Throwing Marshmallows
SHOPGIRL
Directed by Anand Tucker
PROTOCOLS OF ZION
Director Marc Levin
The melancholy Los Angeles drama Shopgirl is being described as a love story, and the description's correct-up to a point. Adapted by Steve Martin from his own novella, the film concerns itself with an affair between a young store clerk named Mirabelle Buttersfield (Claire Danes), who dabbles in art while working at the glove counter at Saks, and a divorced, much older software mogul named Ray Porter (Martin). But while the movie explores their relationship in a series of exquisitely staged and acted scenes, we never quite become head-over-heels obsessed with the characters because Martin and director Anand Tucker have consciously built so many omniscient obstructions (including third-person narration) between them and us, and taken pains to establish that the two lovers are the center of the universe only in their own minds. (Early on, Tucker and the great cinematographer Peter Suschitzky establish this sense of perspective in a transition that starts with an overhead shot of Mirabelle as seen through the skylight of her apartment, then pulls back until the window becomes a single star in an immense night sky; it's an image of solitude so fairy-tale simple that it renders the narration superfluous.)
Like the novel, this movie plays as though Martin had found a whole literary universe in that Casablanca line about a hill of beans; it's probably the only Hollywood movie in recent years that seems hell-bent on reminding us that real love isn't like what you see in Hollywood movies.
As in the superior Tony Takitani-a third-person-narrated, novella-based movie that Shopgirl often resembles-the narration and images offer moments of sharp insight into Mirabelle and Ray's thoughts and feelings. Yet for the most part we remain outside the romance looking in, like accountants trying to piece together a year in a person's life by sifting through a pile of receipts. Tucker fills the movie with close-ups of people thinking, but the narration only reveals their thoughts about a fourth of the time. As in Tony Takitani-as well as the films of Wes Anderson and Jean-Pierre Jeunet-we watch as storytellers playfully try diagram people's lives like sentences, finding epiphanies in impulsive phone calls and purchases, in wardrobe choices, in decision to go or not to go somewhere on a particular night, to fib or not to fib in response to a probing question. Character is revealed here not through expository speeches or grand gestures, but briefly observed moments: Ray sitting uncomfortably on the futon in Mirabelle's apartment, its rickety shoddiness surely highlight the difference in their ages and income levels; Mirabelle driving while listening to a "Love Connections" expert talk about women's biological need to be held after sex; the scene in a restaurant where a tipsy Ray removes Mirabelle's cheap watch, gently closes his big hand around her slender wrist, and says, nonsensically but endearingly, "Now I'm your watch." So much of Shopgirl is like that: exquisite and a bit mysterious. (If it were in French or Japanese with English subtitles, would anyone go out of their way to describe it as adult?)
Which isn't to say it's perfect. Shopgirl is just smart and elegant enough that you may wish it were better-more consistent in its focus and less interested in being liked. Like the book, Shopgirl disperses its mopey energy by departing from its imaginative center, the Mirabelle-Ray relationship, and detouring into the life of Mirabelle's would-be suitor, Jeremy (Jason Schwartzman), a slacker goofball who stencils logos on amplifiers, passive-aggressively dupes Mirabelle into paying for their first date, and generally seems to perceive life in terms of how it's similar to (or different from) a movie. He seems to be starring in a movie about his life, so it's no wonder he sometimes narrates his actions as they happen. (He prefaces an important disclosure by stating, "I think this is the moment.") Schwartzman's goofball intensity rouses the movie whenever it threatens to sink into morose eccentricity. (When a housecat swats at Jeremy's testicles while he's trying to have sex with Mirabelle, he says, "It feels like someone's throwing marshmallows at me.") He's a postmodern schmuck who's as emblematic of young, middle-class, suburban masculinity as Ben Braddock in The Graduate or Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything? But he needed either to be the star of his own film or else be better integrated into this one. Once Mirabelle has taken up with Ray and Jeremy has gone on the road with a rock band, the latter's narrative irrelevancy becomes clear. Our interest lies with Mirabelle and Ray, and we want to be with them, not with this wacky man-boy who's clearly being set up as a climactic age-and-class appropriate replacement for Ray.
There are other problems. Like the book, the film sometimes interprets a bit too much, or too reductively. (Martin may be aware of this tendency; early in the story, his character describes himself to Mirabelle as "a symbolic logician," which could serve as description of a third person omniscient narrator-someone floating above it all.) And Martin's decision to play Ray (which probably helped get the movie financed) strikes me as a mistake. Martin doesn't disgrace himself-he's smooth, sad, serious, and immediately credible as a fifty-something rich man with the sexual mores of a 22-year-old, and when he caresses Mirabelle's skin, you believe him a man who never quit being excited by the prospect of being able to touch a beautiful woman. But he either lacks the deep reserves of hunger and regret that define great older male leads (Jack Nicholson, Anthony Hopkins) or else he's not skilled enough to plumb them. You always believe in Mirabelle's complicated urges-like the heroines played by Helena Bonham-Carter in Merchant-Ivory productions, she's empowered by ardor-but much of the time, you simply have to accept Ray's complexities on faith. Gripes aside, though, this is an adult story well told. It's good to know that in a country where the word "romance" is usually fused to "comedy," a grownup, bittersweet, medium-scale Hollywood drama can still get made and seen.
In Protocols of Zion, a seriocomic documentary about the legendary anti-Semitic conspiracy tome, director and onscreen host Marc Levin makes a very strong impression. He's a great host and audience surrogate-a wry observer and interviewer who does his homework, thinks on his feet and seems equally at home interviewing his elderly father about bigotry in 1940s New York, asking a white supremacist if he plans to make The Protocols of the Elders of Zion available as an audio book, or debating angry Palestinian-Americans about the difference (or similarity) between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. He'd make a great host for a cable news talk show; he's affable but gutsy, totally credible as a self-aware nonfiction hero in the Michael Moore-Morgan Spurlock-Nick Broomfield mode.