High Fidelity*
Rob Gordon (John Cusack), thirty-something, runs a record store in Chicago specializing in vinyl recordings of older rock music, abetted by a pair of employees that have hired themselves, the stridently extroverted Barry (Jack Black) and the diffidently neurotic Dick (Todd Louiso). But this business might well be viewed as the emblematic representation of the life of a character who is living embodiment of the phrase "emotional immaturity." John is not simply a passionate aficionado of rock, but an overgrown adolescent who has chosen a trade which allows him to continue living in the past. No sooner has the film commenced with his latest girlfriend, Laura (Iben Hjedje), leaving him than Rob launches into a soliloquy about the breakup of his first love at age fourteen and then proceeds with a retrospective survey of all his unhappy amours since that time. The idea is a not uninteresting one--something like Proust meets Presley. Unfortunately, however, the screenplay by D.V. DeVincentis, Steve Pink, and Scott Rosenberg, based upon a book by Nick Hornby never succeeds in giving Rob the sort of detail a character like this needs in order not to come across as a jerk. Rob belongs to a whole line of male heroes dating back to Cal (James Dean) in Elia Kazan's East of Eden (1955) who are supposed to be sensitive souls protectively keeping the uncomprehending world at a distance. But Rob is not so much long-suffering as insufferable, a totally self-involved individual who just wants the world to go away and let him listen to his music, an attitude blatantly conveyed by the photo used in print ads for High Fidelity which shows him wearing headphones with a defiant look of disdain on his face. In films like The Green Room (1978) and The Man Who Loved Women (1977), François Truffaut worked wonders with similiarly obsessed characters by giving their passion a tragic intensity reminiscent of Scotty's quest to recover the lost Madeleine in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo--in a way High Fidelity never begins to do with Rob, who is no latter day schöne Seele but an old-fashioned American schmo.
I like John Cusack as a performer quite a bit but it doesn't help that High Fidelity focuses so narrowly on its main character that it threatens to turn into a John Cusack concert movie, especially when half of the movie or so consists of monologues addressed by Rob directly to the audience. Nor does it improve matters that the movie has been directed by Stephen Frears--who did the remarkable Grifters, starring Cusack and Anjelica Huston, a few years back--in an absolutely vanilla style. Even at the film's dramatic high points, when Laura describes how she had had an abortion after Rob was unfaithful to her or when her father dies, High Fidelity has no bite whatsoever. At some moments, the subject reminded me of the bitter saga of affairs gone wrong in Mike Nichol's Carnal Love, but that film's strength was a real vein of nastiness High Fidelity shies away from to its detriment. Jonathan Fuerst (Jack Nicholson) was a far less likable character than Rob Gordon but at the same time a far more memorable one. High Fidelity is a more competent job of filmmaking than American Beauty but I have the depressing suspicion the same motives underlie its enthusiastic reception by reviewers. Just looking at the reviews quoted in the ads for the movie by Richard Schickel, Stephen Holden, David Ansen, Joseph Morgenstern, and Roger Ebert, I can hear a sigh of relief rising over the land, "At last a movie we can understand!" What makes High Fidelity like American Beauty so attractive to an older generation of critics is its conspicuous distance from the challenges offered by Eyes Wide Shut, Bringing Out the Dead, or Fight Club. This is a movie reviewers can "get into" in the worst sense of the word, and I suspect more than a touch of "There but for the grace of God go I" psychology in their ready identification with Rob, although Ebert goes the furthest in this dubiously narcissistic direction. How pathetic and how contemptible a reason for liking a motion picture! Better the perplexingly prolix pace of Ghost Dog than the smugly complacent pleasures of a movie like High Fidelity.
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E-mail Dave at daveclayton@worldnet.att.net