director
Terry Zwigoff
screenwriters
Terry Zwigoff
Daniel Clowes
based on
the graphic novel by
Daniel Clowes
producers
Lianne Halfon
John Malkovich
Russell Smith
cinematographer
Affonso Beato
music
David Kitay
editors
Carole Kravetz
Michael R. Miller
cast
Thora Birch (Enid)
Scarlett Johansson (Rebecca)
Steve Buscemi (Seymour)
Brad Renfro (Josh)
Illeana Douglas (Roberta)
Bob Balaban (Enid's Dad)
Stacey Travis (Dana)
Teri Garr (Maxine)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 111m
u.s.
release: 8/3/01
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
other terry
zwigoff films
reviewed on this website:
- art
school confidential
- bad
santa
- crumb
see also:
- american
splendor
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Hollywood, in its ceaseless
search for material to bend to its own will, has looked to comic
strips and comic books practically since its infancy. Trouble
is -- especially lately -- they look at the wrong comics. While
Sam Raimi's Spider-Man
and Ang Lee's Hulk
might be fun, most comic-book adaptations are closer to the ineptitude
of Batman
Forever than to the clear-eyed vision of Frank Miller's
Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. (Even Miller's own current
sequel, The Dark Knight Strikes Again, is like
an oafish P. Diddy remix of its predecessor.) Hollywood sees
shallow heroism and the potential for hollow spectacle in superhero
stories; anything featuring actual human beings doesn't appear
on the radar.
The closest thing in Ghost
World to an action sequence is a brief, fumbling scuffle
between a nunchuck-wielding doofus and a scrawny record collector,
and its source material -- Daniel Clowes' brilliant 1996-7 serial
comic -- didn't even have that. Ghost World is the sort
of "indie comic" few people besides serious comics
readers have even heard of, and the movie version got similarly
overlooked last summer, when most of America was busy with Rush
Hour 2 and Planet
of the Apes. It centers on two teenage girls, Enid and
Rebecca, right after high-school graduation; its subject is that
awkward, often painful transitional period between high school
and whatever else (college, job), and how friendships forged
in adolescence sometimes don't survive the transition.
The movie, directed by Terry
Zwigoff (who made 1995's amazing documentary Crumb)
from a script he wrote with Clowes, doesn't focus as much on
the Enid-Rebecca relationship as the comic did. Instead, they
have fleshed out a character seen for only a few panels in the
comic -- Seymour (Steve Buscemi), a lonely, acerbic blues collector
(much like the director himself) -- and nudged the equally acerbic
Enid (Thora Birch) into an odd and tentative friendship with
him, while Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson) grows up and apart from
Enid, pursuing things like a job and an apartment half-heartedly,
because it's what you do after graduation.
Enid worships kitsch and outmoded
pop -- anything that isn't mass-produced and mass-embraced. Thora
Birch's performance snaps into focus the moment Enid steps out
of her bathroom and stops in her tracks upon hearing the dusty
old blues number "Devil Got My Woman." This song, finally,
is something for Enid to be passionate about -- the real thing.
Birch is certainly amusing in her earlier, sneering moments,
but it's nothing she and others haven't done before; but after
Enid learns to appreciate that blues record as art and emotion,
not as something to be ironically cherished because it's "so
bad it's almost good," Birch deepens into something like
maturity. Her scenes with Steve Buscemi -- whose Seymour, despite
a couple of Buscemi-esque outbursts, is perhaps his gentlest
and most honorable creation -- are so delicately written and
played that we almost don't even miss Rebecca. (The deep-voiced
Scarlett Johansson is fine as the rather dispassionate realist
Rebecca, but the movie doesn't develop Rebecca in much detail;
her drift towards "responsible adulthood" takes place
mostly offscreen. There's a suggestion of a relationship between
her and one of the girls' favorite stooges, a mild clerk played
with Cusackian befuddlement by Brad Renfro, but the movie has
eyes only for Enid and Seymour. I'd complain more about that
if there were anything in Birch's and Buscemi's scenes to complain
about.)
Ghost World is something of an ode to arrested
development. It just about fetishes the womblike clutter of Enid's
and Seymour's bedrooms, festooned with the sort of "cool
things that only I like" decor that indicates few visits
from outsiders. At the same time, its vision of the characters'
universe -- a plasticized sprawl of mini-malls and convenience
stores, a ghost of the individualized town it might once have
been -- is fairly depressing. What to do in this ghost world?
Buy into it like Rebecca (who displays an unhealthy respect for
dull plastic cups and fold-out ironing boards), buy into it halfway
like Seymour (who has a corporate job but nurtures his non-mainstream
fixations), or reject it like Enid (whose response to Rebecca's
request to act like a presentable, mature apartment-seeker is
to dye her hair green)?
I can imagine Ghost World
directed by John Waters and starring Christina Ricci as Enid
-- it's exactly the kind of role she might've taken a few years
ago -- but I doubt it would've had this mixture of hipster bemusement
and postmodern melancholy. Much of the dialogue is verbatim from
Clowes, who has an uncanny ear for how smart, sarcastic teenage
girls talk, and Zwigoff brings his own acid to the table -- a
lot of the movie works as snide commentary on video stores, megaplexes,
art-school pretensions, or theme-period diners (the film's '50s-theme
eatery Wowsville violates its own reality with raucous hip-hop
oozing out of the jukeboxes). All of this from a comic book --
and not the usual comic book you usually see in theaters, like
the current Rollerball or Collateral Damage. Clowes'
Ghost World is a great short novel told in words and pictures;
the movie he and Zwigoff have made from it is a great comedy-drama
that doesn't look or feel remotely like a "comic-book movie."
If more people appreciated stories like this, movies and comic
books would be better off.
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