|
Island Living, 90's Style
*****If you just want to skip to the movie review, scroll
down to the second set of asterisks. The first part is a mini-review
of the book and my thoughts on Nick Hornby's take on the suicide
of Kurt Cobain. It also contains a few spoilers.
It took one pass through any shopping mall in America during
the years 1994 to 1998 to figure out why Kurt Cobain became
a martyr for disaffected youth, and why even now the occasional
Cobain epithet t-shirt can be spotted in the food court. Cobain's
suicide letter describes the affect of postmodern phlegmatics,
with his talk of emasculation and envy of appreciative showman
Freddie Mercury. He speaks of "pretending," and
being unable to muster real passion from an over-saturation
of praise and existential despair. In short: the guilt of
having it all is too much to take, especially when it's been
handed to you, especially when, in punk rock shorthand, the
world is shit. My friends, if you can't make the connection
between that and perfectly normal, healthy, middle class teenagers
mutilating themselves with piercings and tattoos while wasting
away in the numb sterility of a shopping mall, then you need
only pick up a copy of Nick Hornby's About a Boy, a
book named for a song from Nevermind and proof that
pop writers can have just as much "depth" as "Literature."
Hornby is a pop culture sophist—the pop novel's answer
to Cameron Crowe. Like all great writers, his ideas are layered:
a simple and sugary coating, with richer, more satisfying
tastes lying underneath. His debut novel, High Fidelity,
described a man-boy's approach to thirty by reorganizing his
record collection and searching for a woman who is more like
a worn-in, scratchy LP rather than a perfectly jewel-encased
CD. Here, Hornby turns his eye toward a guy named Will, who
is "men's magazine cool, " the closest thing he's
ever had to accomplishment. He does, well, nothing: His dad
wrote a novelty Christmas song, and the royalty checks roll
in, then roll out in the form of cappuccino machines and CD's.
His days are filled with shopping and listening to music performed
by flame outs; his nights are quests for shags. The occupational
hazard is, of course, the break-up, but since Will has numbed
himself with daytime television and kitchen gadgets, he feels
very little of anything, and what would be fifteen minutes
of guilt and shame becomes merely discomfort—a dandy
exchange for actually having to care about a woman. Since
Will's life objective is the absolution of any degree of disquiet,
he's thrilled by the discovery of single women—women
who have been treated horribly by men, just looking for a
good guy to entertain their kids for a while and then climb
up on him after bedtime. The true coup is the guilt-free dumping
after a month or so ("It's not you; it's me, Will. You've
been wonderful, but I'm just not ready for this.") But
as Will says, "It's hard being wonderful all the time,"
but he finds the arrangement a discovery rivaling electricity
or the homemade espresso machine.
Will finds himself in a complicated situation involving a
friend of a potential shag and her twelve year old son, Marcus.
Marcus is the nerd, and his needs of coolness are not being
met by his "granola" mom, Fiona. Will, of course,
tries to help him find his way, and in the process, he finds
himself. I know this sounds treacly, and the first two acts
of the book are, as condescending lit crits would term it,
"breezy" and "delightful." It bounces
from Will to Marcus chapter by chapter, often lending us two
different perspectives of the same situation. Will's humor
stems from his obsessive materialism and shallowness, Marcus'
from his bittersweet, but "quirky," eccentricities.
It's all very funny, more so than even in a "quick read"
sort of way. Yet, the final act of the book takes a darker
turn involving the suicide of Kurt Cobain, and this is where
Hornby earns his praise, even that bestowed upon him by The
New York Times Book Review.
Like all great rock movements, grunge stems from youthful
rebellion against authority. However, grunge, true to its
brief lifespan, is more narrowly targeted. The 80's saw exponential
increases in both American wealth and the divorce rate. It
was the era of latch key kids and the have-it-all mom and
workaholic dad. With all the excesses and compaction of time,
the American family fell apart—not a new thing, by any
means, but statistics show it more pronounced than in previous
generations. Many of us know how these divorce battles go:
Proclaimed to be about "the children," they descend
into squabbles over money, or worse, the virtual bribing of
children with gifts. The money battle is basically a battle
over security: Dad protecting what he's worked for, Mom concerned
about taking care of the child. With enough wealth, though,
these sorts of things tend to be glossed over with the children;
in other words, Why should you be so mad when their are so
many starving children in the world? I think of the scene
in American Beauty in which Carolyn slaps Jane, even
though their family is a dysfunctional mess, she doesn't appreciate
not living in a duplex.
But does the family's wealth make Jane's pain any less real?
While Carolyn locks away her pain and discontent in the back
seat of her SUV, Jane buries hers underneath a vaguely goth-chick
costume—had Jane been ten years older, I'm quite certain
her closet would brim with flannel. That's the essence of
grunge: Check the biography of any lead singer of almost any
pure grunge band, and you'll find stories of divorce or parental
death mixed with a revolt against the commercial sterility
of the Seattle landscape. It's possible to draw a line—perhaps
not a straight one, but it gets there—from Grunge to
the World Trade Organization riots, from Soundgarden to Starbucks.
Hornby presents us with two characters who couldn't be more
opposite, except for their love of Kurt Cobain. First, there's
Will, whose father was a one-hit flame-out and died of alcoholism.
His mom was one of several of his father's paramours, and
to Hornby's credit, he doesn't wring tears from this. We just
have to assume that the result of the experience is Will's
never wanting to experience another human emotion, so his
life has become a quest to gloss over himself with beer, gadgets,
music, and all the rest of the goods listed across the top
of Maxim. Nirvana expressed everything he really felt
about life, but instead of facing it, he does exactly what
he's done with the rest of his life: tack it up like a poster
on his bedroom wall, or close it up in a state-of-the-art
CD player. Consequently, he can't tell Marcus about anything
"that matters," but he can point him in the direction
of where to look and let him work from there. This contrasts
with Marcus' mom, a neo-hippie "music therapist"
stuck on Joni Mitchell, to whom everything matters
and is constantly telling Marcus what's right and wrong in
the world—she wants him "to think for himself,"
even though she outlaws such devils as Adidas shoes and McDonald's
hamburgers.
Then there's Marcus' crush, Ellie, a punk rock chick with
a self-inflicted spiked hair cut, smelly leather jacket, and
nose ring worn like a threat. Ellie's mom wears ratty blue
jeans and smokes a lot, apparently getting her comeuppance
from a daughter not unlike herself at that age. We never find
out what happened to Ellie's father, but we can reasonably
assume that he wasn't the most conscientious of folk. Ellie's
mom, as Hornby tells us, "has obviously given up on her
daughter," which is no doubt why she's assumed her persona
of "Ellie," which Marcus describes as a missile
that could blow up at any time. She takes to Marcus at first
because he's funny, but there's something in him that she
wants to know more about: presumably, the real pain he feels
from his mother's attempted suicide, firsthand knowledge of
what she's been worshipping on the Nevermind album.
But unlike Will, Ellie's devotion to Cobain is sacrosanct.
Hornby positions Cobain as a symbol, not of generic rage and
rebellion, but as the external face of the internal pain felt
against parents who've done wrong to their kids and tried
to 1) Bury it with wealth (Will), or 2) Ignore it (Ellie).
Will understands what's hurting him, but actively refuses
participate in his own feelings, thus keeping his Cobain posters
at a comfortable distance on his wall. Ellie, being a teenager,
can't quite get a handle on what she's feeling or why, but
recognizes in the music something inside her. Related to Will
by suffering, but opposite in emotional temperament, Ellie
wears her Cobain T-shirt like second skin—it's who she
is, fuck-it-all, and she wants somebody, if not everybody,
to notice. Compounding the Cobain pain is her confusion, which
results in the liberation of a cardboard cutout of Kurt Cobain
from behind the glass of a shop window, which forces her and
her mom to confront Ellie's behavior. It's as if Kurt's death
finally moved her to access previously what she could only
listen to from a distance, her anger directed at the "commercial
exploitation of his image," which really stands in for
similar issues within her own family.
Amongst all this is nerdy little Marcus, the kid with "real
problems," whom both Will and Ellie admit they should
be listening to for advice about the world. His mom felt pained
enough to kill herself, as did Will's dad, and as Ellie's
mom just might. But Marcus couldn't care less about Kurt Cobain:
He only cares about the people who care about Kurt Cobain.
While everyone else is considering topping themselves off,
little Marcus is a survivor; as Will observes, in a Pete Townsend
way, "...beyond a shadow of a doubt, he's going to be
OK." I think of it this way: The emotionally fragile,
those who need help—though leant considerable empathy
from Hornby—are likened to Cobain and suicide, where
Marcus is more of an geekish Eddie Vedder. Though success
almost fell them as well, Pearl Jam didn't give up; they fought
the good fight against Ticketmaster, went back underground
and pulled themselves up off the mat to make some of their
best music since Ten in the last four or five years.
Reading about the tragic, pathetic death of Layne Staley (the
heroin addicted lead singer of grunge rockers Alice in Chains),
I imagined Ellie chucking bricks through the local Wherehouse
Music, later having her stomach pumped after a night of fuck-it-all
rioting. Then I thought about Will and Marcus, probably slumped
on the couch of Will's apartment, watching "Who Wants
to Be a Millionaire" and listening to the Yield
or No Code albums. That's a better waste of time
than reading this month's Rolling Stone article about
the ongoing battle between Courtney Love and Krist Novoselic
over Nirvana's unreleased material. In the end, suicide accomplishes
so very little: In death as in life, the legacy of Kurt Cobain
is still about separation, its offspring, and money.
*****One of the victims of this squabble is the film adaptation
of About a Boy. Reportedly, Courtney Love vetoed the
use of the Nirvana/Cobain material in the movie, which forces
it to be a different story altogether, one that softens its
potential impact and almost erases the Ellie character. Yet,
the rewritten third act puts Will at more risk—he earns
his redemption a bit more, and by miracle, the Weitz Brothers
(American Pie) manage to avoid sentimental cliché
until the very final frames. In the book, Will is put in the
position of heroism by the Redeeming Angel; in the film, he
acts this out on his own—and not by stretch of character—to
put all that he is (a poster boy for both Maxim and
Stuff) on naked display to save his friend. Both endings
have their merit, and though the book's is richer with subtext,
the film's is well enough that I'll declare it The Best Movie
I've Seen This Year.
As Will, Hugh Grant plays a derivative of his usual smarmy
charmer, but this beast is something different altogether:
It's as if the American Psycho possessed Hugh Grant. He describes
getting his hair "carefully disheveled," like Patrick
Bateman's thorough tour of his facial creams. Will sums himself
up best: "No...I really am this shallow." Playing
the Hornby male requires a lot of confused eyes, defensive
posturing, and befuddled crinkling of the forehead, and Grant
delivers the discombobulation as well as John Cusack in High
Fidelity. For those who adore Hugh Grant, the role has
more depth than we're used to; for those who abhor him, the
"Hugh Grant" persona finally has its puerilism exposed,
as only Nick Hornby could.
As good as Hornby's book is, the Weitz Brothers and Peter
Hedges' (A Map of the World, What's Eating Gilbert
Grape) screenplay creates threads and images that seem
like they should come from the book, but are actually original
and sufficiently literary in their own right. Will describes
"Island Living" in his apartment, as if he's Chuck
Noland, but without the need of Wilson or other human companionship,
his philosophy conceived from a question on "Who Wants
to Be a Millionaire" about Jon Bon Jovi. He also describes
his life as "The Will Show"; though several make
guest appearances, he's the only regular, and if others' ratings
are bad, then what's it to him? This new stuff is really funny—my
favorite being Will and Marcus discussing the difference between
a "girlfriend and a girl who is your friend" in
front of a monkey cage, the Weitzes careful to capture some
big pink genitalia.
In fact, the Weitz brothers surprisingly capture the voice
of Hornby's prose on film. The cuts are swift: They don't
linger too long, but smoothly slide the screen from Marcus
to Will and back, much like the chapters of the book—the
pace is so swift that small things seem much larger in retrospect,
thus deepening the work and requiring a second look. Some
of the most effective moments are the camera slowly, silently
pulling back to reveal Will staring blankly in a vacant room,
or when the camera tracks smoothly across a room, trapping
Will or Marcus behind televisions or between people, focused
on the face (without jamming it in ours) to let the actors
fill in the prose. Some of the excised prose is found in the
costume and set design (part of the Hornby prose that's especially
pleasing to see on the screen), and the Weitzes come through
where one would expect: the visual jokes. The infamous Dead
Duck Day plays well on the screen, as does the first scene
when Will joins a single parents club (SPAT: Single Parents
Alone Together). Whatever we may say about American Pie,
it's difficult to argue that the Weitz Brothers don't have
a flair for comic timing, and this film is so well edited,
and the actors get the jokes just right, that I'm willing
to give American Pie a little more credit for just
being funny, even if excessively juvenile.
Also contributing to the voice of the film is the music,
which will play a significant role in any Hornby adaptation.
With a complete excision of the Nirvana theme, the band Badly
Drawn Boy creates the soundtrack. The songs are the sort of
whimsy, "college album" rock that sounds like less
whiny, less pretentious Jeff Buckley—precisely the sort
of Generation X male soul-searching that's the undercurrent
of Hornby's prose. The songs stand on their own, and U2's
"Zoo Station" makes an appearance, which I'm sure
required Bono to insist on the plug for Amnesty International,
for whom Will briefly volunteers.
And like with High Fidelity, the supporting characters
really lend themselves to good character acting onscreen.
The disappointment of Ellie's diminished role is offset by
Toni Collette's Fiona, "Miss Granola Suicide" who
makes jokes at the most inopportune times. Sometimes the role
is pretty thankless; Collette spends much of the movie crying
over stuff only she knows, burrowing into the character, excavating
as much despair as resides on the page. Likewise, Rachel Weisz
plays Rachel, Will's Redemptive Female (we know so because
she lives across from a cathedral) who is so illuminating
as to diminish Grant, which makes her truly stand apart from
Will's random shags. Her Rachel is less forgiving and less
eager than the book's (especially in a turn-point dining scene),
which plays to the film's advantage. It forces Will to risk
himself and face humiliation twice, where in the book Rachel
guides him through both. The payoff, then, seems more earned,
and it rescues the end of the film from potential disaster.
In the final analysis, About a Boy's success rides
on the relationship between Will and Marcus, and the relationship
between Hugh Grant and his child costar Nicolas Hoult. Hoult
vaguely resembles the demon spawn from Disney's The Kid,
but he inspires much less desire to stab him repeatedly. In
fact, Hoult is an affecting screen presence and displays some
impressive range: He dances awkwardly in the hallways to "Shake
Your Ass," but delivers effective tirades. He bottles
himself up but still reveals what's going on underneath. The
same could be said for Hugh Grant, and had it not been for
Al Pacino in Insomnia, I would call it the best male
performance of the year. So as a compromise, because the adaptation
saves itself from disaster and, in some ways, improves on
certain aspects of a great book, I'll call it the best movie
of the year thus far.
|
