Whenever my sense of 99 percenter outrage gets the better of me, I try to remind myself of two things. The first is my college roommate Adam, a Wharton wunderkind who now surely makes more at his private equity firm in a month than I will in my entire life, and who I know to be a decent person. And I think about how much I love Whit Stillman movies.
If one of the reasons we make art is to get a window into the lives of others, and to understand and appreciate our common humanity, then the so-called "Yuppie trilogy" -- Metropolitan, Barcelona, and The Last Days of Disco -- must be considered an amazing achievement. And so I'm very excited that after all these years, Stillman finally has another movie on the way, and strenuously disagree with the way that the times have moved on, and he's been pegged in the wrong place.
What's always surprised me about Stillman's movies is that they are about everything I should hate -- characters from affluent family backgrounds who never worry about student loan payments, people with the space to fret about nonsense and never worry about their lives sliding out of view. But by laying out the story on their own terms, Stillman invites you to sympathize with them. Or not, no big deal -- but you'd have to have a hard heart to still want to see their heads lopped off.
Around last Christmas I saw Metropolitan again for the first time in ages. I like it more each time I revisit it. The story is slight, about a week or so in the lives of a circle of affluent New York college-age kids, but it clicks as a sound comedy of manners. It's larded with class assumptions which it doesn't hide or apologize for. At its heart, it is an almost sentimental tale of passing youth -- a graceful story about passing through the best moments of your life, with all the foreboding notes in the right place (there's a remarkable scene at the very end when two of the characters meet their future selves).
You could just leave it at that. But for me, when put in context, Stillman pulls off something only F. Scott Fitzgerald could do -- to surgically puncture the nonsense that America is a noble meritocracy, and suggest the mix of hate and envy that we look upon whose who live unearned, better lives. This is why Fitzgerald is one of our best novelists -- he has the guts to point out that Americans are just like anyone else. That we are not, as contemporary Republicans odiously suggest, a cheerfully deluded nation of haves and soon-will-haves.
So I couldn't disagree more that his movies are light and simple. They are the opposite of adorable, cuddly, or quirky. Which is why the idea that somehow he is some godfather of twee, is offensive. I've seen the trailer for Damsels in Distress, and yes, it does seem rather "quirky." Yet the capsule review of Metropolitan would also make me wince. And I might say he has let his approach be influenced, rather than the other way around.
There's something enviably surefooted about his method -- the risky casting, the confident observations, the sharp writing. Last weekend I watched Barcelona again, for the first time in many years. This is a particularly poignant film for me because I saw it in the theaters one summer when I was home from college, and in many ways it presented a kind of romance of life abroad that I still value in a way.
There are three things that stood out for me. The first is an effortless sense of awareness. There is a scene at the beginning when Fred arrives in Barcelona to stay with his cousin Ted, who drives him around the city at night showing off the monuments, which is met by grunts from a visibly bored Fred. In a natural way, this signals that yes, we are in Barcelona, but this isn't some travelogue or anything. We aren't going to knock ourselves out to justify our location budget.
The second thing is that the characters are flawed, not eccentric. Every twee movie character basically just needs a hug. But there are real problems with these folks. Fred is the kind of incredibly charming guy who you know is going to screw you over somehow. Ted is a bore, whose obsessive latching on to pseudo-scientific self-help ideas is grating. Most of the women are beyond redemption. There is no mugging around in any of this, and for a storyteller, it is difficult to find the confidence to not make your characters perfectly lovable.
And third, the humor is confident and smart enough to be subtle, to be based on fine observations and not point at itself all the time. The gibberish Ted spews about sales and marketing philosophy is consistent and pitch-perfect, and hilarious every time. The dialogue in Stillman's movies is not the kind of Seinfeldian time-killing nonsense. These are shared observations and ideas, it's what you do if you're curious and educated.
There is something very aspirational about his movies for some of us. The freedom that comes when you don't have to constantly worry about your material position in the world. The effortlessness -- grace -- that comes from knowing your worth and not apologizing for it.
If one of the reasons we make art is to get a window into the lives of others, and to understand and appreciate our common humanity, then the so-called "Yuppie trilogy" -- Metropolitan, Barcelona, and The Last Days of Disco -- must be considered an amazing achievement. And so I'm very excited that after all these years, Stillman finally has another movie on the way, and strenuously disagree with the way that the times have moved on, and he's been pegged in the wrong place.
What's always surprised me about Stillman's movies is that they are about everything I should hate -- characters from affluent family backgrounds who never worry about student loan payments, people with the space to fret about nonsense and never worry about their lives sliding out of view. But by laying out the story on their own terms, Stillman invites you to sympathize with them. Or not, no big deal -- but you'd have to have a hard heart to still want to see their heads lopped off.
Around last Christmas I saw Metropolitan again for the first time in ages. I like it more each time I revisit it. The story is slight, about a week or so in the lives of a circle of affluent New York college-age kids, but it clicks as a sound comedy of manners. It's larded with class assumptions which it doesn't hide or apologize for. At its heart, it is an almost sentimental tale of passing youth -- a graceful story about passing through the best moments of your life, with all the foreboding notes in the right place (there's a remarkable scene at the very end when two of the characters meet their future selves).
You could just leave it at that. But for me, when put in context, Stillman pulls off something only F. Scott Fitzgerald could do -- to surgically puncture the nonsense that America is a noble meritocracy, and suggest the mix of hate and envy that we look upon whose who live unearned, better lives. This is why Fitzgerald is one of our best novelists -- he has the guts to point out that Americans are just like anyone else. That we are not, as contemporary Republicans odiously suggest, a cheerfully deluded nation of haves and soon-will-haves.
So I couldn't disagree more that his movies are light and simple. They are the opposite of adorable, cuddly, or quirky. Which is why the idea that somehow he is some godfather of twee, is offensive. I've seen the trailer for Damsels in Distress, and yes, it does seem rather "quirky." Yet the capsule review of Metropolitan would also make me wince. And I might say he has let his approach be influenced, rather than the other way around.
There's something enviably surefooted about his method -- the risky casting, the confident observations, the sharp writing. Last weekend I watched Barcelona again, for the first time in many years. This is a particularly poignant film for me because I saw it in the theaters one summer when I was home from college, and in many ways it presented a kind of romance of life abroad that I still value in a way.
There are three things that stood out for me. The first is an effortless sense of awareness. There is a scene at the beginning when Fred arrives in Barcelona to stay with his cousin Ted, who drives him around the city at night showing off the monuments, which is met by grunts from a visibly bored Fred. In a natural way, this signals that yes, we are in Barcelona, but this isn't some travelogue or anything. We aren't going to knock ourselves out to justify our location budget.
The second thing is that the characters are flawed, not eccentric. Every twee movie character basically just needs a hug. But there are real problems with these folks. Fred is the kind of incredibly charming guy who you know is going to screw you over somehow. Ted is a bore, whose obsessive latching on to pseudo-scientific self-help ideas is grating. Most of the women are beyond redemption. There is no mugging around in any of this, and for a storyteller, it is difficult to find the confidence to not make your characters perfectly lovable.
And third, the humor is confident and smart enough to be subtle, to be based on fine observations and not point at itself all the time. The gibberish Ted spews about sales and marketing philosophy is consistent and pitch-perfect, and hilarious every time. The dialogue in Stillman's movies is not the kind of Seinfeldian time-killing nonsense. These are shared observations and ideas, it's what you do if you're curious and educated.
There is something very aspirational about his movies for some of us. The freedom that comes when you don't have to constantly worry about your material position in the world. The effortlessness -- grace -- that comes from knowing your worth and not apologizing for it.
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