METROPOLITAN
A film review by Ed Nilges
Copyright 1990 Ed Nilges
Who else saw this move, and what did you think of it? I give it 5 out of 5 for freshness and originality, 4 out of 5 overall.
METROPOLITAN is about a group of TwentySomethings, self-described as "Urban Haute Bourgeois." However, it's not yet another movie about rich people. Most movies made today, *unless* they are explicitly about an underclass or a Dark Side, are made about fictional characters with enough money to decorate a set. The makers of movies, for the most part, lack the imagination to see that there is any sort of interesting freedom in characters explicitly constrained by the need to earn money. This is perhaps because the lives of such people have a highly iterative character (get up, catch the bus, work, go home: da capo): but a Minimalist composer such as Phillip Glass has made something out of sheer iteration, and the film My Dinner With Andre has as a secondary character one who (quite unusually) practically makes an appeal for personal financial salvation in his own movie.
Although the characters in METROPOLITAN are not immediately worried about paying the rent, there is an interesting tension between their elite background (shopping at Brooks Brothers) and the rather humdrum prospects they enjoy. The movie makes the point that even an expensive education is no guarantee of self-fulfillment, or even of an interesting or rewarding job. One of the best scenes in the film takes place at T. J. Melon's, an East Side watering hole where two of the main characters meet up with a semi-failure in unfashionably wide lapels and a Princeton tie.
More poignantly, one of the characters of the film is the son of divorced parents. Divorce, of course, introduces steep decline in the lives of the ex-wife, and the children, who usually stay with the ex-wife. It's hard for the characters in this situation not to at least try to keep up appearances, and the note of shabby gentility is a new element in American film.
For films up to now have been stories of social ascent, whether legal or illegal (cf. THE GODFATHER). Somewhat more innovative are stories of recovery (as in POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE) where a character finds that her decline is due to character flaws which she can herself change. Any decline undergone by the characters in METROPOLITAN is not due to character flaws. The people in this film are noble in a fashion that reminds the viewer of Jane Austen, a writer discussed in the movie. The men, in particular, clumsily try to behave as paladins in a way thought outdated even in F. Scott Fitzgerald's time, which is decried as "sexist" by the women, but which provides the (slightly disappointing) resolution of the movie.
Underneath the modulated voices, the chivalry, I sensed a low key and smoldering anger in METROPOLITAN. This is an anger at fathers who absented themselves from families in their own search for self- fulfillment. Unlike the modal fathers of my generation (I'm 40), who came home to their families and who exhausted themselves meeting their needs, the father of the generation of METROPOLITAN is presented as one overly concerned with his own needs...who moves, for example, to New Mexico without telling his son, and who leaves his son's old toys in the street for his son to stumble upon (Manhattan is a small place in its way.)
Since it's too hard to confront the Father directly, we get instead a large, aristocratic figure in a pony tail who is the same age as the characters in METROPOLITAN, but who comports himself, according to one of them, in a despicable way. This involves treating women as sex objects. Although the male characters, in making this charge, are themselves charged with sexism by the women in the film, they are obviously reacting to the economic sexism of fathers who left their families in the financial lurch in a way described by Barbara Ehrenreich (see her books THE HEARTS OF MEN and THE WORST YEARS OF OUR LIVES). A hundred years ago, the character who confronts Lord PonyTail would have charged him with toying with the affections of women. I half-expected a challenge to a duel in one drawing-room scene. Now, the charge is that Lord PonyTail is treating women as sex objects. Are the two charges actually equivalent?
But Lord PonyTail (whose long hair now marks him as Out Of The Past) is not *really* the hero's father, any more than the gun the hero pulls is a real gun. Audrey is at once amused, and impressed by her parfit, gentil knight's assault on The Dark Tower. Perhaps this leaves room at the end for forgiveness of the *real* father. Can the *real* fathers of that generation redeem themselves? Question for discussion: is the *real* father that generation which treated child support as a non-starter for much the same reasons they treated energy conservation as a non-starter? That generation which has several divisions of TwentySomethings in the Persian Gulf at risk as I write, for this reason?
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