Critics who have seen many more films than I agree that this is among the smartest, most delightful comedies of this or any recent year. Especially refreshingly, this distinction comes the old-fashioned way: with a solid and intelligent script, fine acting, and direction with a sense of-- well, direction. We see an honest, intimate comedy of manners, with no overlay of untoward pretentions like flashy special effects or a budget to vie with third-world countries.
Furthermore, its release date is a fittingly cheeky gesture itself, juxtaposing this tidy little work of art with its opposite, a sprawling, spectacular episode of Star Wars. The world is, alas, not always a reasonable place, but there is no *reason* why it should thereby suffer from its competition at the hands of anyone who attends more than one movie per season. There are various sorts of good movie. If perchance two are showing simultaneously, is it too much to expect that we see one and return for the other next weekend, blessing our good fortune and storing up such unaccustomed pleasure in one's hump? Treks between the desert's oases seem to lengthen over time.
But now to differ a little with the critics: I even sympathized with the character of Will. A "blank"? Yes, seemingly he is. But "a bastard", whom audiences "love to hate"? Where have folks been since 9/11? "First do no harm" is a similarly blank, or negative precept, yet as a basic ethical hurdle it fells many even whom we don't usually love to hate. I suggest beginning with it.
Will stands in the tradition of generations of ladies and gentlemen of leisure who live quietly in their homes and let others do likewise. Further, awhile back we all might have enjoyed the reminiscent comedies of, say, Noel Coward, who portrayed such with a smile, complete with equally creative strategems to beguile the opposite sex. As for us, typically we save up because by age 65-- or 60 if we can possibly manage-- our life's ambition is to attain to Will's situation; whereas he is, shall we say, retired at 38. There gapes the gulf between us.
Yeah, Will likes his sports car (although not too much to consign it to a daft woman when rushing out to save a daft boy), but apparently he doesn't habitually burn up irreplaceable resources gallivanting around the world in jets or yachts. Such self-indulgence, hardly confined to the leisure class anymore, irreversibly deprives all posterity of not only energy but plastic. Otherwise, money that passes through his albeit frivolous hands cyclically provides employment and livelihood to others, making his lifestyle no more malign than that of most Londoners.
Meanwhile, Will schemes no scams to weasel into the wallets of unsuspecting fellow citizens. He is not selling drugs. He doesn't blow up buildings or teach kids to kill Jews under the pretext of some exotic religion. We might wish that he weren't quite so stand-offish for so long towards the lonely and needy like Marcus (who, I agree, with most but not all, is nicer than Will). But, then, to such lengths one must go nowadays to ensure that gestures towards the young aren't misunderstood. Good-old Will even passes that test-- under the eagle eye of a mother who, over this issue, suddenly jolts herself out of her free-thinking, nostalgic, bipolar haze into a shocked vigilance, in the finest tradition of properly instructed, up-to-date 'parenting.'
In the sense that these scenes don't fit her character, they don't work. But I bet the directors knew and intended this incongruity full well. Given the Stygian streams that cultural spelunkers James Kincaid and Judith Levine have mapped at last, and the ritual coin in the mouth for the boatman before contemporary audiences can sit back and enjoy an intergenerational relationship, theirs was so abrupt and blatent as to constitute satire. As Marcus would trill, this stroke was "brilliant!" Quentin Crisp would agree, who advised: if and when you must start going bald, the cool thing to do is shave your head.
So, by today's real standards (i.e., divested of vestigial Marxist lip service), we have, er, what to hate in Will Freeman? Two generations ago we admired undisguised leisure and a modicum of independent wealth. Now, our blue noses ever to whomever's grindstone, we affect to despise them. If this change came from living in a society become generally freer, more just, more promising, and more gracious than then, I'd agree: fair enough, goodbye and good riddance to Will and all his ilk. But that is not what I see outside theaters. Do you?
Does the inferred distaste arise from the fact that-- unlike countless others who live too high on the hog to maintain straight-faced that they earn their keep, however chronically "stressed-out" they may become on behalf of their chosen standard-- Will is a *single man*? Does a T-shirt glimpsed in the film's first minutes say it all? "Lorene Bobbitt for Surgeon General" reads the chest of a woman obviously eager to proclaim her independence from men, but perhaps less eager to return men the favor.
From Hollywood's ghoulies and ghosties, long-leggedy beasties, things that go bump in the night, and earnest turning-over-new-leaves by dramatically converted protagonists, good Lord deliver us, as the Weitzes have already done. Not for them the conjuration of lightning flashes. Freemasonry, it is said, quietly takes good men and makes them better. Once he'd doggedly pounded his way in, 12-year-old Marcus quietly took a blank man and made him good. I'm happy. Maybe even, someday, Will Freeman Will Freemason, but that's another movie (always leave room for a sequel, in which he could even defy American-imperialist bugaboos enough to give Marcus a hug the next time the kid fears for his mother's life). Meanwhile, both man and boy-- or is it both boys-- could do worse. Like most movies.
Furthermore, its release date is a fittingly cheeky gesture itself, juxtaposing this tidy little work of art with its opposite, a sprawling, spectacular episode of Star Wars. The world is, alas, not always a reasonable place, but there is no *reason* why it should thereby suffer from its competition at the hands of anyone who attends more than one movie per season. There are various sorts of good movie. If perchance two are showing simultaneously, is it too much to expect that we see one and return for the other next weekend, blessing our good fortune and storing up such unaccustomed pleasure in one's hump? Treks between the desert's oases seem to lengthen over time.
But now to differ a little with the critics: I even sympathized with the character of Will. A "blank"? Yes, seemingly he is. But "a bastard", whom audiences "love to hate"? Where have folks been since 9/11? "First do no harm" is a similarly blank, or negative precept, yet as a basic ethical hurdle it fells many even whom we don't usually love to hate. I suggest beginning with it.
Will stands in the tradition of generations of ladies and gentlemen of leisure who live quietly in their homes and let others do likewise. Further, awhile back we all might have enjoyed the reminiscent comedies of, say, Noel Coward, who portrayed such with a smile, complete with equally creative strategems to beguile the opposite sex. As for us, typically we save up because by age 65-- or 60 if we can possibly manage-- our life's ambition is to attain to Will's situation; whereas he is, shall we say, retired at 38. There gapes the gulf between us.
Yeah, Will likes his sports car (although not too much to consign it to a daft woman when rushing out to save a daft boy), but apparently he doesn't habitually burn up irreplaceable resources gallivanting around the world in jets or yachts. Such self-indulgence, hardly confined to the leisure class anymore, irreversibly deprives all posterity of not only energy but plastic. Otherwise, money that passes through his albeit frivolous hands cyclically provides employment and livelihood to others, making his lifestyle no more malign than that of most Londoners.
Meanwhile, Will schemes no scams to weasel into the wallets of unsuspecting fellow citizens. He is not selling drugs. He doesn't blow up buildings or teach kids to kill Jews under the pretext of some exotic religion. We might wish that he weren't quite so stand-offish for so long towards the lonely and needy like Marcus (who, I agree, with most but not all, is nicer than Will). But, then, to such lengths one must go nowadays to ensure that gestures towards the young aren't misunderstood. Good-old Will even passes that test-- under the eagle eye of a mother who, over this issue, suddenly jolts herself out of her free-thinking, nostalgic, bipolar haze into a shocked vigilance, in the finest tradition of properly instructed, up-to-date 'parenting.'
In the sense that these scenes don't fit her character, they don't work. But I bet the directors knew and intended this incongruity full well. Given the Stygian streams that cultural spelunkers James Kincaid and Judith Levine have mapped at last, and the ritual coin in the mouth for the boatman before contemporary audiences can sit back and enjoy an intergenerational relationship, theirs was so abrupt and blatent as to constitute satire. As Marcus would trill, this stroke was "brilliant!" Quentin Crisp would agree, who advised: if and when you must start going bald, the cool thing to do is shave your head.
So, by today's real standards (i.e., divested of vestigial Marxist lip service), we have, er, what to hate in Will Freeman? Two generations ago we admired undisguised leisure and a modicum of independent wealth. Now, our blue noses ever to whomever's grindstone, we affect to despise them. If this change came from living in a society become generally freer, more just, more promising, and more gracious than then, I'd agree: fair enough, goodbye and good riddance to Will and all his ilk. But that is not what I see outside theaters. Do you?
Does the inferred distaste arise from the fact that-- unlike countless others who live too high on the hog to maintain straight-faced that they earn their keep, however chronically "stressed-out" they may become on behalf of their chosen standard-- Will is a *single man*? Does a T-shirt glimpsed in the film's first minutes say it all? "Lorene Bobbitt for Surgeon General" reads the chest of a woman obviously eager to proclaim her independence from men, but perhaps less eager to return men the favor.
From Hollywood's ghoulies and ghosties, long-leggedy beasties, things that go bump in the night, and earnest turning-over-new-leaves by dramatically converted protagonists, good Lord deliver us, as the Weitzes have already done. Not for them the conjuration of lightning flashes. Freemasonry, it is said, quietly takes good men and makes them better. Once he'd doggedly pounded his way in, 12-year-old Marcus quietly took a blank man and made him good. I'm happy. Maybe even, someday, Will Freeman Will Freemason, but that's another movie (always leave room for a sequel, in which he could even defy American-imperialist bugaboos enough to give Marcus a hug the next time the kid fears for his mother's life). Meanwhile, both man and boy-- or is it both boys-- could do worse. Like most movies.