Ghost World

To hear most people talk about Ghostworld one would assume that the film is some kind of cult classic.

Not so.

For a start the pacing of the film is way too slow (it takes forever for anything to actually happen), the characters are given very little depth or believability, and at times border on caricature. Steve Buscemi (Seymour) as always is good value, Thora Birch (Enid) reprises her alienated/cynical teen shtick from American beauty and Scarlett Johansson (Rebecca) begins strongly but fades inexorably to become by the end an almost tangential character. The few genuinely funny moments that are here are bogged down in a slow moving, muddled and anemic plot.

The biggest frustration about this entire film is that one senses that there was a funny, well observed movie in here somewhere. Scenes like those in the general store, Seymours date at the "jazz club" and his being stood up at the diner are all well done, but they only serve to juxtapose those scenes which work less well.

And hey if your going to be basing a movie on a one dimensional character you could choose someone else, maybe the shirtless guy in the store.

He did have about 50% of the good lines after all.

I went in to Ghost World expecting an oddball comedy, so I was surprised by the nuance, depth, and emotional complexity of this film. There are some funny moments, certainly, but the whole movie is just too deep, dark, and meaningful to be dismissed as mere comedy. Your reaction to the film may well depend on what kind of person you are - or were back in school. If you were cool and ran with the in crowd, you'll probably laugh - condescendingly, of course - at the losers who make up the main characters of the story. If you were an oddball and have drunk deeply from the waters of alienation, however, you will feel a real kinship with these characters. The only bad thing about this film is the fact that there isn't enough of Scarlett Johansson in it. It's really all about the character of Enid (Thora Birch), an incredibly complex character who wears alienation like a crown and tries to avoid total decimation at the hands of a cruel, mixed-up life. We start out with Enid and her friend Rebecca (Johansson), but - for obvious reasons - Rebecca has a lifeline to normalcy and makes a much better transition to post-high school existence than her friend. The fact that her partner is crime begins to grow apart from her only makes Enid's journey all the more difficult to navigate - and there is much to fuel her contempt for the world.

The plan is for Enid and Rebecca to gets jobs and rent an apartment together, playing pranks and generally complaining about how fake and stupid everyone else is in their spare time. After Rebecca starts working, though, you can start to see that her heart's just not in their long-held plans, while Enid just sort of sleepwalks through each day with no purpose whatsoever - apart from attending the remedial art class she has to take during the summer. She does find a project for herself, though - one extremely weird fellow named Seymour (Steve Buscemi). Of course, it begins with her setting the hapless Seymour up on a fake blind date and watching him suffer through the internal agony of being stood up. She follows him, though, and the two strike up an unusual friendship. Seymour is a great collector of classic jazz and blues records and an odd assortment of other things, and he basically lives in that forgotten world he has recreated for himself. Enid sets out to find Seymour a girlfriend - which is quite a project indeed, as Seymour is almost hopelessly undesirable in the eyes of the world (or at least the 99% of it that Enid hates so much).

Then Enid's world starts closing in on her in all sorts of ways. Always alienated, she now begins to feel completely alone, and she basically keeps sabotaging her chances of reversing course (which is an unfortunate habit most of us weirdoes seem to have). Every day brings bad news on some front. By this point, the comedy is basically over and done with, and the final third of the film comes across as a nuanced, poignant look at this poor soul who truly doesn't know what she is going to do with the rest of her life - or even tomorrow, for that matter.

I could say more, but this is really one of those films that you can't really explain. There's no real sense of closure when the movie ends, but that is indicative of life itself - and that is really what Ghost World is all about. Thora Birch and Steve Buscemi give inspired performances that will stay with you, Scarlett Johansson is marvelous, and some oddball characters (such as Numchuck Guy) round the film out quite well. It's quirky, but quirky is almost always good. I'm not sure how older people will react to this sort of film, but the younger generation will see much of themselves somewhere in this weird story, making Ghost World one of the most impressive coming-of-age movies of the new millennium.

Here's an unHollyowood film about life, roles, friendship and departure that transcends most of the trash available on the big or little screen. I saw this on TV last night, followed by the big screen spectacular "Three Kings". It was more than clear to me which film was about ideas and real life, and which one was a cure for insomnia. I'll talk about the one about ideas and real life.

Unlike the Amazon synopsis and Leonard Maltin's opinion, this movie is not about alienation. It is about a cynical high school graduate's attempt to find a niche to fit into when her world undergoes changes she cannot understand. Thora Birch ("American Beauty") is very good as the high school graduate with a dark view of everything in the world...until she meets milquetoast record collector Steve Buscemi. There is a good deal of cliche in this meeting but it serves to break the holocaust of darkness in her life, which is compounded by her best friend changing roles, her schlemiel father being an empty, vacuous figure in her life, and her indecision about what to do with her own life.

Birch focuses on loser Buscemi, trying to improve his lot in life. She successfully helps set him up with another woman, then injects herself in his life in a way to locate her own life when everyone she knows seemingly abandons her. When this fails, she follows the pattern of the only other stable role model in her life, a mentally ill middle age man who sits at a bus stop, waiting for a bus that never arrives. When his bus one day arrives, she decides to take it, too, as the movie ends.

This is Birch's final removal from the world, the alienation most critics disucssed. I prefer to think of it as role acceptance, as finding her niche, as getting to a place she wants. This very simple film portrays a reality for many high school kids that come from single parent homes and lack direction after school. It tells a real story in an uncomfortable circumstance. People that enjoy nice neat stories in films will be very distrubed watching this. People whose minds look for meaning in film portrayals will become more involved the longer the movie goes on.