Ghost World (2001)

Wonderful film, intelligent, surprisingly compassionate, and humanistic...

This is a great, great movie. It could have easily gone off into another variation of the typical indie film. Instead of being smug and overly quirky like many indie films can be, this film is genuine, intelligent, and humanistic as well. I atttribute this to the director, Terry Zwigoff, who directed one of my favorite documentaries, Crumb, and the two excellent leads, Steve Buscemi and Thora Birch. Buscemi here is especially good, playing a character that could have easily turned into a caricature with a lesser director and actor. Buscemi plays a lonely 42 year old bachelor who lives with an astonishing record collection. Some may have portrayed him with snark and made him look like a loser, but Buscemi and Zwigoff give him humanity and soul, and it makes for one of Buscemi's greatest performances. He's really underrated as an actor. Birch is excellent, too, as the sarcastic, yet human girl who takes a liking to Buscemi. Again, their romance feels real, and she seems to genuinely like him, despite the differences in age. It's not forced, sleazy, and it's not done for the sake of being quirky. This is one of the best indie films I've ever seen. October 29, 2008

The hollow women

Touted as a film on "over 140 Top Ten Lists" and "Best Film of the Year," "Ghost World" really works. The fact that I had to watch it twice just to finish it doesn't mean much. I fell asleep the first time. I was tired and the movie was boring. Nix that. Because I was tired, the movie was boring.

The second time I was totally alert to this film rife with meaning. Enid (Thora Birch) and Rebecca (Scarlet Johannson) have been friends for ten years and have that mental telepathy of friendship of the closest kind. However, their friendship is based on being outsiders and isolated from the slightest connection with others, thus a friendship by default.

Cynical and world-weary even as a recent graduate from high school, Enid finally finds a job in a movie theater doling out snacks to wary and unwary moviegoers. Enid does not mince words and if she says, How much chemical sludge do you want on your popcorn?, you really can't blame the supervisor for firing her.

The fact that the two young women are going to get an apartment together means a job is essential. Score a negative for Enid. Rebecca is disappointed. Again Rebecca expresses disapproval of Enid's cynical nature concerning boys. None is any good! The viewer can watch Rebecca's slow, yet discernible twist away from her best friend in this significant summer of growth. Change is inevitable, life is inexorable.

The second weak link of summer is Enid's art class which she must pass to keep her diploma. The art teacher is a pseudo-hippy, quarking out artisms, not to impress, but because she is a product of this Ghost World. What has meaning? Art? What kind of art?

Two oddities stream out of this segment: the poster Enid submits to make a statement and the art that is real, Enid's notebook of art created because she really is talented.

The poster unifies the film in that it is the possession of Seymour (Steve Buscemi), an older version of Enid, disillusioned, unsettled with the world at large, and a citizen in the world of his own making. Seymour is Enid's hero and she unlikely bonds with him mentally and physically.

Sleepwalk. The major characters sleepwalk through their lives, until Rebecca wakes up to self in the grand way that recent graduates can do. Enid becomes more entrenched in her self-imposed isolation in this Ghost World. It's not a happy film, but then life does not always offer happiness. Take it the way you find it or change it. That's what Enid does. (Intentional ambiguity)

July 9, 2008

Trippy.

Ghost World could have been a lot better and more special. Thora Birch is a great actress and she's good in this unique indie film but the plot and ending leaves the audience with many unanswered questions. Steve Buscemi and Scarlett Johansson also star and the late Brad Renfro. Ghost World is based on a comic book, so expect a dark comedy. Wish I liked this film more but it is just ok for me. April 27, 2008

Quirky movie

Had seen this movie about halfway through on cable. Had to buy it to see the rest. Good acting, good actors/actresses, subtle story line. January 7, 2008

Every Cynic Is a Frustrated Romantic

"Ghost World" was the best movie I've seen in a LONG damn time. The key to a great movie is that it's its own world --
a self-contained universe. "Bringing Up Baby" is one such example, so is "Vertigo" and "For a Few Dollars More." Any of Billy Wilder's movies, too. This one was one of them.
I love Enid. A teenage H.L. Mencken, she skewers pretentious poseurs and tips over sacred cows. But, underneath her outer punk persona, there is a soft-hearted hero-worshipper. Her predicament is that she's stranded on a social desert island and uses cynicism as a shield to protect her from the hopeless banality in which heroes and passion are deemed passe by people who walk through life questioning nothing, but just parroting the answers they've picked up from the larger society.

"Ghost World" abounds in social commentary, but doesn't fall into the schmaltzy trap of trying to "solve" the world's social ills. Although on the surface Enid is directionless, she nonetheless has a mania for sketching a diary of the oddballs and weirdos that make up her small town. An excellent artist and charicaturist, Enid ends up failing art class TWICE.

Her airheaded hippy/burnout art teacher, Roberta (Illeana Douglas), is a walking cliche of a total conformist affecting an air of anti-authoritarianism. She blows off Enid's diary and her cartoons of Don Knotts, but pushes her students to instead produce so-called "controversial" art. A really dead-on scene is when one of Roberta's sycophantic students creates a sculpture out of coathangers, which represents "a woman's right to choose, something I feel super-strongly about." It's a gem of a parody on political art in which the politics are much stronger than the art. I was rolling on the floor when Roberta's real bad college art film "Mirror/Father/Mirror" clip was playing. God damn, that rings true. Roberta doesn't encourage the artistic impulse so much as pushing her agenda on the students to be "controversial" and "confront people's attitudes."

So, Enid decides to spoof Roberta and bring in a "found object" of a Jim Crow charicature from the 1920s of "Coon's Chicken," which depicts a monkey-like negro. This pisses off the other students (who were sotto voce receiving the message that they should only confront people with PC controversy), but the irony of the movie is in how Roberta reacts to the Jim Crow poster; Enid can't get the time of day from her when it comes to her own talented artwork, but her jokes on Roberta's inanities wins Roberta over to her cause and even inspires Roberta to get Enid a scholarship to art college. All this falls apart when Roberta enters the piece in an exhibit, and the local censors force her to remove the poster and fail Enid in her class. Her capitulation reveals her devotion to "controversy" and "confrontation" to be a hollow pose, and she covers her [rear] by letting Enid be the lamb to the slaughter.

The relationship between Enid and Seymour (Steve Buscemi) evinces Enid's yearnings to find someone to look up to, rather than down upon. I liked Steve Buscemi a lot. I'm so used to him playing funny roles, that it was sort of incongruous seeing him play it (mostly) straight in a comedic movie, but it worked quite well. Like Enid, Seymour is a middle-aged outcast, and at first becomes the victim to one of Enid's and her best friend Rebecca's (Scarlett Johansson) cruel pranks. But underneath the nerdish and pitiful exterior, Enid comes to discover in Seymour someone as isolated and alientated from society as she is. She finds in him a noble soul, whose passions are worn less on his sleeve than Enid's are, but locked up in his 1920s-themed room dedicated to his 78 rpm blues and ragtime records and poster art from the same era. Enid sees in Seymour a lot of herself, but also someone who has been run over once too many times in life and whose social rebellions have shrivelled into repressed loneliness. Enid finds in Seymour a hero, and gushes "I'd kill for a room like this" when complimenting his passion for nostalgia. To which Seymour -- who has given up on the possibility of ever fitting in or finding love -- replies "go ahead, kill me."

By the movie's end, Seymour starts asserting his inwardly pent-up feelings to relate to the world through his romance with Enid. Finally getting up the nerve to break up with Dana, a nice, though conventionally-thinking person, in order to be with Enid, who shares his passions, and thinks like he does, Seymour nonetheless has his love for Enid somewhat unrequited. Just as the revelation that Seymour deserves happiness manifests itself, Enid alientates herself from the world -- and the two people she most treasured in the world, Seymour and Rebecca. A happy ending does not win the day, because Enid is compelled to travel down the same lonely path that Seymour has. Perhaps in twenty years, she will have become what he is now.

As I recall, this movie was nomimated for absolutely NOTHING by the Academy of Motion Pictures "Arts and Sciences." And yet, this was the best movie in a year barren of talent, originality and true cinematic art. Now I understand why this movie is called "Ghost World." December 2, 2007

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