Pleasantville’s point is way beyond the scope of complexity of the majority of sombre art movies, never mind teen comedies. Because there are many good reasons for our heroes to settle in Pleasantville and stop rocking the boat. No pain. No violence. No failure. No rejection. Parents who unquestioningly adore you and wait upon you hand and foot (well, Mom does – this is the ’50s) but stay out of your way. A life-plan mapped out for you where AIDS and unemployment and global warming don’t exist and relationships live happily ever after. David and Jennifer destroy this world by killing its innocence and, just like the new ideals of the ’60s begat assassination, riot, violence between youth and state, activists becoming terrorists, suicide bombers, 9/11 . . . much of what comes from their meddling will undoubtedly be very, very bad.
But freedom – true freedom – is a risk. It means accepting responsibility for your fellow man and, when we don’t or won’t, society fails. It means being constantly unsure of why you’re here, and where you fit. This is the moral argument of every dictator, exploiting the chaos that democracy inevitably causes and reasoning that our lives would surely be better if we gave up key freedoms in return for the comfort and security of a world where our role is pre-ordained and we never have to feel like we do not fit ever again. It’s what leaders mean when they tell us that we are faced with a stark choice between human rights and teenage gangs or terrorists. Of course, the dictator in question, if given enough leeway, always becomes a self-appointed genocidal God. But who else would feel qualified to design our lives?
Pleasantville, the movie, insists that freedom is essential to humanity even if it means suffering, insecurity and loss of innocence. It connects the right’s vision of a clean, white, well-behaved America with fascism and declares that collective action – not a leader or a hero – is necessary to ensure that that fascism is never allowed to hold sway. And that the best thing about life is The Unknown, which is the only thing that makes us get off our arses and try to shape our own futures.
But it does this in such an entertaining, funny, pretty and elegant way that not only does the movie not preach, but it also never descends into being self-righteous. It adores Back To The Future, even if it doesn’t share its values, and much of its look and sound is a throwback to the unashamedly escapist feel of Spielberg in his early ’80s blockbuster phase which, by the time it reaches its thoughtful, surprising and elegantly adult and understated ending, has become a joyful tribute to the lush ’50s women’s pictures of Douglas Sirk. And it still allows its teens plenty of irresponsible scope to take their snappy, cruel dialogue cues from Heathers (see here), like the bit early on where one of Jennifer’s friends, in reference to the dorkiness of David, says: ‘You guys are, like, twins, though. You must be from the cool side of the uterus.’
It presents a Dream Mother, in Joan Allen’s Betty Parker, who may just be the most sympathetic and heartbreaking mom in teen movie history, and forces you to acknowledge your repressed longings for a pretty, kind woman who just looks after you, for ever . . . and then shows you exactly why you shouldn’t get it.
Oh . . . and a final word about Ms Witherspoon. You don’t hire the sainted Reese and make her a cardboard-cutout Mean Girl. She goes on a journey, and you think you know where it’s heading, and then it multiplies itself by ten and breaks a key rule of both time-travel movies and hugging-and-learning fiction. She’s just one of the many reasons why Pleasantville is among the most brave and beautiful of all teen movies.
RUSHMORE
1998
Starring: Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, Olivia Williams, Brian Cox
Dir.: Wes Anderson
Plot: The boy who never leaves school.
Key line: ‘I saved Latin. What did you ever do?’
Rushmore is a movie where an unattractive and unpleasant nerd is ashamed of his sweet old dad because he’s poor, lives a deluded myth of moral and intellectual superiority, orders everyone around, stalks and attempts to molest one of his teachers, and tries to kill the man she loves. It’s a delightful light comedy. Nope, I’m not being ironic. It really is.
Wes Anderson’s second movie is, as the director acknowledged, hugely indebted to the dry whimsy of Hal Ashby’s Harold And Maude (see here). But Ashby’s movies were all attempts to comment about America from a left-wing, counter-cultural perspective, and Anderson and his Rushmore co-writer Owen Wilson are well-to-do products of the apolitical ’90s, so their take on the wildly eccentric geek boy and the older woman is not really about anything, except perhaps their own experiences at posh prep schools put through a surrealist, film-buff filter.
Yet Rushmore is a more wholly satisfying movie than Harold And Maude, and much of that is because it has nothing specific to say about the state of the world or teenage realities. It’s probably about how much Anderson and Wilson always wanted to be feted film people. But even this is buried beneath enough whimsy, random quirkiness and technical brilliance that it doesn’t really matter.
Their teen protagonist Max Fischer is a wilful rejection of every movie teen male except Harold Chasen. While movie teens all want to get out of school as soon as possible, Max wants to stay in school for ever. While screen teen boys are masters at repressing their true feelings, Max has no filter whatsoever between thought and its expression. He’s a What If fantasy character, deliberately scrambling any attempt to define his movie as a coming-of-age saga with insightful things to say about kids. Which is absolutely brilliant for me because I’ve just watched 81 movies that try to say something meaningful about adolescence and, boy, it’s refreshing to watch one that doesn’t. It just wants you to sit back and look at strange and funny things, and laugh a little, and feel like you’ve watched an entertaining work of art. And it succeeds at every level.
Much of this, naturally, is down to the casting of Bill Murray. Anderson was apparently so overawed when Murray walked on set that he couldn’t bring himself to give him instructions publicly. Murray responded by deferring to him as overtly as possible, working for scale and even paying 25 grand out of his own pocket for a helicopter scene which would have pushed Rushmore over budget.
But Murray got his karmic reward. Rushmore reinvented him as a subtle leading man for cool indie movies, setting him up to play Bob Harris in Lost In Translation, the role he had been born to play. And it reminded us that he was an all-time great comedy presence, a man who could change the entire tone of a scene by hiding behind a tree at its outset, and ending it by turning tail and running away, in that uniquely funny stiff-necked-and-Bambi-legged manner that only a true clown could conceive.
Murray’s Herman Blume, the equally excellent Jason Schwartzman as Max and the modestly adorable Olivia Williams as English rose Rosemary Cross play out their bizarre love triangle around the fictional elite Rushmore school. Max is a scholarship student who runs just about every extracurricular activity on campus. He’s also an appalling student who is on the verge of being expelled by Brian Cox’s quietly bemused principal. Herman is a disillusioned millionaire who impresses Max with his anti-elitist speech at the school – ‘Take dead aim at the rich boys. Get them in your crosshairs . . . and take them down’ – and, bored with his own horrible meathead sons and dissolving marriage, becomes Max’s friend. The basis of most of the comedy is that no one, especially Max and Herman, notices that people generally makes friends with people their own age. The pair are mirror images of each other; Max talks like a man but reacts to everything like a child; Herman is a jaded adult who longs to feel and behave like a child again.
Problems quickly develop when Max gets an intense crush on teacher Rosemary, another adult who seems happy to see this weird boy as an equal. The crush quickly becomes inappropriate and obsessive, while Herman and Rosemary fall in love. Cuckolded Max goes mental, gets himself expelled, goes to a normal school, gets into a futile feud with Herman, gets himself arrested, forces Rosemary to leave Rushmore, and despairingly accepts a lonely future working in his dad’s barbershop. Its joyously corny se
t of resolutions and happy endings play out like a alienated kid’s fantasy of heroism, and the idea that the movie might all be a play-within-a-movie-within-a-pipedream is foreshadowed by an opening scene where Max dreams about becoming the toast of Rushmore by solving an impossible maths problem, and recurring red theatre curtains that introduce each new month of the tale.
The marvels of the film lie in its gorgeous camerawork and memorable use of ’60s British pop songs to comment upon the action. At one point, we are treated to a montage of Max’s extracurricular activities, played out as a series of immaculately composed but very funny tableaux, and backed by the punchy, sneering, Who-esque garage-mod of The Creation’s ‘Making Time’. Anderson finds as much joy in staring in wonder at an old-fashioned record player in Max’s dad’s barbershop as he does out of the deadpan interplay between Murray and Schwartzman.
But the comedy here is slow-burning rather than belly-laffing, as when Max gives a business card to an especially Yummy Mummy which bears the legend, ‘Max Fischer, Rushmore Academy, Ext. 23’. Rushmore revolves around the organic humour in watching a nerdy and unattractive boy playing at being a suave man-about-town, and doing it with such deluded determination that he entirely believes his own hype. He is Ferris Bueller-meets-Tracy Flick from Election (see here), somehow enveloping his fellow pupils (and most of the faculty) in the conspiracy of his fantasy self-image, splendidly obnoxious but too funny to dislike.
Anderson’s love of New Hollywood cinema of the early ’70s is hit home by the comic conceit of Max’s self-written and directed student play version of Serpico, a 1973, Sidney Lumet-directed tough cop vehicle for Al Pacino that spawned a TV series. The joke is that Max’s play is actually brilliant, with the actors in full period ’70s gangster threads and a perfectly proportioned and lit model train running past the tenement windows at the back of the stage. Not that Max Fischer is the young Wes Anderson, or anything . . .
Co-writer Owen Wilson finds his brother Luke a role, as a good brother should. Unfortunately, it’s a role that consists of being verbally humiliated by a teenage über-nerd while Bill Murray looks on, sniggering. Sibling issues, much?
How Wilson went from co-writing great left-field teen movies to playing third banana to Jennifer Aniston and a dog is probably one of those tales that will make a great episode of Entourage one day. And, in truth, the only film of the last few years that sucks as bad as Marley And Me is probably Anderson and Murray’s agonisingly pointless The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. But forgive ’em all because, along with the young Schwartzman in his too-small school blazer and ridiculous red beret, they conspired to make one of the few teen movies that has nothing to declare except its genius and the teen male’s fixation on hand-jobs.
CRUEL INTENTIONS
1999
Starring: Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Philippe, Reese Witherspoon, Selma Blair
Dir.: Roger Kumble
Plot: Les Liaisons Teenereuse.
Key line(s): Kathryn: ‘I’ll give you something you’ve been obsessing about ever since our parents got married.’
Sebastian: ‘Be more specific.’
Kathryn: ‘In English? I’ll fuck your brains out.’
The third best of the ’90s teen versions of highbrow classics (see Clueless, here, and William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, here) sees an A-list cast attempting to recast fin de siècle drawing-room drama about a diseased French upper class as a post-Heathers (see here) orgy of bad teen faith. Set in a New York made to feel like Glyndebourne with skyscrapers, Cruel Intentions is funny, glossy, nasty and dirty, and presented Sarah Michelle Gellar (cue Hallelujahs and hosannas!) with an opportunity to get as far away from the self-sacrificing nobility of Buffy Summers as was (super)humanly possible. Did she pull it off? We’ll get back to that.
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ original novel had already been adapted for the screen with numerous liberties taken. The most famous version, the Oscar-nominated Dangerous Liaisons (1988), which starred Glenn Close, Michelle Pfieffer and John Malkovich, stayed period-faithful to the novel and blew the following year’s Valmont (Colin Firth, Annette Bening) out of the water. There had been a Korean version in 1970 (the Koreans had another go in 2003), and a 1959 Roger Vadim version that transposed the story to the 1960s. Post-Cruel Intentions, there’s been a 2003 French TV miniseries starring Catherine Deneuve and Rupert Everett set in the 1950s, and, helpfully, a 2005 gay porn version featuring cameos from Boy George, Graham Norton and somebody called Hedda Lettuce. It really is the gift that keeps on giving.
For Hollywood teen purposes, it goes like this. Step-siblings Kathryn (Gellar) and Sebastian (Philippe) rule the New York upper-class teen social scene by fear, sex, manipulation, blackmail and humiliation. Sebastian fancies Kathryn, and she knows it. While Kathryn sets about trying to destroy the rep of the virginal Cecile (Blair) in revenge for her nicking a previous boyfriend, the pair also make a bet over whether Sebastian can bed the militantly virginal Annette (Witherspoon).
Meanwhile, Cecile falls in love with her black cello teacher, which is obviously a no-no. Sebastian falls in love with Annette. Annette falls in love with Sebastian, despite herself. Kathryn falls in love with cocaine and fucking everyone else up, especially Sebastian. She gets her comeuppance, but not in time to avert a tragic death.
Writer/director Roger Kumble set himself a daunting task and somehow pulls it off. The bitchy and occasionally disgusting dialogue zings and he has great fun reinventing the mansions, grandiose gardens and opulent drawing-rooms of period drama in a New York setting. The plot machinations are annoying because the original’s plot machinations are annoying, but you don’t care because you are too busy enjoying Philippe’s evident pleasure in playing the gorgeous sadist to the hilt. The boy’s playing against two of the finest actresses of the day here, so it’s some shock that Cruel Intentions is undoubtedly Philippe’s movie. You wonder if his effortless skill at playing an effete pervert has something to do with his subsequent lack of success as a Hollywood leading man. Plus . . . should the boy really be prettier than the girls? Unless he’s Johnny Depp who is, as always, the exception that proves every rule.
The movie has flaws, though. And Flaw Number One gives me no pleasure whatsoever to report. Its name is Sarah Michelle Gellar.
Its something I am only now admitting to myself, what with being a Buffy obsessive and all. But it has been brought to my attention by the news, just as I’m finishing this book, that Ms Gellar’s new project is on its way to dear old Albion. It’s a US TV show called Ringer where she plays identical twins. In other words, she appears to have given up on her attempts to become a movie leading lady and has come back to genre television, where she belongs. And watching Cruel Intentions again, after sitting through various disappointments and/or flops like the Scooby Doo movies, The Grudge and Southland Tales (I’m leaving out all the straight-to-DVD disasters), you can, sadly, see exactly why.
Because, despite being more beautiful as a brunette than a blonde, and applying all her prodigious technique to all those dirty jokes and bitchy come-ons . . . Philippe, Witherspoon and even Selma Blair repeatedly blow her off screen. She is supposed to be one of the most enduringly seductive but grotesque villains in literature, and you want to go with it, but . . . you can’t.
Why? Because she’s Buffy Summers. And Buffy Summers isn’t capable of such depravity.
Over 144 episodes SMG developed one of the most fully rounded characters in TV history. And just like Buffy keeps saying about her sister Dawn, ‘they made her out of me’. Buffy is all the most noble qualities and quirks of mannerism and movement of Sarah Michelle Gellar. Which means she’s got nothing left over to be anything else. Which means that, when she leans back on a bed and implies that Ryan Philippe can fuck her up the arse . . . we’re just not buying it. It just looks like Buffy pretending to be bad, like when she pretended to be a robot at the end of Buffy Season Five. And precisely the same goes for her Karen Davis in The Grudge (Buffy wouldn’t be so
scared!) and Krysta in Southland Tales (Buffy wouldn’t be a porn star!). To lead movies, you need to be bigger than the character. You need to be you, with different names and haircuts. And therefore, if all who watch you just see the role that made you . . . you’re doomed.
Still, if this really is the end of SMG’s movie career, Cruel Intentions ensures that she’s left her mark on cinema history. Because, while we’d all like to pretend that what we took from this movie was its ingenious updating of the intricacies of 18th-century French literature, we didn’t. Especially us guys. When someone mentions this film to us, we nod knowingly, look a little dreamy, and bond with other men on matters other than football. Because we’re thinking about The Kiss.
In case you haven’t seen: Kathryn is combing Cecile’s hair in Central Park. They are talking about the fact that Cecile has no sexual experience at all. Ms Gellar, who is resplendent in black Jackie Onassis chic, asks, ‘Haven’t you practised on a girlfriend?’ She turns Cecile around, instructs her to wet her lips, removes the hat (but not the shades) she’s wearing, and they kiss very slightly and tenderly. Having gained approval for her teaching technique, SMG (see how I can’t even bring myself to call her Kathryn? I’m barely able to stop writing the ‘B’ word!) suggests that they use tongues this time. Cecile seems oddly keen. SMG removes the shades. ‘Coffee & TV’ by Blur is playing. And the two lean slowly forward and . . .
Worlds collide, oceans flow backwards, cars crash, men as far away as Texas topple from ladders, and you can hear the spirit of Glen Quagmire off Family Guy going ‘giggedy-giggedy-giggedy’ until his head explodes. It’s a good kiss.
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