Apologies in advance for my gratuitous usage of the word shit. Yes there are spoilers in this review…
This movie has been described as being about two non-conformist feminist teenagers and their trials of not conforming. The movie begins with the main character, Enid, who is portrayed as one of those short-dark-haired girls with the old style glasses, adding to her geekyness. High school is just ending for her and her life consists of banging her head to music, degrading her single father (who is portrayed as a submissive, weak, and stereotypically feminine), and walking aimlessly with her slightly more realistic and slightly more attractive friend during which time they pretty much talk shit about anything and everything, which at times can pass for cynicism.
The perspective the movie tries to paint is one with a hellishly boring and bland backdrop, which creates the moods of the main characters (to which you are supposed to relate).
The entertainment of the movie is meant to be the shit talking they do under every-body’s nose. They don’t really talk much shit about the larger teenage demographic, they only hit the deluded incessantly perky/preppy/cheery type people, and the super popular that everyone knows and talks about (the power couple). In total 3 teenagers were degraded.
The perspective of the movie continues on, one of the plots is that these two cynics are going to move in together. The more realistic (blond) one is able to get a job, but the dark haired protagonist main character is so miserable and cynical that she gets fired from her first day of work at a movie theater by saying things like “here’s your popcorn mam, smothered in delicious yellow heart clog”. Since then she just can’t bring herself to get or hold down a job. They walk by a bench on a discontinued bus route, where a man is sitting alone, and always does. They ask him his name and he replies “Norman”, they ask him why he is waiting for a bus when there hasn’t been one for 2 years, and he brushes them off and ignores them.
So basically that’s the entire movie up to a point, their cynical wanderings lead them to find one of those 50’s theme restaurants, where everything is blander than ever. They have a habit of making ridiculous sarcastic suggestions, and the other will agree and actually do it. (creating a scene usually).
one of them reads the personals and find this
"Do you remember me? airport
shuttle, June 7th. You striking
blond with yellow dress, pearl necklace,
brown shoes. I was the bookish fellow
In the green cardigan who helped
you find your contact lens. Am i
crazy, or did we have a moment?
The realistic one says “we should call and pretend to be the blond.”, naturally the other one does it. They provoke him to a meeting they set up but just stake it out (its a bland restaurant). They end up stalking him, and in a weird way the protagonist becomes friends with him (he sold her a record she liked). The appeal of this couple is directed towards the quirky type people, people who like antiques for nostalgia, or obsess over collections. Anyway, Enids (the protagonists) relationship with this very apathetically pathetic Seymour drives a wedge between her tag along slightly more realistic friend, and while her friend gets a job and moves into an apartment alone, Enid ends up sleeping with Seymour, which screws up his current relationship with the actual yellow dress woman from the personal ad, who ended up calling after they became friends, and then Enids depression comes into full swing. She Wanders by Norman and tells him he’s the only one she can count on, and he says he’s leaving town (even though he is on that bench every day)
She tries to patch things up and almost succeeds but winds up being to negative and cynical and sentimental to lift a finger. Throughout the movie various hopeful plot scenes arose, like the prospect of moving in together, the relationship with Seymour (which by sleeping with him she ruined), her crush on the tag along boy who she claimed to like torturing, basically everything is built up, and then destroyed. The movie espouses a constant sense of monotony and frustration. Her father gets together with one of those horribly ugly and superficial 70’s-80’s type women, which for some reason drives her insane. The movie eventually succeeds by the end by having exhausted all venues of enjoyment, where all parts of her life are utterly unbearable to her character, and the viewer is meant to have a similar point of view.
She told a fantasy to Seymour, which was that she had dreamed of slipping away silently, without telling anybody, and going somewhere far away, and never be seen again, to start a whole new life somewhere else.
So in the end, when she is too depressed to crack bad jokes, she is walking toward Norman, but before she gets there she sees a bus with no markings on it, and no people, and barley a silhouette of the driver pick up Norman and continue driving.
She solemnly walks up, well dressed with a circular old-timey luggage case, sits where Norman was sitting, and with eerie depressed end type music, a bus comes by and picks her up, and drives off into over a bridge and out of town, in teh dark and out of sight.
Clearly it’s a metaphor for suicide…
This movie striking in that despite it’s overall shittiness, it delivers an even shittier message, which is to idealize the type of escape that suicide offers. The movie begins with her dancing wildly to some sort of Spanish music, later to banging her head to death metal, basically not giving a shit about anything, being to emotional to deal with anything. basically just miserable. At various points i found the movie to be absurd where i reacted negatively to what the movie was selling. At one point Enid had a mental breakdown just because she listened to a childhood sing along song on an old record she owned. To me i thought she was throwing away her chance to move in with her friend, and to get a job (where she almost succeeded), and i could no longer understand her problems.
When her father told her he was getting his girlfriend to move in, she cried, which was ridiculous because Enid did not pay any rent, and was basically waited on by her father. Her father was basically trying to ask permission, which was pathetic as well, but her reaction to it was even more pathetic.
With no offense to the author, Daniel Clowes, whose name an anagram for Enid Coleslaw, this film and story concept is shit. I haven’t read the comic, so I’m not sure of the original authors intent with the story.
If you sympathize with Enid and her fate, you might be suicidal in some way. I say shame on this movie for being so low brow, narrow minded, and absurdly mistaken.
If i had to rate it, I would give it 9 and a half shits, out of a possible ten shits.
