All good things . . . Whit Stillman lost his patience and made a lazy film. Rather than allowing us to cozy up to his affluent young characters, understand their milieu, and then enjoy their erudite yet innocent banter, he dispensed with development and jammed the quirky kids right down our gullet.
A transfer student to a tony private liberal arts college is identified by a trio of society girls who decide she needs their counsel and guidance. All four negotiate a lampoon of a Seven Sisters campus replete with neanderthalic frat boys, sneering campus journalists, and neurotic coeds.
There is no subtlety to this picture. The characters aimlessly drift into various Stillman exchanges, waiting their respective turns to say something Stillmanesque, like, “Do you know what’s the major problem in contemporary social life? The tendency to always seek someone cooler than yourself.”
There is more cleverness than that, but little intelligence, warmth or draw. Like Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, which proved Kubrick probably had not had a sexual relationship in decades, Stillman seems too far removed from youth to master even a very broad comedy about young people.
And broad it can be. When one of the girls runs away to sort out her feelings after she finds her boyfriend has cheated on her, she goes to a low-rent motel. “Were you at a Motel 6?” her friends ask. “The Motel 4 – it’s even cheaper.”
Stillman has achieved bad Woody Allen. Not much fun, especially when he takes us out of Manhattan.
The film is often amusing, but the characters, never particularly realistic in Stillman pictures, are cartoons. Worse, every actor knows Stillman, and they’ve brought their Stillman A Game. The dialogue is stilted and even charmless. Oh for Chris Eigeman, who last I saw, stole a scene in HBO’s “Girls.”
The movie borders on a Whit Stillman spoof, though that really can’t be, at least until we get a proper David Mamet spoof.
He also cribs from his own work. A character has a fascination with a dance craze as social movement, just like a character in The Last Days of Disco. When you’ve only made 4 films, this is bad news.
It is no recommendation that it ends with two dance numbers.
This documentary is directed by Carl Colby, the son of the subject, former CIA Director William Colby. In all likelihood, therein lies the problem. Carl is torn as to which themes to stress, much as he is torn by the legacy of his father. He settles on three. First is a straight up documentary about a clandestine Cold Warrior who saved Italy from Communism and was critical to the Phoenix Program, eventually rising to the directorship of the CIA, where he was battered by Congress’s withering post-Watergate assault on the Agency. Footage from Italy, Vietnam, and congressional hearings is provided, along with interviews of numerous members of the American power structure at the time, including Donald Rumsfeld, Bob Kerry, Bud McFarlane. Bob Woodward and many others. This part is occasionally interesting, but since critical emphasis is placed elsewhere, the historical report lacks any real depth.
Which leads to a biography of a director highlighting the following: criticism of Paul Thomas Anderson, as if Anderson were a peer; becoming so overweight he is kicked off of a flight for not having bought two seats; attacking Bruce Willis (“I had no f***ing help from this dude whatsoever”) because Willis did not work hard enough to promote the execrable Cop Out); an attempt to market his last cruddy picture “outside the system”; and retiring, at the ripe old age of 41.
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