CAREER GIRL POWER! by Kristian Lin
He had his big success with SECRETS AND LIES, and now everyone has gone back to ignoring Mike Leigh. We shouldn't be surprised. He's not the kind of filmmaker who'd parlay his Oscar nominations into a big-time transatlantic career. Maybe that's too bad - it'd be interesting to see which American actors would flourish under his direction, and what kind of movies he'd make on a Hollywood budget (what would MY BEST FRIEND'S WEDDING have been like with him directing?). Nevertheless, Leigh keeps doing what he does best: small, intimate, sharply observed slice-of-English-life movies.
His new film, CAREER GIRLS, takes place during a weekend when Annie (Lynda Steadman) returns from Yorkshire to London to see Hannah (Katrin Cartlidge), her roommate and best friend from college. Hannah complains that the men she meets don't last a weekend with her, but Annie makes the grade with her. They haven't seen each other in six years, but they have little trouble reconnecting. They're like ex-lovers who still turn each other on (in fact, they're twice mistaken for a lesbian couple). The movie recognizes that there's a sexual charge to any close friendship, be it these two or Thelma and Louise or Agent Mulder and Agent Scully. There's little in this movie besides extended conversation between these two, in flashbacks to their college days and in the present day. In this respect, the movie's like Richard Linklater's 1994 magnum opus BEFORE SUNRISE, and the fact that CAREER GIRLS can stand the comparison is high praise indeed.
We see the two of them as social misfits in their student days who band together for companionship. Hannah is a rather alarming piece of work. She's a motormouth who talks in a Robin Williams-like stream-of-consciousness deluge. She's an English major, which is just as well, since her mind runs frenetically in literary circles. Her bizarre and highly original sense of wordplay grabs at anything that presents itself - outrageous puns, metaphors, allusions, and off-the-cuff impressions of Marlon Brando and Robert DeNiro. She's also prone to fits of rage, with a nasty attitude to go with her steel-trap mind - witness her ruthless destruction of a psych major who good-naturedly tries to analyze her. No wonder people keep away from her; aside from giving off the appearance of some kind of dementia, her wit is so sharp that she frequently cuts herself and people she cares about.
But if Hannah has a soft spot for Annie. Annie touches Hannah deeply, in fact, and it'd take a cold heart not to be moved by this pathetic creature. As a collegian, her hair is dyed some shade of orange, she chain-smokes despite her asthma ("Isn't that a bit kamikaze?" erupts Hannah), and she has a shambling walk from carrying a bag that's too large for her. She also has a severe case of dermatitis on her face, and she can barely lift her eyes from the ground during a conversation. Hannah says, "You look like you did a tango with a cheese grater," which is enough to send Annie to the bathroom in tears. But Hannah's able to sense the gentleness and resilience in Annie's heart, a quality that comes to the forefront when Annie makes her present-day appearance as a well-adjusted, warmly radiant presence.
Hannah, for her part, has morphed from a gangly, scowling misanthrope into a cool, fashionable business executive, though she's still rough around the edges. Her nervous tics have now been replaced by the self- consciously theatrical gestures of a woman who hasn't lost her desire to act out, just refined it. Nor have her verbal idiosyncracies disappeared; she explains Annie's fear of heights by saying, "She's got a touch of the Hitchcocks." Annie's enthralled by her, and so are we, as she continues to thrust herself, insecurities and all, in people's faces. In a Hollywood movie, a character like this would be required to have a tearful breakdown at some point and reveal her innermost fears - audiences want to see such a hard-shelled person (especially a woman) exposed and made vulnerable. It doesn't happen here, and the characterization is richer for it.
If Kristin Scott Thomas is a Britisher who acts like a French actress, Katrin Cartlidge is a Britisher who acts like an American actress. She's unstudied, content to be unpolished, loose with her body and at ease with herself (though this could be just simple relief at playing a character so different from her roles in BEFORE THE RAIN and BREAKING THE WAVES). At the movie's end, when Annie asks her if she'll meet anybody exciting on the train, Hannah says, "Maybe you'll meet the man of your dreams." The end of this line is accompanied by a hand gesture which, we have come to learn, is one of Hannah's trademarks. Cartlidge puts her whole being into it, and yet it's a delightfully self-deprecating jab at her way of expressing things. The effect is terribly charming; you couldn't imagine it coming from another British actress (or even most American leading ladies), so ladylike and self-possessed are they. It's something out of the Julia Roberts repertoire. Hey, here's a comparison - Roberts is similarly tall, with an excess energy that keeps pouring out of her in the form of tiny, illuminating gestures. But anyone can see that Cartlidge isn't Roberts - with her severe, angular features and a cerebral ferocity that shows even in this light comedy, Cartlidge's presence in a movie is strong stuff indeed.
Of course, it takes two (and not a cheese grater) to tango, and the newcomer Steadman, while overplaying the naïveté a bit in the present-day section, is an effectively soft counterpart to Cartlidge's hardness. We don't see too many movies about women forming close friendships. We see even less of them done so convincingly. It still dips into clichés like Hannah telling Annie, "You're the only person who's ever appreciated me," but the chemistry between the actresses redeems the movie's occasional talkiness and overexplicitness. In this respect, CAREER GIRLS is like a down-to-earth English version of ROMY AND MICHELE'S HIGH SCHOOL REUNION. It doesn't have the silly comic highs of its American counterpart, but when you're watching the latter movie, you're always aware of two funny actresses clicking together. In CAREER GIRLS, you're aware of two characters finding strength in the way they complement each other instead.
Mike Leigh designs his movies to be unformed, with stray stories poking out from the edges. There's a funny house-hunting scene where the two girls meet a bathrobe-clad stockbroker who lights up a joint while showing them his apartment and clearly wants to have sex with them. (Hannah spots an open girlie magazine on his bed and asks, "Going through your family album?") On the flip side, there's the boyfriend that Annie rejected who turns up six years later homeless and insane. This vignette lacks the tragic power of a similar scene in FARGO - it takes too long without really going anywhere. But Leigh's films acquire their richness from hinting at the lives that are lived offscreen and only peripherally touch on the movie we see.
Hollywood likes movies about bland people, and does its best to smooth out interesting actors. Only minor characters are allowed to be eccentric, and they tend to be grotesque caricatures. There seems to be no middle ground - a movie like MY BEST FRIEND'S WEDDING, which allowed its protagonists some mild oddities, amounts to a blast of fresh air. On the other hand, some American independent filmmakers strain mightily to create characters who talk, act, or think in original ways. Mike Leigh always gives the impression that he's just found these people and treasures them for being the way they are. At one point, Hannah credits her first boss with saving her sanity. How? She says, "He let me be myself." We never meet that boss, but I'll bet he was Mike Leigh.
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