Terry Zwigoff (2001)
Enid: Only stupid people have good relationships anyway.
Seymour: That’s the spirit.
As Enid, Thora Birch has a young woman’s body but the truculent gait of a pre-adolescent. She’s dissatisfied with the way things are but fearful that they’re going to change. Ghost World – based on a comic novel by Daniel Clowes, who wrote the screenplay with the director, Terry Zwigoff – is about Enid and her increasingly strained relationship with her best and, it seems, only friend Becky (Scarlett Johansson), in the weeks immediately after their high school graduation. I don’t know of another film which deals with ‘growing up’ the way this one does. Zwigoff and Clowes dramatise the spiteful but heartwarming reassurance you can get from being part of a group – in this case only a duo, so there’s a built-in fragility to the esprit de corps – that makes smart, unkind fun of everyone within the relative safety of school; and the desolating and disorienting process of finding your power crumble in the world outside that closed order.
Enid is stuck in a limbo between school and post-school but Becky adapts to a normal life in the real world with – as Enid sees it – dismaying facility and docility. (Emotionally, I’m with Enid that only stupid people wouldn’t be dismayed by this.) Becky gets a job in a coffee shop, starts earning enough money to move into an apartment without needing Enid to pay a share of the rent. Scarlett Johansson is perfectly cast as Becky – she complements Thora Birch both physically and temperamentally. In the early scenes, the two girls are convincing as contemporaries; as the story develops, the combination of Johansson’s easy sensual authority and the placidity of her mind – compared with Birch’s frictional intelligence – makes Becky’s growing into conventionality and away from Enid inevitable. By the end, they seem to belong to different generations. The flair that Thora Birch showed for deadpan wit in American Beauty is developed really inventively in this lead role. The wit never deserts her but it becomes more nuanced, as Enid’s situation gets more complicated and unhappy. At the start, the pleasure she takes in clever derision is palpable (and infectious – she’s very funny). Later on, her wit seems sometimes to be what Enid’s hanging onto, at other times what she’s stuck with whether she wants it or not.
The day after they leave school, the two girls decide to make a hoax call in response to a personal ad placed by a man called Seymour. Enid pretends to be the woman with whom Seymour, as he reveals in the ad, is infatuated. They make an assignation and, once Enid sees the fortyish Seymour, she starts to feel sorry for him. She and Becky go to a garage sale and Enid makes a purchase from Seymour’s vintage record collection. This is the start of the relationship between them, which is the heart of the film. Getting into each other’s lives has the effect of disturbing Enid’s and Seymour’s isolated but in some ways comfortable routines. Steve Buscemi plays Seymour brilliantly: with his pasty complexion and lank hair and his brownish wardrobe, he’s nerdiness incarnate but that’s only the starting point of the rounded character that he creates. Seymour isn’t the only character in Ghost World who seems simply ridiculous at first but then reveals different, surprising aspects that make you think again: Roberta Allsworth (Illeana Douglas), the teacher of the art class that Enid starts attending, is another. The audience’s experience of these characters – it seems natural and enjoyable to deride them then things get more complicated – chimes with Enid’s apprehension of a larger, unsettling world.
All the actors are good: Bob Balaban as Enid’s father; Teri Garr, in an uncredited cameo, as his lady friend Maxine; Brad Renfro as Josh, the pleasant, relentlessly discomfited ex-classmate of Enid and Becky; Brian George as the harassed owner of the convenience store where Josh has a holiday job; Dave Sheridan as the store’s most reliably eccentric customer; Stacey Travis, as Seymour’s super-conventional, short-lived girlfriend; Tom McGowan as his desperate housemate; Ezra Buzzington as the waiter whom Enid and Becky make fun of in the coffee place they go to; and, as two other girls in their high school class, Rini Bell (a wheelchair-bound speaker at the graduation ceremony) and Debra Azar (a gushing would-be actress called Melorra). The film’s music is entertainingly disorienting too – a mixture of Seymour’s 78 RPM classics and Bollywood dance numbers (with an original score by David Kitay).
Seymour’s day job is as a middle manager with a fast food franchise called Cook’s Chicken. He tells Enid about the outfit’s racist history – it was originally known as ‘Coon Chicken’ – and she takes an old advertising poster in Seymour’s possession, depicting a grotesque black caricature, to the art class. She presents it as ‘found art’, aware that this is a term of approbation in Roberta Allsworth’s vocabulary, and, sure enough, Roberta is intrigued and, eventually, impressed enough to offer Enid an art school scholarship. This all turns sour when the racist poster causes a scandal at the class’s end of term show and the scholarship offer is withdrawn – although that climax isn’t convincing: it’s incredible that someone as PC-aware as Roberta wouldn’t realise in advance what kind of reactions the poster would get. A recurring shot in the film is of a solitary old man sitting on a bench waiting for a bus that never comes – because the service has long been discontinued. When, near the end of the picture, a bus unexpectedly appears and the old man gets on it, it’s effective as the removal of another certainty in Enid’s life but when, finally, she herself gets on a bus and it drives out of town, the moment feels over-resolved. Seymour’s last appearance too, in a session with a therapist which characterises him as a hopeless middle-aged mother’s boy, is too neatly reductive. But if the ending of Ghost World is a little disappointing, it’s largely because the journey up to the closing stages has been such a dynamic and elating one. You’re much more conscious of the few bits that don’t work because nearly all the others do. Ghost World is one of the most enjoyable and original American films of the last decade.
2 August 2008
