Beautiful Girls

I get asked a lot, "Say, John, your blog is freaking amazing and all, but what happens if you buy a DVD behind what you've watched in the alphabet?  Do you stop and go back, or what?"

That's a good question, and I'm glad you asked.  This blog is not Vietnam; there are rules.

I don't buy a lot of DVDs anymore, and if I do, I try to buy ahead of myself in the alphabet. However, when I saw part of the late Ted Demme's 1996 film Beautiful Girls via Netflix streaming this week, I realized I'd committed an egregious oversight by leaving this wonderful film out of my DVD collection.

So yes, although I just watched Orson Welles' F for Fake, now I have to go backward; Beautiful Girls arrived in the mail today.

I've started seeing my DVD collection as a finished, semi-locked project, and if I buy anything, I just fill a hole.  I'm seeing my CD collection in the same way.  As physical media slowly dies, I find myself in a not-quite-holding pattern, only buying what I know I will watch repeatedly, what films mean the most to me that I don't yet own, what items fill holes and round out collections, and maybe most importantly, what I need to write about here.

Writing this stuff a few times a week is a kind of therapy.  I need to revisit this stuff.  I need to go back to what I was thinking when I saw a film the first time, or remind myself of when I was watching the film often.  With my favorites, I don't so much re-live the film as re-experience the film and compare how I feel now to how I felt then, and ponder the distance between two points.  I used to be somebody; now I am somebody else.  I'm folding back on myself so I can understand where I was and where I'm going.

I also just like watching movies.

At 35, mortgaged and married and teaching full-time on a loop, maybe I'm restless, too.  Maybe I'm just suffering from a horrible case of creative paralysis, living in constant doubt of everything else I write (which is nothing lately), and maybe this place is where I go to try to jolt myself alive.  Maybe movies are my creative crash cart.  Maybe I shouldn't say maybe.

I once owned Beautiful Girls on glorious VHS, which I watched dozens of times (often with actual beautiful girls), but I never picked up this one on DVD — even after getting rid of all my VHS tapes — because there were never any features on the Miramax disc.  ("Chapter Selection" is not a feature.)  I even went so far as to borrow my dad's VHS-to-DVD recorder so I could burn the VHS tape, which looked awful, and I'll never watch the thing.  (Plus, the project doesn't include DVD-Rs — yes, dammit, there are rules.)

Seeing part of this film via Netflix got me all nostalgic and navel-gazey, and made me think of this film as a missing piece to a DVD collection that takes up an entire wall, and that nostalgia is sort of where I am again after finishing the DVD.  And I haven't even talked about the movie yet.

Timothy Hutton plays Willie, a restless piano player who comes home for a high school reunion.  He's in a relationship, but he has this fear of commitment.  (I assure you, the "commitment-phobic male returning home to find his center" premise was more original 15 years ago when the film came out.)  Willie is so restless, so desperate, and so unable to cope with both, that when a 13-year-old neighborhood girl flirts with him and eventually throws herself at him, he realizes something is wrong; he has to face growing up.  (Or, you know, he could become a pederast, which isn't a good option.)

He's not the only character who has to GTFU.  Michael Rapaport plays a guy who was so afraid of commitment, his girlfriend left him.  Now he buries her garage door with a snow plow every morning, and he tries to propose to her, too little too late, with a brown diamond.  (She left him for an older man with a steady job and, apparently, shoveling skills.)

Noah Emmerich plays a devoted husband and father who appears to be the only one of his kind in this town full of immature twentysomethings, but he still thinks that brawling solves problems.  Matt Dillon plays a former high school legend who spends his time committing adultery with his high school flame and trying to nurse his anorexic girlfriend through his infidelities.

I'm focusing on the male characters because Demme does.  I'm not saying the female characters are insignificant, but they seem to have things figured out, and frankly their arcs aren't that interesting.  Nobody goes to see a film called "Women Who Have Their Shit Together."  However, people will go see a film called "Men Who Are Dumb But Might Grow Up A Little."  (I'll hedge my bets a little; I'll try to write scripts for both.  Happy, Gloria Steinem?)

Despite their immaturities, all of the male characters have an awakening at this pivotal time (here, a high school reunion and the events surrounding same).  They inch forward in a town that never really changes.  The town reminds me of my hometown, where I can go after a months-long absence to find everyone pretty much as I left them.  Only the seasons change.

It's telling that a 13-year-old character (played by then 15-year-old Natalie Portman) appears to be the most mature character in this film at first, and maybe even in the end.  When I first saw this film, I was 21 or 22.  At the time, I actually thought, yeah, wait 5 years, man — she'll be 18 and that's fine!  I may have said this in front of the aforementioned beautiful women dumb enough to hang out with me at the time.  I can't tell you everything.

Now, at 35 (the same age as Timothy Hutton at the time of the film), I see that line of thinking as sheer madness brought on by desperation and raging against adulthood and stability, like Rob in High Fidelity, who after yet another woman tempts him to stray from his relationship, bellows, "When is this gonna stop?!?!?"

That stuff doesn't stop — if you can't commit.  You'll always be tempted.  You'll always have a "next."  You'll never escape this stuff unless you really, fully commit not just your heart but your life to someone, when you are convinced that nothing is better than what you have at home, and there is no greater prize, no missing piece that makes you more complete.

I try not to get sentimental, but I always end up failing in that regard.  What I'm saying is, the stuff isn't complicated.  I made myself let go of the nonsense.  I'm happy.  That's how this stuff works.

Beautiful Girls is about that.