The Spectacular Now

THE SPECTACULAR NOW              B+                  

USA  (95 mi)  2013  ‘Scope  d:  James Ponsoldt          Official site

I open my arms wide and let the wind flow over me. I love the universe and the universe loves me. That’s the one-two punch right there, wanting to love and wanting to be loved. Everything else is pure idiocy—shiny fancy outfits, Geech-green Cadillacs, sixty-dollar haircuts, schlock radio, celebrity-rehab idiots, and most of all, the atomic vampires with their de-soul-inators, and flag-draped coffins.

Goodbye to all that, I say. And goodbye to Mr. Asterhole and the Red Death of algebra and to the likes of Geech and Keeeevin. Goodbye to Mom’s rented tan and my sister’s chargecard boobs. Goodbye to Dad for the second and last time. Goodbye to black spells and jagged hangovers, divorces, and Fort Worth nightmares. To high school and Bob Lewis and once-upon-a-time Ricky. Goodbye to the future and the past and, most of all, to Aimee and Cassidy and all the other girls who came and went and came and went.

Goodbye. Goodbye. I can’t feel you anymore. The night is almost too beautifully pure for my soul to contain. I walk with my arms spread open under the big fat moon. Heroic weeds rise up from the cracks in the sidewalk, and the colored lights of the Hawaiian Breeze ignite the broken glass in the gutter. Goodbye, I say, goodbye, as I disappear little by little into the middle of the middle of my own spectacular now.

—The Spectacular Now, ending paragraphs from the book, by Tim Tharp, 2008, The Spectacular Now - Page 294 - Google Books Result

Like S.E. Hinton’s young adult novels, this Tim Tharp novel is also set in Oklahoma, but has been transported to movie director James Ponsoldt’s home town of Athens, Georgia, as he explained:  “The script didn't identify where it was set—the setting just wasn't a big city.  It felt vaguely suburban—or kind of like a college town.  It seemed to me that the script had a sense of place in the way that Breaking Away (1979) did.  Athens was such an obvious candidate as a setting to shoot the film in—and it was really the only place I wanted to make the film.  Filming in Athens was incredibly meaningful to me.  We shot in the streets and houses of my childhood!”  While the movie is filmed in Georgia, there are no accents, no southern hospitality give-aways, no local beer references like Terrapin Beer Company, and nothing specific to identify a location, although we learn it’s not Texas, California, or Philadelphia, and is in a place that seems far away from those places.  But the beauty of it all is that it could be anywhere, as it’s a rite of passage story, one that takes us to a place most of us have already been before, as we’ve probably lived it.  What distinguishes this small little indie film from others is that the voices ring so true, as there’s nothing fabricated or Hollywood contrived about these characters.  These are beautifully written people that have not yet been corrupted by a movie business that long ago forgot to tell their stories, so at least for a brief moment in time, what you experience here feels genuine.  Opening and closing with the voice of Sutter Keely, Miles Teller from John Cameron Mitchell’s RABBIT HOLE (2010), a high school senior that is narrating a college application essay where he’s asked to mention experiences about any particular hardships he’s had to overcome.  This immediately jettisons us directly into his life which is expressed as a sustained flashback.  His is not an ordinary story, but there’s also nothing truly exceptional about it either, as it could be any one of us.  What makes it so compelling is the naturalistic strand of realism exhibited throughout, where there are even noticeable scars left intact on actor Teller’s face incurred from a real life car accident that figure prominently in how the film refuses to whitewash reality.     

Sutter begins his story by describing how he loses his girlfriend Cassidy (Brie Larsen) by trying to get Ricky (Masam Holden), one of his smart but geeky friends “some action,” setting him up on a double date where he’s unfortunately caught by his girlfriend.  As Cassidy is one of the prettiest girls in school, Sutter has ties with the more popular “in crowd,” where he’s such an easy going kid that he seems to connect with everyone, as his friendly, overly gregarious nature makes him extremely likeable, where at his age he exhibits an unshakeable confidence, often dispensing advice to others.  When we see him at parties, he and Cassidy have always been the life of the party, the ones other kids come to hang out with for fun.  But she’s not cool with what she’s seen, so Sutter spends a night bravely trying to drink away his difficulties, ending up asleep the next morning on somebody’s front lawn, completely in the dark about where he left his car.  He’s discovered by Aimee, Shailene Woodley from Alexander Payne’s The Descendants (2011), a smart but overly shy girl that knows him from school, as they’re in the same classes, but he hasn’t a clue who she is.  Nonetheless, she’s cute and he’s without a girlfriend at the moment, so he takes an interest and discovers she’s an amazingly sweet listener who’s uncomfortable talking about herself, which for an amiable guy like him is something of a challenge, so he grows more curious about her.  By this time, we realize Sutter has a habit of pulling a flask out of his coat pocket and pouring alcohol into his soft drinks, something he regularly does at his job at a shoe store as well, where we begin to realize why he’s such a happy go lucky guy, a friend to everyone except himself.  Aimee is much the same way, exhibiting low self-esteem, never wanting to draw attention to herself, where the two, perhaps surprisingly, hit it off immediately, even though it’s obvious he still has his eye on Cassidy. 

What’s perhaps more surprising is Cassidy still likes him, enjoys speaking candidly with him like they’re still good friends, but expresses no interest in going out with him again, as she’s currently going out with Marcus (Dayo Okeniyi), the black football star who’s also class president.  So even though the audience knows he’s waffling about his strong feelings for Cassidy, the relationship with Aimee is genuinely motivated and utterly sincere, where she can even help him with his failing geometry, but they both have parental anxiety issues, as Aimee wants to go to college in Philadelphia, and has been accepted, but her mom insists that she stay at home and help support the family, while Sutter hasn’t a clue where his father is, but knows his mother (Jennifer Jason Leigh) won’t even speak about him since he left.  What we discover are two unhappy kids who literally need one another, where both are in denial about major issues in their lives, each one shrugging it off as if it’s an everyday part of being normal.  Sutter’s family, including his friends, all have broken marriages, where he’s not aware of any happy adults, making him a bit leery about the future, where he instead concentrates on today and forgets about tomorrow.  There are some extraordinary scenes of extended conversations that have a way of including the audience in the impact of the moment, where our reactions will surely conflict with the notions of teenage kids, but some of these scenes are simply heartbreaking.  The secondary characters are hardly window dressing, but feature significantly into their lives, where their influence matters, as these are genuinely helpful people who are concerned about their welfare but may not know how to help.  The film is something of a portrait of unseen and unspoken tragedies, as Sutter is perfectly fine on the outside, popular and liked by all, where even as others are passing him by on their roads to having a future, making plans to go to college and choose a career, he’s perfectly content with being where he is, knowing “We’ll never be this young again.”  Even as the façade starts crumbling around the edges, where his life is a tragedy waiting to happen, we sense an incredible sadness in his ultimate fatalism, a lost soul where all that matters is this day and this moment, as nothing else exists.  There are no existentialist cues here, as this is still just a kid, but one we’re not apt to forget.

The Descendants

THE DESCENDANTS                        B+                  

USA  (115 mi)  2011  ‘Scope  d:  Alexander Payne                  Official site

One of Payne’s better films, where the spaciousness of his canvas is particularly appealing, as the Hawaiian setting here is idyllic, certainly a change of pace from the rat race of our normal lives, where we should be so lucky to have these kinds of inheritance problems, but one wonders what the infatuation is for lifestyles of the super wealthy, which seems to be an American and European fascination at the moment while the reflective economies are in a terrible downturn - - see von Trier’s MELANCHOLIA (2011), Almodóvar’s THE SKIN I LIVE IN (2011), Assayas’s SUMMER HOURS (2008) or Woody Allen’s MIDNIGHT IN PARIS (2011).  Based on an adapted screenplay from a novel by native Hawaiian Kaui Hart Hemmings, who herself has a role as Clooney’s secretary, the story concerns the coexistence of natives and whites in modern day Hawaiian society, suggesting they bear a responsibility in deciding what to do with the original lands of the indigenous past while also cultivating a need for development in a rapidly changing modern society.  Apparently large amounts of land continue to be held in trusts that were set up more than a century ago by the families of Hawaiian royalty.  Under a law called the rule of perpetuities, individuals, as opposed to charitable organizations, have until a specific date to act upon these trusts.  This is a backdrop for the story of Matt King (George Clooney), the hapa-haole (half-white) heir of a prominent Hawaiian landowning family that married into 25,000 acres of unspoiled land 150 years ago that now stands to make a bundle if they agree to sell off their shares.  However, much of what makes Hawaii so uniquely gorgeous has disappeared beneath a blitz of high end housing development for more hotels, condominiums, and luxury resorts, the kind of thing that makes a few people very wealthy at the expense of the pristine beauty of the island.  Many of the same questions were raised by Olivier Assayas’s SUMMER HOURS, where the heirs of the French aristocracy were too busy in their impersonalized modern lives to concern themselves with their family or the nation’s legacy, forgetting how influenced they were in their own childhoods by their seemingly unlimited and unending cultural access.    

Payne has crafted an irreverent but very low key approach that follows flawed yet original characters, highlighted by Clooney’s beautifully understated performance, a guy that appears out of nowhere to suddenly take an interest in the family he’s otherwise neglected for his own business adventures through the years.  However he’s called into action due to the medical emergency of his wife who ends up in a coma from a boating accident.  When her condition is not expected to improve, he’s forced to confront his two daughters, Shailene Woodley as Alexandra and Amara Miller as Scottie, both offering spirited performances, showing unusual range of expression without falling into the typical family cliché’s.  King also has to contact the friends and extended family at the same time he’s considering what to do about the family trust.  His lifelong retreat behind the safety net of complacency is suddenly called into question, made even worse when his daughter reveals her mother was having an affair.  Like a house on fire, King has to decide what’s worth saving and what he has to let go.  Quiet and surprisingly tender, there’s a healthy dose of humor mixed with pathos wrapped up in the tragic circumstances, where the revelations slowly reveal themselves and only grow more poignant, becoming more personalized with the growth of the characters.  While it’s first and foremost a family drama, one can’t help but see the broader implications and how it reaches into the lives of all Hawaiian citizens.  King understands many resent his inability to connect to his indigenous past, yet he’s the one that stands to make millions from land that never actually belonged to him or his family, but was entrusted to a vision of an idealized Hawaiian future.    

  

With brief autobiographical narration from King, what’s intriguing about his character is that he continues to play someone who is himself still developing into the person he is becoming, changing skins, making room for adjustments, experiencing a myriad of emotions from anger, confusion, sadness, the loss of parental authority, to suddenly finding himself alone without a partner, where he has to come to terms with his wife’s betrayal of her own family, all told in a tone that mixes humor with heartache.  Payne carefully sprinkles the family with notable eccentrics, but also shows the serious family portraits that have been hanging on the walls for generations.  Raising questions about assimilation and cultural identity, all of the music in the film comes from Hawaiian artists, where one was even written by Liliuokalani, Hawaii’s last queen.  The director never intends to overwhelm the viewer and refuses to resort to stylistic tricks of the trade, but infuses knowledge with the setting, where the audience is treated to an overview of the family legacy, plush green cliffs with plenty of vegetation overlooking the white sands of an undeveloped beach, a place that has remained as is for literally thousands of years, a portrait of everlasting perfection.  The natural beauty is an interesting contrast to the pervasive sadness of the story, which features a woman dying, who’s already been declared brain dead and has left instructions to remove all life support.  Despite all the unique twists that make you think otherwise, this is a horribly downbeat story that has a sobering effect on everyone, a wake up call that suggests this could be anyone, that life is short, that we have an obligation to rethink our lives in the truest, most moral sense and reconnect with those that matter the most to us.  Fortune may be intertwined with fate, but the choices and direction of our lives still belongs to us and we should never betray that most precious gift.