Back in the days when Steve Martin was one wild and crazy stand-up comedian, he'd come out on stage in a bright white suit with an arrow sticking through his head and exhort the audience with a crazed grin, "Let's get small!" It's interesting to see, now that he's a well-respected, gracefully aging urbane art collector and writer of theatre and literary fiction, that he's pitching the same irreverent idea. Shopgirl, Martin's latest creation, is so small it threatens to barely be there.
Movies are a wonderfully capacious form (sorry--just learned this word today, so I have to use it or I'll forget it), and your average mainstream Hollywood product is so crammed full of... Stuff, that it's intriguing to see how many recent American releases seem to take perverse delight in virtually emptying out the frame. Shopgirl joins this crop, with Good Night, and Good Luck among them; super-undersized films, bite-sized stories that speak softly and carry -- well, a big stick in the case of Good Night, but in Shopgirl's case, more like a backscratcher.
Martin (though director Anand Tucker is ostensibly the auteur of record, this is clearly Steve's show) takes pains to point out his parameters: the screen credit reads "based on his novella." Well, here's his moviella. It clocks in at 104 minutes but has the feel of a long short. Shopgirl is a familiar triangle story, pure and simple, and given such slim pickins, I'm not out on a limb in suggesting that the material required Martin's name to make it to the screen.
Still, there's splendid seconds of pleasure to be had within its carefully transcribed boundaries. The film gives the incandescent Claire Danes a chance to really shine (arguably her best work since My So-Called Life), it makes a case for Jason Schwartzman being more than a hairy goofball (he's one talented hairy goofball), and it finesses the difficult hat-trick of making Los Angeles look like a romantic city -- something Martin himself didn't quite pull off in L.A. Story (as blogfriend Kristen points out here, L.A. stubbornly resists romanticizing).
In mise-en-scene, Shopgirl is an object lesson in making the most of the least. I lapped up the movie's elegant details. I like a movie that's willing to slow down and savor, beat by beat, both the acute anxiety of an awkward it's-not-happening first kiss moment, and the bittersweet melancholic suspension of stolen time that occurs as an older man's hand takes reverent possession of a young woman's back. There's one exquisite piece of set-design: the steps that go up to the apartment above Mirabelle's, then descend to get to her door -- it's a perfect metaphor for where she is in her life.
On the other hand, if less is more, I'm wishing there were more more here. The Saks-like dressings on the package can't disguise how lightweight it is. This is a gossamer wish-fulfillment fantasy, one that evaporates if you start to question the essential passivity of its female lead. And the story resembles Martin's character, in never quite being able to give into its passions.
Passion, I persist, is what we go to romantic comedies to experience. Underneath all the banter and bawdiness, the beating heart of a good rom-com is it delivery of how it feels to fall in love -- in all its breathless, messy-crazed excitement. And that's the experience Shopgirl sidesteps.
Maybe in his eagerness to go against the grinning, anything-for-a-gag persona he came in with, Martin has serioused himself into over-shooting his mark. While colleague Bill Murray was allowed to get into outsized trouble and expose his inner colors in both Broken Flowers and Lost in Translation, Martin here nearly slips away from us in rueful self-effacement. Kinda made me miss the guy with the crazy feet. Getting small shouldn't mean you have to disappear.
Still, Shopgirl did get to me. It's an absorbing job well done, and in the absence of say, a new Eric Rohmer pic, it could serve as an indie couple's date movie. But as far as screenwriting goes, kids: Don't try this at home. With romantic comedy as in life, you can't be too stingy with your passion or your story. 'Cause sometimes, less is less.
Thanks for the shout-out. I look forward to seeing this film sometime soon. I'm very curious about it. Sounds like the antithesis of the overblown formula film.
I have been wanting to ask you about the point you made in your book, about the B-story's completion being dependent upon the A-story's (the romance's) success. Can you discuss this a bit on the blog? Any recent movies (not in your book) that are good examples of this? Good examples but also "easy" to watch, not contrived, just organic?
(I'm thinking of "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days" as an example of an extraordinarily non-organic A/B parallel plot.)
Also, when are you next teaching a class that I can sign up to take? ; )
Posted by: kristen | October 28, 2005 at 12:12 PM
I saw Steve Martin recently in that romantic comeday with Alec Balwin and Meryl Streep. Well, actually he was only funny one time: when he smoke Marihuana. Reminds me, what he was once saying, that private he is not funny at all. Actually, I think he played himself in that piece :)
Posted by: Peter274 | April 12, 2010 at 06:53 AM