Edgar Wright (2010)
Scott Pilgrim is based on a series of comic books by Bryan Lee O’Malley. Set in Toronto, it’s the story of how the weedy, light-voiced Scott, in order to win the alluring, puce-haired Ramona, needs to defeat her seven ‘evil’ ex-boyfriends. Edgar Wright, who did the screenplay with Michael Bacall, garnishes the action on screen with ‘Pow!’ etc during fights, a purplish cloud exhaling the word ‘Love’ when Scott’s rejected girlfriend tells him how she really feels about him, and so on. Plenty of the audience in Curzon Soho was laughing plenty and seemed to find these graphic decorations witty – whether because they simply acknowledged the comic book origins of the material or underlined the primitiveness of the emotional scheme, I don’t know. The device just left me puzzled as to why the film had been made with human beings.
Some of the performers are skilful but they have to reduce themselves to blocky caricatures. In the case of actors as accomplished as Anna Kendrick (Up in the Air) or Alison Pill (Milk), the effect is depressing. (Kendrick is Scott’s sister; Pill is again the honorary girl member of a group – the drummer in the band called Sex Bo-bomb for which Scott plays bass guitar.) Michael Cera as Scott has the advantage of being able to suggest a cartoon without undue effort but his adolescent presence has a neutralising effect. Scott is supposed to be in his mid-twenties and, at the start, the other members of Sex Bo-bomb scoff at his dating the high-school girl Knives (Ellen Wong). Cera looks about fifteen, though. I didn’t understand why, since Scott’s charm is unconventional (to put it mildly), Ramona (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) treated him so incuriously. Perhaps she didn’t all the way through. I walked out after half an hour or so – feeling not angry or hostile but that if I didn’t get the film I wasn’t going to start getting it, and that if I wasn’t missing anything there was nothing to keep me watching.
1 September 2010
