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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Two teenage girls spring to life in Daniel Clowes and Terry Zwigoff's comic tale of obsessives, compulsives and searchers for authenticity.
Jul 27, 2001 | There's something inherently dubious, I guess, about a couple of middle-aged guys making a movie about the lives of two teenage girls, especially when one of the girls ends up sort of kind of having a thing with a middle-aged guy. But "Ghost World" is such a bittersweet comic delight, with a core of real seriousness and sadness, that such concerns don't matter, or almost don't. Based on the cult-fave comic book series by Daniel Clowes and directed by Terry Zwigoff (who made the unforgettable documentary "Crumb"), "Ghost World" offers an exquisite tour of the twilight zone between high school and the so-called real world, as well as between bohemian subculture and the even stranger culture of America at large.
Our guide is Enid (Thora Birch), a knowing, demanding and terribly lonely 18-year-old who's somewhere between Holden Caulfield, Elizabeth Bennet from "Pride and Prejudice" and the narrative voice of Dave Eggers' "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius." Enid is anxious, for example, for people to realize that her dyed-green hair, leather jacket and short skirt are a cultural quotation and not some pathetic attempt to be trendy. "It's obviously an original 1977 punk-rock look!" she spits at the obnoxious hipster dude from whom she buys 1960s Bollywood videos. Like everyone else in Enid's world -- even her best friend, Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson) -- the Hindi video guy hadn't quite picked up on the distinction.
"Ghost World"
Directed by Terry Zwigoff
Starring Thora Birch, Scarlett Johansson, Steve Buscemi, Illeana Douglas
Enid and Rebecca have finally graduated from high school, after sitting through a graduation speech by a classmate in a wheelchair that begins, "High school is like the training wheels for the bicycle that is life." Or rather, they almost have; Enid still has to make it through a summer school art class taught by a purple-clad performance artist (Illeana Douglas) who urges her students to "externalize the internals" and hopes to exhibit their work in a show called "Neighborhood and Community: Art and Dialogue." (Clowes, who co-wrote the script with Zwigoff, shares with Matt Groening and Mike Judge a keen ear for the bland, liberal banalities the adult world tends to offer teenagers.)
"Ghost World" is set on the west side of Los Angeles sometime right around now, but it could be almost any North American city at almost any time since the mid-'80s. Enid and the boyish, willowy Rebecca live to defy adult expectations, to torment their friend Josh (Brad Renfro), who works in a dismal convenience store and on whom they both halfway have crushes, to shop at thrift stores and garage sales, to hang out in an ersatz '50s diner and make fun of it ("Who could forget that great hit from the '50s?" asks Rebecca when a gangsta-rap song comes on the jukebox), to follow strangers around for no reason and pursue a private catalog of pranks and obsessions.
Or at least Enid thinks they do. She mostly misses the signs that her friendship with Rebecca, and their seventh-grade dream of sharing an apartment after high school, are starting to fray. Rebecca wants to live in a suspiciously normal neighborhood, wants to spend good money on brand-new plasticware from an actual store and confesses that a wholesome-looking blond guy who listens to reggae gives her "a total boner." When the victim of one of their mean-spirited practical jokes turns out to be a 40ish record-collector geek named Seymour (Steve Buscemi), the differences between them become even more apparent.
