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I picked up Steve Martin's Shopgirl,
the novella, this past Friday and finished it Monday night.
Phenomenal. Steve Martin, who I think is one of the
greatest living comedians we have, has proven now that he is
on the cusp of being one of the greatest living authors we
have. An extreme assumption, perhaps, but not at all
unfounded. The book is a tender, often laugh-out-loud
funny, constantly emotionally poignant book of wonder.
The book is about life, life as view by a man at sixty who
has lived a full, wise life. This is a man who
understands the realities of love in the reality we all
inhabit. This little book is monumental.
Which brings me to Shopgirl, the film. I just,
mere hours ago, returned home from seeing this film by
myself (which is an absolute joy for me, so don't feel bad)
and have been thinking so much about what went wrong.
The film is far from terrible, mind you, it is absolutely a
good film, but director Anand Tucker missed the
point. Steve Martin's screenplay adaptation, with some
minor flaws, is truly the only way such a quirky book could
be made a film. Ilike the screenplay, I like the way
the story was adapted and I like the dialogue.
However, there is absolutely a good reason why Martin felt
the need to write it first as a book. But the
screenplay wasn't the problem. I then started
analyzing the acting. Was I bothered by the way the
actors brought the characters I'd come to care deeply about
in the book to the screen? No. If anything is
clear it's this: Steve Martin understands Ray Porter
perfectly. He is Ray Porter and not our beloved Steve
Martin. Wonderful job. Claire Danes was
perfectly cast as our Shopgirl. Mirabelle Buttersfield
is perfect on screen, just as quirky, cute, and confused as
she should be. Danes fit my mental image of Mirabelle
and I was very happy with her. Jason Shwartzman, of
Rushmore fame, is Jeremy. The character changes a
little at his hands, but only in ways that make him more
accessible on screen. Great job. The woman who
plays Lisa does a fine job with the comedy. If there
is any actor I have an issue with, it's Sam Bottoms, who
plays her Vietnam effected father more like someone with a
mental handycap than a man who's been deeply affected by a
war. He comes across as simpleton, something Martin
never did in the book. While this was an annoyance,
however, it didn't lessen the overall acting quality of the
film. The problem is the director. On
my drive home, I decided that the director, who I was until
now unaware of, had to be in his early twenties and had no
concept of Martin's understanding of life and relationships.
Hadn't yet experienced the truths of love and male/female
relationships that Martin is exploring, and was, in some
ways very much like the Jeremy we meet at the beginning of
the film. Boy was I wrong. Anand Tucker is 42,
which is by the way the answer to life, the universe and
everything else. 42 years old and totally misses the
humor within the mild, daily tragedy of the lives of these
characters. As I've said in some review before, Anton
Chekov, the great playwright and short story master, held
that all tragedy is comedy because it is happening to
humans, and anything bore the mark of human thought was
comical on some level. The humor of the
(self-inflicted) human condition. Tucker is obviously
completely oblivious to this, playing some potentially
comical scenes with a gravity that couldn't be more wrong.
He goes so far as to utilize slow-motion in sequences that
should be fast, spontaneous human movement. And the
score he hires by Barrington Pheloung, who's previous work
is also a question mark to me, is more befitting an estrogen
strewn melodrama than a work of human relationship reality.
When he's not booming the ominous score, he gets a hair
closer to Martin's feeling with LA style slacker rock, which
holds tenuously in its immature hands eons more emotional
weight than any single note in the score. One might
even wonder if he lifted this score from an unproduced Steel
Magnolia's sequel and didn't look back. As a
result the movie is often slow, showing none of the spark of
a book that Martin intentionally marketed as a NOVELLA, a
short work, plodding out the movie with uncomfortable
silences between characters that instead of highlighting
moments of human confusion in dealing with other human's
needs, merely makes the actors look occasionally retarded in
all aspects of social interaction. Yes, this is the
story of three misfits (not in the heavy meaning of term,
but rather in the idea that they are not cut from the
standard made-for-total-unthinking-function-in-the-world
mold... they are all thinkers) who don't always know how to
interact with other, BUT, they are not social outcasts.
His characters, and again, this doesn't seem to be a fault
in the acting at all, seem unable to function with anyone.
This is all an issue of plotting blocking and timing between
dialogue. The director's hand is very heavy here.
Overall Shopgirl is a good film, an enjoyable watch,
but not at all the great character study in human sexual and
emotional relationships it could have been. It doesn't
in anyway approach the level of understanding Lost in
Translation or Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters,
that Martin's novella comes close to surpassing. I
would go so far as to say that Martin's novella surpasses
the emotional honesty of Lost in Translation, but
this is due to the main thing that Shopgirl the film
is missing: The atmosphere of the Casual.
Martin's book exists in a wholly casual
world, a world where everything is handled realistically in
the casual manner of day-to-day existence. And it is
this very casualness that brings out the full emotional
impact of the story, that yes, this level of deep human love
and suffering and ecstasy and depression exist every moment
of every day and those that find happiness are those that
can embrace the ecstasy of everyday love and life with
another human being... in the casual. The
movie is worth the rental to see the great Steve Martin in
acting, but to truly grasp the brilliance of Steve Martin in
action, read the book. |
