiction as either “masterpiece” or “minor” according to his father’s tastes, whether he’s read the book himself or not). Peculiarly pretentious for his age, you still sympathize - his cringe-inducing behavior brings back memories of your own embarrassingly awkward adolescent posing and the inadvertent cruelties that are its casualties.

Privy to a few brief scenes of interaction between husband and wife, we sense the many underlying currents which define the disintegrating relationship; as Bernard egomaniacally attempts to keep Joan under his intellectual thumb, we gradually come to see that this obtuse oppression probably has more to do with the demise of the marriage than her infidelities. Walt’s awakening to these faults in his father and his own unfairness to his mother gives structure to The Squid and the Whale, crystallized in the penultimate hospital scene where Bernard’s tyranny expresses itself to Walt clearly for the first time. What makes the elder son’s progression so resonant lies in the recognition of that revolutionary moment when you come to truly understand your parents as human. Trite as it sounds, this realization - that your parents have flaws, and fuck-up, just like any other person - represents a major hallmark on the way to adulthood; it’s a severing moment wherein you understand that aspiring to be just like mom or dad isn’t enough, that you need to forge your own identity. I can’t recall another film that charts this significant mental crossover.

The final shot is both clarifying and ambiguous: Walt rushes to the Museum of Natural History and stands before the sculpture from which the feature takes its title, entranced and mystified by its meaning. I like to think it’s just this: that the squid and the whale’s tangled limbs illustrate the complicated, inextricable intertwining between beings, inspiring in us, as in Walt, an appropriately confused awe.

- km