Apes & Scrapes. - Review - movie review

National Review, August 20, 2001 by John Simon

This summer's movies are even more disheartening than the usual dog-day fare. They are less concerned with human beings than with robots, dinosaurs, cats and dogs, and monkeys. Perhaps this is why so many reviewers have gone ape over Ghost World, a feeble effort that has elicited raptures all the way from the New York Times to the Village Voice.

On the surface, this is a movie about people, but let us not forget its provenance from a comic-book novel by Daniel Clowes, and that its approach to the lives of two Southern California recent high-school graduates-both refusing to go to college, one unable to keep a job-may be a little too close for a true perspective. Enid is an overweight girl of 17 whose defensiveness takes the form of a sarcastically aggressive attitude toward the admittedly less than stimulating world of strip malls and faux-Fifties coffee shops. She is imaginative, but also horribly bratty; her best friend, Rebecca, is more serious but, being fundamentally aloof, is drawn to a rebellious loner like Enid, whose snooty pranks she reluctantly gets sucked into. The girls are indulged by the screenplay (co-written by the director, Terry Zwigoff, and Clowes), which views their snotty conversation and practical jokes with unabashed affection. This is the movie's first problem.

Zwigoff, who has directed a much-praised documentary (Crumb) about the anarchic cartoonist R. Crumb and his profoundly dysfunctional family, is obviously drawn to the cartoon sphere. In Ghost World, Enid even carries about a notebook full of her cartoonish drawings, actually executed by Crumb's teenage daughter, Sophie.

Both Enid and Rebecca are taken with Josh, a youth who works in a convenience store and is himself a bit of a loner. In the Zwigoff- Clowes worldview, all good persons are loners. So, too, is Seymour, a childish grownup, on whom the girls play a trick, but whom Enid-finding him a kindred spirit-grows fond of.

In this skewed world, all adults are suspect. Enid's father, known only as Dad, is a doormat to his daughter; Maxine, his former mistress (or is it second wife?), is fulsomely effusive to Enid, who duly despises her, especially after Dad brings her in to live with them. Seymour, who works in a record store and collects esoteric 78-rpm blues and jazz records, as well as other nostalgic bric-a-brac, is a sad sack; his collection, however, is totally to kill for. (Totally is the chief catchword in the girls' vocabulary, where things tend to be "totally cool" or "totally weird.")

It is interesting to note that Daniel Clowes seems to be similarly verbally disadvantaged. Explaining the work's title, he has said that he was walking in Chicago "in a really bad neighborhood" when he came across-among some "really illegible gang graffiti"-the words GHOST WORLD on a garage. "I thought at the time that there was really something sort of beautiful about that. . . . It struck me as having a really evocative, poetic quality." I guess one man's really is another man's totally.

Seymour, of course, is hiding his fear of the world and of women behind his precious records, quite a few of which find their way to the movie's soundtrack. He is a character who doesn't exist in the Clowes novel, and whom Zwigoff confesses to be modeled on himself: His first film was Louie Bluie, a one-hour documentary about an obscure Chicago jazz musician on one of whose 1934 recordings he happened to stumble.

And that is the film's second major problem. It is made up of short- breathed sequences that resemble jazz riffs or comic-strip installments. There is no cogent structure, but only more or less haphazard accretion. When the filmmakers want significance, they throw in Enid's discovery among Seymour's treasures of an old poster: a garish blackface caricature that once was the logo of the Coon Chicken Inn, an actual former restaurant chain. She takes it as a "found object" to her summer make-up course in art. Her goofily trendy teacher, Roberta, finds it fascinating; nevertheless, Enid ends up flunking the course because of it. But Enid learns nothing from this, and the film makes nothing further of it. That she is Jewish remains likewise unexplored.

Steve Buscemi, however, does a superb job as Seymour. With his beady eyes in their deep sockets, unhealthily pale face, and plaintive voice, he is the archetypal nerd. Enid calls him "such a clueless dork, he's almost cool." She first labors to fix him up with girls, but after wrecking his relations with them-in much the same way that she gets fired from all jobs, and cannot pay for her share of the apartment she and Rebecca have found-ends up tumbling into bed with him herself. Am I giving away too much plot? But plot is all there is.

It is instructive to compare this movie with Erick Zonca's French masterpiece, The Dreamlife of Angels, which I reviewed here. It too deals with two young girls trying to make it in a dreary provincial city. But that vastly superior film brings a compassionately adult sensibility to the thrashings about of confused youth.