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GHOST
WORLD
7/10
USA
2001
director
: Terry Zwigoff
script : Zwigoff, Daniel Clowes (based on comic book by Clowes)
producers include : John Malkovich
cinematography : Affonso Beato
editing : Carole Kravetz
music : David Kitay
lead actors : Thora Birch, Steve Buscemi, Scarlett Johansson, Brad Renfro
111 minutes
Ghost
World desperately wants to be a cult movie: it has trendy, off-beat stars
playing trendy, off-beat characters; it's based on a painfully hip underground
comic-book; director Zwigoff won the Documentary Oscar for Crumb a few
years back; the production design is a kitschy riot of colours, hairstyles,
costumes, props; the supporting cast is a gallery of hilarious grotesques…
But aren't hip, cult movies just a little bit, er, nineties? And isn't
this package just a little over-calculated to appeal to the indie, arthouse
market? You shouldn't need to be told, for instance, that the title is
never explained or even mentioned.
 There
isn't much of a plot, more a sequence of situations involving teenage
best-pals Enid (Birch) and Rebecca (Johansson), recent graduates from
high school reluctant to embark on the rat race of college courses and
careerism. They drift from McJob to McJob, appalled at the excesses of
modern American consumerist culture, but their cooler-than-thou pose -
and their friendship - comes under strain when Enid befriends geeky fortysomething
Seymour (Buscemi). He's a record collector whose obsessions have a predictably
negative impact on his love life and, to Rebecca's bemusement, Enid sets
out to improve Seymour's lot, with unexpected success…
Ghost
World may not be the masterpiece acclaimed by some US critics, but it's
easy to be seduced by its confident panache - right from the 60s-Bollywood
clip that opens proceedings with an surreally infectious bang. As the
title implies, we're not quite in reality, but neither are we in the usual
'film world' - instead, we're transported into Enid's private universe.
If the movie's attitudes and poses are essentially adolescent and artifical,
well, that's because they're Enid's - a nice, handy get-out for Zwigoff
and Clowes.
It's
always refreshing, however, to see corporate America satirised , as when
Enid gets a job in a soulless multiplex and outrages her boss by deviating
from the 'script' employees are supposed to follow: "It's not optional!"
rages the youthful corporate cog. Even better is Enid and Seymour's abortive
visit to a music bar to see a venerable BB King-style guitarist who's
roundly ignored by the boorish crowd ("those creatures!" splutters
Seymour) impatient for dreadful bunch of headlining rockers called 'BluesHammer.'
But it's downhill from here, as the movie bogs down into a disappointingly
conventional subplot about Enid winning an art-school scholarship - her
dopey-hippy teacher (Douglas) falls the wrong side of caricature. The
ending, typically, is rather too neatly ambivalent for its own good, but
stick around for the end of the credits - it isn't often you see a Buscemi
character kick somebody up into the air.
20th
August, 2001
(seen Aug-16-01, on video - Edinburgh Film Festival)
by Neil
Young
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