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| Ghost World |
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  (9/10)
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Runtime: 111 |
| Public Rating: 7.65 (52 votes) |
Director: Terry Zwigoff |
MPAA Rating:  |
| Genre: comedy, drama, satire |
Year: 2002 |
| Writer(s): Daniel Clowes (comic book), Daniel Clowes and Terry Zwigoff. |
| Distributor: United Artists |
| Reviewed by: Avril Carruthers |
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Starring Thora Birch, Scarlett Johansson, Steve Buscemi, Brad Renfro, Illeana Douglas, Bob Balaban, Teri Garr.
Like the cynical teenage perception it illuminates Ghost World is a movie which never quite lets you pin down what it’s about. It’s always shifting focus and viewpoint reflecting that phase in human life which characteristically is about finding a path and finding something reliable to depend on or believe in at a time when everything is changing and nothing is really what it seems. At the beginning we think it’s about two very alienated teenagers graduating from high school looking at a not very inspiring range of choices of future. What initially seems to be an unshakeable alliance in disgust between Enid (Thora Birch) and Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson) at the conformity and posing they see around them quickly starts to disintegrate once they leave the familiar milieu of school.
Finding they don’t fit in at school is relatively easy to manage. Their non-conformist role helps them identify themselves at least by what they don’t relate to. Their jaded revulsion for all the posers who have apparently successfully adapted to the superficial world of strip malls, fake theme franchises and Barbie doll values leads them to pick on specific targets to torment, losers who have no hope of fitting in. At least some sense of power and superiority results. Rebecca has always attracted the boys because of her blonde natural beauty, and has never needed to play up to boys to get their attention. Darkly intense Enid is more likely rudely to put those boys down, revealing an inner insecurity while denying secretly being in love with one of them, Josh, (Brad Renfro) who fancies Rebecca. Enid unsettles people she doesn’t like by a deliberate non-responsiveness, doing the opposite of what is expected. She despises most those who don’t even notice.
What becomes more difficult when they leave school is a divergence of personality brought about by their changed environment. Rebecca seems content to work in a coffee bar, saving to get their own apartment. Enid, on the other hand finds herself unable to conform to the fake, happy, up-selling salesperson persona demanded by her employer and is fired during the course of her first day. Enid accuses Rebecca of selling out to false societal values. Rebecca can no longer understand Enid’s apparently universal negativity and is impatient with her self-absorbed unreliability.
What is diverting Enid from her alliance with Rebecca is that a prank which she perpetrates with Rebecca and Josh, falsely answering a personal ad by Seymour (Steve Buscemi) in order to exult in his humiliation, backfires. Perhaps it is because something in Seymour’s lonely outcast status resonates within her that she follows him to his home. Finding him to be a passionate vintage blues record collector she gradually becomes his friend, discovering a similar love in herself for the authenticity of the voice of legendary blues great Skip James. Rebecca is astonished.
“You actually like that guy?” she says of Seymour.
Enid replies, “Well, he’s the exact opposite of everything I hate.” Seymour’s self assessment, “I can’t relate to 99% of humanity,” is something she knows from the inside.
When the genuine person to whom his personal ad was addressed leaves a message, three weeks later, Seymour initially refuses to ring her back, burnt by the humiliation Enid (unknown to him) brought him. Enid insists he ring and the relationship that develops ousts Enid from her alliance with Seymour. Distraught, Enid cannot work out why she is rejected by the one person she has tried to rescue. Still living at home with her diffident, ineffectual father and his gushingly effusive partner Maxine (Teri Garr), she seems surrounded by the debris of her unconscious self-sabotage.
In the meantime, Enid’s remedial art class, run by a brittle and affected Illeana Douglas, is another battleground where Enid’s negativity breeds chaos. The ludicrous incident with Enid’s entry in the art show, expressing a viewpoint she adopted from Seymour that racist attitudes still exist, they are simply better hidden than in the old days, demonstrates her own projected view. She is misunderstood by the superficial outlook most people affect. Her deeper worth and her creative talent are not even discerned. The pseudo rules.
While she endeavours to be authentic to herself she seems completely unaware of the part her disaffected attitude plays in her own isolation and the fact that extreme aversion is simply the opposite end of the same reactive continuum as adaptive conformity. She is drawn to the character of Norman, an old man apparently hopelessly waiting for the bus on a discontinued line.
In the end the slightly deus ex machina solution she chooses is to opt for the ghost world of her fantasies. Or maybe it is really for the unexpected certainty Norman has about his future, while telling her she “doesn’t know what she is talking about”. As an ending to the movie it reminds me a little of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, while the body of the movie is more akin to a bland Catch 22 without its wrenching bite. Not that the movie is bland in itself: anything but. Its darkly comic message simply has nowhere to go. Nevertheless, it is an extremely thought-provoking statement which stays with the viewer and gets under the skin.
The performances are electrifying. Thora Birch (American Beauty) seems effortlessly to combine the featureless mien of the cartoon character of the original Ghost World comic with a deeply layered portrayal of a complex, introverted teenager. Her reactions have all the more impact for her stillness. Fifteen year-old Scarlett Johannsson, playing an 18-year-old with aplomb, delivers her lines with conviction and matches Birch absolutely. Steve Buscemi is riveting as Seymour, his energy, body language and posture conveying a hopeless resignation that Enid refuses to accept for her own future.
Brilliantly evoking the satirical premise of Ghost World Terry Zwigoff’s direction is excellent while the cinematography, framing, sets and costumes match the kind of imaginative reality we project onto comic book environments as we read them. It is all too appallingly real. An astonishing movie, impossible to dismiss.
© Avril Carruthers, 11th July, 2002
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