Flak Magazine: Review of Ghost World, 08-14-01

While Crumb director Terry Zwigoff's Ghost World thankfully does not include a voiceover in which the main character says, "I was never the same after that summer," let there be no bones about it being that kind of movie.

Based on a popular graphic novel by Daniel Clowes, Ghost World picks up the story of high-school BFFs Enid (Thora Birch, of American Beauty but also Dungeons & Dragons) and Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson) at the girls' graduation. It's supposed to be the gateway into the rest of their lives. The girls plan on getting jobs and moving in together, so they can sit back and kick it while their more ambitious peers go on to things like college and tech school and suits and Real Jobs.

But everything seems headed for trouble the minute Enid discovers that instead of getting a diploma, she has orders to report to a summer version of an art class she failed despite her considerable artistic talent. And while she pays lip service to the idea of getting a job and an apartment with Rebecca, her feeble attempts at packing and mollification at hearing her dad has reunited with a former live-in girlfriend show she's not going anywhere.

Essentially, Ghost World plays out as a reminder that most of the best friends we have in high school rarely remain so for life. Throughout the movie, the audience watches the painful, growing tension between the two girls, from an early scene where Rebecca derides Enid's vintage punk outfit through a much later scene when Rebecca says the two can't get together because she's going out with friends from work; never mind that the audience can see Rebecca sitting on her couch in pajamas, watching TV.

Though there are plenty of character differences between the conventionally pretty Rebecca and the venomous, bespectacled Enid, most of the tension between the two comes from Enid's friendship with Seymour (Steve Buscemi), a sad sack who collects vintage 78 rpm records and says he can't relate to 99 percent of humanity.

The girls meet him through a cruel joke — Enid calls him up, pretends to be the woman in a missed connection personal ad Seymour placed and arranges a meeting at a diner so she and Rebecca can see what he looks like — but Enid soon comes to realize that Seymour is "the opposite of everything I hate." The two begin hanging out, and Enid takes it upon herself to find a girlfriend for the lonely heart.

Rebecca, naturally, becomes jealous, which only feeds her irritation over Enid's continued unemployment. By this point in the movie, though, few people watching are likely to care. Even though the source material for Ghost World is largely about Enid and Rebecca, the rapport and, well, sexual chemistry between Enid and Seymour usurps the whole "friends growing apart" plot and towers over the rest of the movie, namely because the characters as Birch and Johansson play them seem an unlikely duo. In some movies, this would be considered a failing, but, well, Buscemi is a better actor than Johansson, and his character is far more compelling. Zwigoff and Clowes' script wisely plays to the movie's strengths, particularly Buscemi and Birch's uncanny ability to make a relationship between a 17-year-old girl and a middle-aged man not seem creepy.

But the script excels most in its willingness to explore the truths behind stereotypes. As Enid gets hard lessons in the real world, Ghost World serves as a refresher course for its audience, reminding it that stereotypes, at least occasionally, get started somewhere. Aside from the opening graduation scene where the bon mots fly faster than they ever do in real life, the movie does this without overreaching for labels like "shocking," "irreverent" or "un-P.C."

The weirdos Enid and Rebecca spy on at the diner could be the weirdos at any urban diner. The pathetic "missed connections" ad Seymour places probably was taken verbatim out of some alternative weekly. The group of audiophiles standing around at Seymour's house debating digital-versus-analog is something this music nerd has heard one too many times, and the experimental short film Enid's summer-school art teacher shows on the first day of class is precisely the sort of thing that packs 'em in at small festivals of homemade art films: Bloody doll limbs are dropped into a sink to a soundtrack of someone saying the same phrase over and over, "artily" rendered in black and white.

Though Ghost World's characters and scenarios are based in stereotype, its direction is anything but conventional. From the opening scene in which the camera slowly pans across an apartment building to find Enid sitting in her room, rocking out to a dance number from some obscure Bollywood flick, Zwigoff demonstrates a stylish savvy way too refined for a first-time feature-film director. The movie's scene-to-scene transitions ought to be played in film classes for years to come; one using a carpet sweeper is particularly noteworthy.

Despite all its prescient wit and terrific camerawork, Ghost World suffers slightly because Clowes and Zwigoff can't seem to figure out how to wrap things up. Once virtually every aspect of Enid's life becomes unhinged, the film bombards its audience with a surplus of crying-Enid-walking- around-in-a-daze. When the daze comes to an end at the film's conclusion, there's not enough payoff for having sat through the last half hour of the movie. It's almost as if the duo decided on how to end the movie after filming was completed, then went out and shot a few more scenes to try to tie everything together.

A sure sign of a weak ending is when the post-credit outtake is more entertaining and rewarding. That's the case here, and while this sort of thing normally seems gimmicky and contrived, it's a decent payoff for having sat through the too-long final 30 minutes. As hilarious as the deleted scene is, however, Zwigoff should take care next time to make sure his film ends, not just peters out.

— Eric Wittmershaus (ericw at flakmag dot com)