Superbad

The comedy in Superbad works, I think, because of the absurd innocence behind the characters’ attempt to lose theirs. From the Animal House perspective—which generated a large degree of commercial, youth-oriented schlock in its wake—the kids are cynical narcissists living for the trashed weekend hook-up. In Mean Girls, the kids are the slick products of a sophisticated farce—honestly depicted, but detached from reality. Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen, however, who wrote the first draft of Superbad while they were adolescents themselves, are far from detached; they are only so far beyond high school age—and have made much of themselves in the meantime. Thus, they portray the banal, rockin’-the-suburbs rites of passage with very balanced nostalgia.

The last-party-of-high school, trying-to-buy-liquor-underage, gotta-get-the-girl coming-of-age superstructure of Superbad is nothing new. And, technically, neither are Seth (Jonah Hill) or Evan (Michael Cera); the corpulent bore and his lanky sidekick predate the teen movie by a long shot. Even the much-lauded deluge of “dirty words” is just Porky’s: The Next Generation. Don’t other critics get that censorship (and teenagers’ vocabularies, upon seeing these movies) is continually getting laxer? (Using swear words isn’t really boldness on the filmmakers’ part.) What works is not the all-too-universal plot line, but the lovingly absurd point of view, which consumes it. With the penis drawings and, in a lazier way, the dialogue, Goldberg and Rogen are livening up the usual circumstances; it becomes a farce, all right, but one that teenagers would want to write about themselves. The writers (Rogen was 25 when Superbad came out) aren’t reliving their high school past; they’re rewriting it as they wish it had been—but, fortunately, they’re not narcissists.

Why else would Rogen (also executive producer) cast himself as one of the cops that picks up Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) and takes him for a joyride to prove that grown-ups can have fun, too? (He’s not trying to convince just Fogell of that.) Teen movies often feed into teenage self-absorption and pretend that the adult world is like some weird, parallel dimension beyond the viewer’s scope (or interest). When adults are actually given dialogue, it might as well be the wonk-wonk-wonk of the Peanuts’ parents. Mom and Dad don’t make an appearance in Superbad, either, but the sequences with those strange creatures beyond the drinking age are generally the best. Quasi-virginal Seth acts as a shrewd pragmatist, blackmailing a shady addict into drawing them to a lurid house party. David Edelstein of New York compared the scene where Evan is made to sing for a group of cokeheads in a bedroom to Dean Stockwell’s orgasmic ditty in Blue Velvet, but I think Edelstein got it in reverse. As in the David Lynch film, the kids aren’t the surreal spectacle, the postlapsarian grown-ups are. It’s a strange world these twenty- and thirty-somethings are mired in, but the great irony is that this is just what the party Seth and Evan would be relegated to in a few years time—high school is indeed a “magical” age.

The unscrupulous cops—Animal House brothers that, much to their chagrin, graduated—are even queasier role models. Their target-practice, drunk-driving tomfoolery would be a nightmare in Training Day; it’s a testament to these filmmakers that it comes off comically in Superbad. The teen-triumvirate wants to get out of high school “accomplished”; the policemen want back in. The cops’ sentimentality keeps them from being immoral buffoons, but the level of sentiment is just right: they don’t want to get back into the pool so much as they just want to dip their feet in. Otherwise, the fantasy would become acridly anti-adult, and the cops’ woebegone misanthropy would be a stone-cold bummer.

I’d be remiss not to mention the actors, though they’ve been greatly publicized elsewhere. Cera’s Evan is not naïve: he’s sweetly, shyly moral. He’s in opposition to the brutal masculine figure who’d come back into style with the Burger King commercials of a few years back; in fact, his femininity is made into a joke—but not a cruel one. Cera blends goodwill with good timing, and exudes a cowboy’s laconic chivalry and conscientiousness without the kind of ego that fosters pretensions of superiority. When he says, matter-of-factly, that he wants to respect women, you believe him. Hill, on the other hand... I can identify with the bullies who want to beat this violently undersexed loudmouth up. But his seeming authenticity in this role is also his strength. It’s almost impossible (and undesirable) to play this role without irony; he doesn’t, but neither does he wink at the camera. Mintz-Plasse is such an authentic dork (being as he was, an actual high school student at the time) that saying anything more about him would be superfluous. (Except maybe, Why does everyone think his McLovin license is such comedic gold? It just passed over me, I guess.)

I’m sure that Superbad will soon join the pantheon of generational teen movies, somewhere between Empire Records and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and up there it deserves a place. I’m certain, too, that this is exactly the kind of movie that will become iconic of this generation and decade (even though its 70s-chic will seem confusing), and will gloss over, to some, all the bad memories of high school. One shouldn’t forget, however, that it has the failings of all its antecedents, as well: the two-dimensional, all-their-shit-together mythical girls, for instance. But, it’s a small, winsome movie (even a nicely lighted one, for what it’s worth) that gears one up for illicit summertime partying.

Atonement

Atonement is so pleasingly old-fashioned that one might believe, save for a few details, that it was up for Best Picture of 1946. One can safely assume that the filmmakers were aiming for the kind of “greatness” that romances of this stripe have attained in the past; in those terms, Atonement has achieved it. Its psychology is no more advanced than that of a Gone with the Wind or Doctor Zhivago or Titanic, but it’s a grand tear-jerker—a high-class chick-flick.

The early scenes, at a stately English manor, are presented as though Gosford Park was decades away. There’s the pristinely-beautiful starlet-lover, Cecelia (Keira Knightley); her Victorian dowager mother; her unappealing, rich fiancé; his foppish, absurdly élitist industrialist-friend; the starlet’s true love, Robbie (James McAvoy), a gentle soul of lesser means who is about to enroll in medical school and prove his worth as a credit to his class; and the starlet’s little sister, Briony (the airy blonde Saoirse Ronan), whose name smells of salt and who pines for Robbie, but is too young and awkward to nab him. All in the span of a day, Robbie accidentally sends Cecelia a letter expounding on his longing for her “cunt,” which Briony reads and is disgusted by. Briony catches Robbie and Cecelia finally consummating their love in the library; later, when Briony sees a man (who we do not see) raping her pre-teen cousin in the woods, she blames the crime on Robbie. He’s sent to prison, and, at the break of World War II, opts to become a soldier instead.

Like Wind or Zhivago or Titanic, the calamity here is but a means of separating our two star-crossed lovers. And, as with those three films, the historical disaster (the Civil War, Russian Revolution and sinking ship, respectively) is reproduced like a technician’s dream: one impressive dolly shot swivels around a war-torn city for minutes. But, even when the camera pulls back to reveal slaughtered schoolgirls stumbled upon by Robbie (meant to evoke, I’m certain, the famous crane shot revealing all the wounded Confederates in Wind), one doesn’t feel too much anti-war fury: Robbie’s perambulations as a soldier never show him any combat, only monumental weariness and the heart-squishing yearning for Cecelia.

Despite its gaudiness, though, the movie is not without feeling; there’s a very sensitive scene at a war hospital in which Briony (now a nurse) speaks to a dying French soldier. He’s missing pieces of his brain, and believes he knows and loves her. A counterpoint to this scene, however, is the incredibly graphic display of battle wounds after a battalion is rushed to the hospital. Like the schoolgirls, this doesn’t show us the horrors of war; it shows us how nasty a makeup job these filmmakers can provide. Why they thought this effect desirable in this movie, I don’t know.

The real innovation of Atonement, I suppose, is that the foci of the romance are not just Cecelia and her Robbie, but Briony the Bitch, as well. The title comes from her lifelong attempts at penance for slandering Robbie—a crime of passion. Guilt and the sultry are prime subjects for a romance novel, and they translate cleanly into this epic spectacle because the writers and the director, Joe Wright (a name not quite as epical as Cecil B. DeMille’s), seem earnest about featuring the pathos, but balance that earnestness with an ability to keep thrusting the plot (through sometimes-confusing flashbacks and forwards) in the same way that Robbie wishes to thrust Cecelia. Unfortunately, as they are such darling sweethearts, that thrust sometimes includes mantras like “Come back to me!” and “This story will resume!” But the cinematography (by Seamus McGarvey) is so classically grandiose that one feels that it’s natural for Pvt. Robbie to run after Cecelia’s truck as it drives away. And McAvoy and Romola Garai (the older Briony, and a good double for Ronan) give their roles an elegant, utterly British intensity. One moment, however, is irreparably campy—a purplish attempt at foreshadowing: through a window, Briony sees an old woman waddle down the street with a cart during an important scene, and the viewer laughs his way right out of the film.

Here’s a question: Why are war romances (not combat movies such as Platoon and Saving Private Ryan) so popular at such queasy times? The Civil War somehow provided pleasurable escape for those about to face World War II, and now, as we are entrenched in Iraq and the War on Terror and cynicism, this throwback goes up for Best Picture. It’s not a question one can satisfactorily answer in a small space; but maybe by making our previous conflicts seem grotesque in a glamorous, fantastical way, and, further, turning them into passionate duologues between two lovely lovers, we feel less troubled by the problems at hand—they devolve to the interpersonal level. Regardless, soggy—sometimes even sloppy and hole-ridden—material like this can make for a compleat guilty pleasure, if not a “great” movie.

Michael Clayton

"Michael Clayton" is a direct descendant of the corruption-themed thrillers of the seventies (such as "Serpico" and "Chinatown"), but it loses nothing in dropping the characteristic downer ending. With the possible exception of "Atonement," which I've still yet to see, "Clayton" is the least arty of the Best Picture nominees (in terms of style--not necessarily substance), but it's terse, slick, exciting and one hell of a polemical. Films like this sometimes go slack and take a pedantic piddle, but this one's tight, bouncy and smart. Tony Gilroy, the writer and director (this is his first go at the latter), has a knack for giving potentially-shopworn sentiments an entertaining kick (such as taking the profusion of anti-lawyer bigotries and turning them into "The Devil's Advocate"). He doesn't disappoint here; he draws out his characters and gives them so much to do in so little time (the movie spans less than a week) that the proficient actors in those parts can't but sparkle--it may be from exhaustion. It certainly looks that way with George Clooney (Clayton), the tired fixer who finally wants out (an old standard, but one that's frenetically enlivened here); he was at one time kindred to the broad hero of "Thank You for Smoking," but has finally crashed to planet earth. His situation is so bad it would be "Kafka-esque" if he had a spare moment to think it through. The only really substantial problem with this movie is that it has too many characters in too many places--some look like others and, though there's a tight Hollywood wrap-up, one's not entirely sure of everybody's affiliation at the end--but that's like saying the movie is too interesting. It doesn't give you the aesthetic thrill ride that "There Will Be Blood" does, but "Clayton" stays blissfully above the speed limit.