1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 10: Beautiful girls
This movie takes place in the coldest, snowiest time of the year, in a town in the northeastern United States. The setting is not unlike those of It’s a Wonderful Life and the bleak novel Appointment in Samarra. Everyone knows everybody else; the hierarchies have long been established; very little goes on, and so the inhabitants drink a lot of alcohol and dabble in sexual and romantic intrigue.
The most troubling flirtation is the one between Marty (Natalie Portman), a precocious thirteen-year-old, and Willie (Timothy Hutton), who’s twenty-nine and has returned to the town after many years in the big city. Marty’s and Willie’s scenes are meant to be charming, but some viewers may well be disgusted by them. The obvious contrast is with the novel Lolita, in which it’s clear that the teenaged character’s flirtatiousness is a projection of the adult narrator’s warped point of view. Is anything like this true of Marty’s and Willie’s scenes in Beautiful Girls? It would seem not.
Whether or not the movie errs in failing to condemn a grown man’s attraction to a thirteen-year-old, its focus is upon a different problem, which is that Willie is insufficiently committed to the grown woman with whom he’s in a long-term relationship. This is a problem that he shares with several other male characters.
They include Tommy (Matt Dillon) and Paul (Michael Rapaport), who are involved with Sharon (Mira Sorvino) and Jan (Martha Plimpton), respectively. Tommy distracts himself from Sharon by continuing a long, stale affair with rich housewife Darian (Lauren Holly). Paul has fallen out with Jan because he idealizes women in a way encouraged by certain magazines. The movie could have been called “Distracted Men,” though that title wouldn’t have sold as many tickets as “Beautiful Girls.”
I list all these actors because their casting is crucial. No one plays against type. Hutton (Ordinary People) plays a starry-eyed idealist on the verge of self-destruction. Portman, previously of Léon: The Professional, seems sophisticated beyond her years. (Now that the years have caught up with her, is she as effective an actress?) Dillon, as in Drugstore Cowboy, A Kiss Before Dying, and Wild Things, plays an intelligent hunk trapped in a soul-crushing rut; Holly (Dumb and Dumber) plays a character who’s rich, glamorous, and accustomed to enjoying men’s attention. Rapaport and Plimpton look less gorgeous than the other actors but display incisive charisma. This is even truer of Rosie O’Donnell, whose task is to recite basic feminist wisdom.
Earlier I mentioned It’s a Wonderful Life and Appointment in Samarra – one story that ends well and another that ends badly. So, then: which way does this movie go? Do these people get better or worse? Is this movie nasty or nice?
From the beginning, there’s no question that it’s a very nice, very jolly movie. For all their misdeeds, the characters exhibit warmth and camaraderie, as in this poster – which arranges the cast around Andera (Uma Thurman), the movie’s most desirable “girl”:
Other characters, hitherto unmentioned, add to this camaraderie. They’ve more or less figured out life; they serve as beacons to those who are still wandering. A lot of caring goes on in this movie.
As Roger Ebert puts it:
The most troubling flirtation is the one between Marty (Natalie Portman), a precocious thirteen-year-old, and Willie (Timothy Hutton), who’s twenty-nine and has returned to the town after many years in the big city. Marty’s and Willie’s scenes are meant to be charming, but some viewers may well be disgusted by them. The obvious contrast is with the novel Lolita, in which it’s clear that the teenaged character’s flirtatiousness is a projection of the adult narrator’s warped point of view. Is anything like this true of Marty’s and Willie’s scenes in Beautiful Girls? It would seem not.
Whether or not the movie errs in failing to condemn a grown man’s attraction to a thirteen-year-old, its focus is upon a different problem, which is that Willie is insufficiently committed to the grown woman with whom he’s in a long-term relationship. This is a problem that he shares with several other male characters.
They include Tommy (Matt Dillon) and Paul (Michael Rapaport), who are involved with Sharon (Mira Sorvino) and Jan (Martha Plimpton), respectively. Tommy distracts himself from Sharon by continuing a long, stale affair with rich housewife Darian (Lauren Holly). Paul has fallen out with Jan because he idealizes women in a way encouraged by certain magazines. The movie could have been called “Distracted Men,” though that title wouldn’t have sold as many tickets as “Beautiful Girls.”
I list all these actors because their casting is crucial. No one plays against type. Hutton (Ordinary People) plays a starry-eyed idealist on the verge of self-destruction. Portman, previously of Léon: The Professional, seems sophisticated beyond her years. (Now that the years have caught up with her, is she as effective an actress?) Dillon, as in Drugstore Cowboy, A Kiss Before Dying, and Wild Things, plays an intelligent hunk trapped in a soul-crushing rut; Holly (Dumb and Dumber) plays a character who’s rich, glamorous, and accustomed to enjoying men’s attention. Rapaport and Plimpton look less gorgeous than the other actors but display incisive charisma. This is even truer of Rosie O’Donnell, whose task is to recite basic feminist wisdom.
Earlier I mentioned It’s a Wonderful Life and Appointment in Samarra – one story that ends well and another that ends badly. So, then: which way does this movie go? Do these people get better or worse? Is this movie nasty or nice?
From the beginning, there’s no question that it’s a very nice, very jolly movie. For all their misdeeds, the characters exhibit warmth and camaraderie, as in this poster – which arranges the cast around Andera (Uma Thurman), the movie’s most desirable “girl”:
Other characters, hitherto unmentioned, add to this camaraderie. They’ve more or less figured out life; they serve as beacons to those who are still wandering. A lot of caring goes on in this movie.
As Roger Ebert puts it:
What’s nicest about the film is the way it treasures the good feelings people can have for one another. They emerge most tenderly in the friendship between Willie and the 13-year-old girl.The townspeople are rough around the edges, as illustrated in scenes of misbehavior involving snowplows. Piling up snow in front of a former girlfriend’s garage is not a gentlemanly thing to do. But snow is, at least, clean; it can be cleared away; and, eventually, it will melt. This movie exhibits the comedic faith that wrongs are impermanent, that they can be undone.
They have crushes on each other for essentially idealistic reasons (each projects a simplicity and perfection that may not be there), and yet they draw apart, ever so tactfully, because they are sensible enough to know that it’s the right thing to do.
Their relationship is mirrored in all of the others, which are all about idealism and its disappointments. The men insist that women correspond to some sort of universal ideal, and the women sometimes blame themselves when they cannot. But somehow, doggedly, true love teaches its lesson, which is that you can fall in love with an ideal, but you can only be in love with a human being.