by Terry Zwigoff, 2001.
Starring: Bob Balaban, Thora Birch, Steve Buscemi, Scarlett Johansson, Brad Renfro, Stacey Travis.
Rating: 9/10, 8.5/10.
This movie doesn’t play like a movie. I don’t know what it does play like, but it’s completely different from any other movie I’ve ever seen. Everything about it is different. The look—the colors are both bold and washed out, at the same time. The characters—especially Thora Birch with her crazy hair and costumes, but even, say, Bob Balaban, who doesn’t even look much different than usual—they somehow don’t look like any real people I’ve ever met, or even any fake people I’ve ever seen in a movie. The script—the way these mysteriously unreal-looking people talk is some sort of bizarre mix of ultra-realism and ultra-utter-implausibility.
Ghost World notices things, too, that most films don’t. Like the existence of people other than the main characters. Some of the most memorable characters aren’t really characters at all. Like, say, the pregnant woman who walks by in the background while Enid (Birch) and Rebecca (Johansson) are disagreeing over what sort of house to rent. Or the man who gets excited for Dana (Travis) when she closes some sort of deal at her job. The excited man gets about two words in; the pregnant woman never even steps into the foreground. And yet I have very vivid memories of both of them. Why? A certain skill on the part of the actors in getting their body language exactly right? A subtle turn of camerawork, making the eye in just the right place in just the right way? Subliminal messages? I don’t know.
It’s funny in a way that other movies aren’t, too. It’s hard to explain. Much of it is utterly deadpan, though that’s not the entire reason. It allows itself to be awkward in a way you don’t see very often, the way people often are—and yet, as I’ve said, nothing at all like people really are. I said it was hard to explain.
The plot revolves around Enid and Rebecca, two outsider girls just graduating from high school, trying to work out or avoid working out what to do with the rest of their lives. Their only plan is to rent a house together. Rebecca gets a job and starts to become disturbingly normal, while Enid (the real focus of the story) cultivates a bizarre fascination with a downtrodden, loserish sort of fellow named Seymour (Buscemi), whose entire life revolves around collecting old blues records. She likes him, she says, because he’s the exact opposite of everything she hates, while he has an even less flattering view of himself: "I hate my interests," he says at one point. So now the story comes down to Enid and Seymour’s bizarre courtship of sorts, which involves, among other things, Enid trying to set Seymour up with various women, and Seymour clumsily fuddling everything up. Not to say that Enid doesn’t clumsily fuddle everything up in her own way, too.
Basically what it comes down to is that Ghost World is a teen comedy the way that, say, Annie Hall is a romantic comedy, or Hedwig & The Angry Inch is a musical. I think.
Before reading on, consider whether you want to have any discussion of the ending, even in vague terms, reach your brain before you see the movie. If you don’t wish to be influenced, or have even the slightest of tiny bits of information made known to you beforehand, stop reading now.
So, if you’re still here, I have some brief words about the ending, trying not to reveal too much of it. Everyone I’ve talked to, and I myself until I thought more about it, saw the ending as a positive thing for Enid. It certainly has the structure of a happyish ending. But the more I thought about it, the more I doubted it, the more I saw it as negative for her. If you think about it (assuming, of course, that "you" have seen it), she does little more than indulge in a childish fantasy. True, she takes an action that she couldn’t have before the events of the movie changed her character, but in what way does that action actually help her? Not only that, but the more you consider it, the more you realize that she didn’t even rely on her own strength, power, mind, abilities, whatever you want to call it, to take this action. She was leaning on the fantasies of another. There is more I want to say about this, but I’m afraid of getting too specific. Just think about it.
ps. I’m not saying the ending was bad, mind you. I thought it was great. It’s just more thought-provoking than it seems at first glance, and hey, that’s always a good thing.