HTTTGAP is a prisoner of its own making. Probably should have been a shorter film or tried not to be an adaptation at all. Its ambitions to comment on a time and place and gender stereotypes and family values and suicide and music prevent it from doing any of those things justice. Add this to the list of movies you watch once when your kids go through their weird Elle Fanning phase where they want to watch everything she’s been in over the course of a weekend, but if you’re really jonsesing for an edgy comedy that will tug at your heart strings, possibly just rent Sing Street?
The summer has officially kicked off–saw wife off to the airport this afternoon and found this gem had already been kicked to streaming services after it’s wide (?) release in mid-May. Last week we watched Solo for a second time. This week is Hotel Artemis, Ocean’s 8 (John Mulaney’s standup notwithstanding, there will, in fact, be a heist movie made up entirely of female criminals), and Hereditary. But before all of that can happen, I need to sadly watch a movie in my empty apartment by myself on a Friday night for the first time in months.
The film is more obsessed with defining “punk” than La La Land was with defining “jazz”. No one is suggesting that there can only be one coming of age story set in the 70s England punk scene, just like there can be two movies about Dias De Los Muertos (Book of Life, you were so much more than Coco even without the 35 minutes of Frozen), but if we were saying that, Sing Street (2016) would maybe be that movie. John Cameron Mitchell’s adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s eponymous short story needs to find places to expand upon the source material, like an alien unhinging its jaw before consuming delinquent children, but it’s unclear to me if the two subject matters really “harmonize,” to borrow Stella’s word.
(For those keeping track, John Cameron Mitchell is NOT Paul Thomas Anderson, which I am learning only now while doing this write up: PTA is the guy who did There Will Be Blood and Phantom Thread and Inherent Vice, whereas JCM made a movie about an Angry Inch nearly twenty years ago. Why is this not disambiguated more often when their respective movies come out?)
The original short story’s premise relied simply on the awkwardness of innocent young men trying to act older than their age at a party filled with insane monologues by beings masquerading as human girls. There are certain callbacks to this: Vic’s sober advice to John’s request for relationship wisdom, “Forget everything you think you know,” or Wainswain’s delightfully odd monologue at the party itself. The stuff that critics who seem to dislike the film hate so much is everything that happens after the source material itself, everything after the party in the first 30 minutes. Which, I can empathize with some–the party itself is lacking in dramatic build up, foreshadowing. We don’t really even see the house from the outside, because of quick scene cuts. The boys just sort of stumble into a house and begin nosing around in a series of vignettes. John’s physical comedy in the alien dance party is one of the most terrific bits of comic choreography and cinematography in the film to be sure, but other scenes at the party haven’t aged well from the short story’s first inception.
The original story (and this film, it appears, if we’re being charitable) both satirize the incomprehensibility of young women through focalized narrative, but the metaphor of girls as alien sometimes seems to corner the new storyline into making decisions it shouldn’t have to make. Zan (not so much Stella) feels a little bit like a hybrid of the Born Sexy Yesterday and the Manic Pixie Dream Girl tropes, even if eventually after playing the role of the damsel in distress, she’s able to make a decision that gives her a little bit of emotional complexity. The problem is that the director and/or screenplay decide to make the image of her final decision feel very cliched, something straight out of Joseph Campbell’s “Girl’s Tragedy” reading of female heroes, the bride of death trope. Because the film has hamstrung itself into serving two masters, an adaptation of a sci-fi story but also an edgy commentary on punk culture, it has a hard time allowing its would-be female protagonist to exit the stage in an original, meaningful way.
That being said, Elle Fanning (playing “Zan”) looks a lot more comfortable in her skin since Neon Demon, her first foray into “mature” roles. (That film was divisive enough that my wife and I got into a shouting match on the drive home in our, want to say rental? car, that night, about whether it was brilliant or completely stupid.) Even though she’s given a lot of the physical gags, throwing up in so many faces during makeout sessions, awkward boner killers, she plays the straight man and her signature stony stares work perfectly. She has some lovely deliveries of lines like, “I feel this body is dying. / It may still yet live,” or her maybe uncomfortably schmaltzy, “It’s a good world. / I thought it would be bigger and cleaner and more colorful, but it’s still a gem,” but her bit where she lies about what it’s like to live in America to Enn’s friends is probably my favorite.
Nicole Kidman’s Boudicea is forgettable, but it’s not her fault. The script is either too squeamish (in this one instance!) to be earnest or no one could be bothered to try, hence, “Be an original. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I’m boring myself now,” as she dispenses advice under her breath to Zan before she goes on stage. If nothing else, Kidman plays an important role as a public service announcement for what must be a veiled reference to Toyah Willcox’s portrayal of the British badass queen Boudica in Toyah Willcox and Tony Robinson’s truly masterful half-hour spoken word piece from 1988 about the Queen’s short-lived rebellion against the Romans, which is about as close as punk ever got to public broadcasting, I think.
I’m not original in saying that the end is trying to do a lot, too much, and that these endings’ functions are a little bit in conflict with one another. The film tries to make motions toward its self-awareness of its internal contradictions, but ultimately cannot resolve a story arc about parenthood that never really develops beyond its nascent stage and an arc about a vast cannibalism conspiracy that we never really cared about.
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