GHOST WORLD R, 111 minutes Directed by Terry Zwigoff WHEN, WHERE: De Vargas
Terry Zwigoff made `Crumb', the startling, insidiously brilliant documentary about cartoonist R. Crumb and his world-class dysfunctional family. With his first fiction film, `Ghost World', Zwigoff stays on the underground comics reservation, tackling the comic book of the same name by Dan Clowes, who collaborated on the screenplay.
Enid (Thora Birch of `American Beauty') and Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson of `The Horse Whisperer') are a couple of high school misfits who have ostracized themselves from the shallow mainstream. They stand apart, lips pursed in cynical scorn at the hypocrisy and false values of the world they inhabit at arm's length. At their high school graduation, an uplifting speech is given by a girl strapped to a wheelchair and propped up by an erector set of braces. In the audience, Enid winces. `I liked her better when she was an alcoholic and drug addict. She gets in one stupid car crash and suddenly she's Little Miss Perfect."
But for all its traumas, high school affords a buffer against the quicksand of the real world. It's a safe house where poses, even the pose of outsiderdom, are easier to maintain. As graduation recedes, Enid and Rebecca are faced with getting on with the rest of their lives. College isn't an option; though they're smart as whips, they want nothing to do with the structured expectations of more schooling – though you half suspect, in a world beyond the last frame of this movie, that someday Enid may reconsider. What they want now is their own apartment, that first great badge of adulthood and independent life. That means getting a job. Rebecca finds one at Starbucks, and begins drifting away from Enid and the Puritanical code of alienation that has forged their sisterhood.
Enid can't hold a job. Her determined truth-telling gets in the way. So she continues to live at home with her well-meaning but ineffectual father (Bob Balaban), and forms an unlikely relationship with a lonely-hearts loser named Seymour (Steve Buscemi), whom she encounters first while playing a cruel prank on him, but later comes to understand and appreciate, because "he's the exact opposite of all the things I hate."
Seymour has practically no illusions about himself. He knows he's a dork, he knows he hasn't a ghost of a chance with women. He collects old jazz records, one of the blessed refuges of the marginalized; jazz taps into a spirituality that floats above the rat race of societal positioning, its pioneer artists were marginalized themselves by a white society, and anyway discs of grooved, recorded acetate don't judge or betray.
`Ghost World' is based on a comic book, and it reflects its origins in a surface depth that implies more meaning than it delivers. It's nominally a comedy, but it's more `hmm' than `ho-ho.' It moves a bit haltingly, with awkward editing, as if progressing along cartoon frames on a printed page, and there's a designed flatness to the color and the visual plane. Some of its plot turns, particularly the romantic pairing of Seymour and a lady from the personals, aren't persuasive. But it digs at truths both disturbing and amusing. Enid has to attend a summer art class to fulfill her graduation requirements, and she encounters a post-hippie teacher (Illeana Douglas) who is dismissive of her cartoons (drawn for the screen by Crumb's cartoonist daughter Sophie) and only values conceptual art. Enid, borrowing an old poster from Seymour, comes up with a humdinger of a concept.
The great lift of this movie comes from its two excellent central performances. Thora Birch, playing an antiheroine role that a few years ago might have gone to Christina Ricci, radiates intelligence through her hip dissatisfaction, and promises a character with many worlds to explore as she grows older. And Buscemi grounds Seymour in a clear-eyed pathos that is both funny and heartbreakingly true.
Almost, but not quite, as funny, heartbreaking, and true as R. Crumb.
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