After what must have been maybe the seventh time Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character, Tom Hanson, makes reference to his love of The Smiths, I basically switched off. It's a questionable feat: the character at once unrealistically depicts Smiths fans as good looking, well-dressed and clever whilst more accurately portraying them as wet, dead-beat and emotionally retarded.
Romantic Comedies are a nonsense: reducing relationships to a series of adolescent musings, product placement-centred romantic encounters and arguments about absolutely fuck all.
(500) Days of Summer had all of those things and absolutely nothing else: the most vapid of boys meets the most boring of girls (Zooey Deschanel) and would do nothing of any great magnitude for her (but would do it with feeling!). She isn't really into it, though: doesn't believe in relationships, love, monogamy - wilfully defining herself by this nihilism and creating a character so lacking in depth that you can only hope she isn't fussy about procreation either.
Half of the film was shot in an Ikea, the other half taking place in the knowingly mundane surroundings of a generic office workspace and a karaoke bar. Mundane, of course, because these characters, these
lovers, well - they're just like you and me, right? I, for one, seriously fucking hope not. I saw reviews that billed this movie as that catch-all for cliché, "different", presumably because (spoiler alert!) the guy gets his girl in the end, although the girl is not the girl you've spent the whole film dreaming up a personality for but in fact a girl that you only see for a couple of minutes and are willing to give a chance to until the film ends and you're allowed to go back to what's remaining of your own sorry existence.
Worse still is the boundless ambition shown in making the movie appeal to ALL audiences, and how maddeningly successful the strategy appears to have been. Adolescents: revel in grown adults displaying a level of emotional maturity even you consider juvenile! 20-somethings: I canNOT wait to go to Ikea and... it's funny cos it's true!!1 30-somethings: are your lives
still like this?! Cool! 40-somethings: relive your unsatisfying but unquestionably gone twenties! Girls: Cute, 'ordinary', boy! Guys: Cute, unattainable girl!
So everyone gets a little bit of what they want, I suppose. Though I noticed the group of girls sat behind us in the cinema, undoubtedly in the adolescent range mentioned above, were content to talk over the myriad pop culture references they didn't understand (The Smiths,
Star Wars, Belle & Sebastian) because they were too young. Perhaps this is the most disappointing element of all: a film of such broad appeal that it can communicate only the most rudimentary ideas to everyone without actually speaking in-depth to anyone. Or perhaps, more temperately, we could say that the real disillusionment comes from the fact that this hollow interaction between film and audience is, to an apparent majority, not just acceptable, but something we can call entertainment.
Of course, it's good to come up for air from all this naïvety about how much people
really want to emotionally or intellectually engage with a movie (because contrary to the above, I understand that it's escapism, not education or labour that we look to the big screen for), once in a while. It's even better that, sometimes when you do, you're dragged back into the depths once more.
Away We Go is everything, absolutely everything, that
(500) Days... is not.
Burt (John Krasinski) and Verona (Maya Rudolf) are expectant parents and Good People, if somewhat confused about what to do next, perhaps as a result of having underachieved a little along the way. Cue soul-searching, paranoid, self-indulgent road trip - a framework co-writer Dave Eggers already did to a turn in his novel,
You Shall Know Our Velocity. This leads to encounters with former friends, former colleagues and fractured family located all around North America, in the search for a new hometown and perhaps some sense of how not to raise children, along the way.
Of course, the movie is not without cliché: the more-humorous-than-romantic sex scene, the in-car argument, the goofy, cheeky boy and the wearisome, grounded girl, but it's all so very well put together that you hardly notice the producers tapping away, trying to break your heart. Is it more grown up, more sophisticated than
(500) Days...? I'm aware (via Wikipedia, naturally) that criticism has been levelled at the movie's central characters lording it up over the others, appearing "superior" and "condescending", and while I'm not familiar with Eggers' wife Veronica Vida (who co-writes the film with him and is also a novelist and journalist), those criticisms certainly sound familiar with regard to Eggers' other work.
Firstly, even a cursory look at
(500) Days... would reveal a similar trend. Be it Tom's romantic edge on his best friend or Summer's apparent belief that she is above anyone who believes in love, there isn't any lack of ego in either film. The real difference is that it's only really arguable that the situations the couple in
Away We Go find themselves in give them some justification for their attitudes - they believe they're better than the hippy couple who hate strollers and fuck in front of the kids rather than have them sleep in separate rooms, and they question the judgement of the parents who appear permanently drunk in front of the kids. You're left feeling that yes, obviously Eggers and Vida have engineered the story that way, but regardless, Burt and Verona have something resembling a point. Tom and Summer, on the other hand, are better at karaoke than like, one person, and Tom was almost an architect once.
I suppose the commercial success of
(500) Days... is the limited release of
Away We Go. One film is hailed as new and inventive and attracts audiences diverse enough to include people who've never had sex before because they listen to The Smiths and people who aren't old enough to have done either. Another, much more specific, transient and less prissy, quietly reaches out to comparatively small audiences but is, well, just much better, really. Which I guess rounds off the superiority argument, too: its protagonists think they are better than its supporting players, and its fans think it is better than the other romantic comedies of the era. And as Roger Ebert (quoted from his review of
Away We Go, on Wikipedia) suggests, "...maybe they just are."
My semi-regular and ill-informed movie review column, Film Idiot, returns next week. Click here for archive editions.
