Shopgirl

It’s difficult to tell at any given time and place what factors conspire to influence and determine my critical judgments. Certainly personal issues come to bear, but so also does one's physical and emotional sense of being—how I feel, whether I’m hungry, my blood sugar and hormonal levels, the clothes I’m wearing, the person I've just argued with—all of these come to bear. I certainly do apply critical standards, consciously and unconsciously, when I judge a film or book. But these other factors apply as well, and they may be more powerful than any critical standards I apply.

I remember with pain and sorrow various moments of despair and aimlessness from my 20s. I enrolled in graduate school immediately after graduating college. This delayed the onset of adult reality. (For many people in my line of work, university teaching, the onset of adult reality is still waiting to happen). I remember one Friday evening, sitting alone in my apartment, elbows canted on a rickety metal desk in my bedroom, studying. In the dark outside, dogs were howling, children were yelling at one another, a cat yowled. I had nothing to do, nothing in the social sense—I didn’t have a date, hadn’t had one in months, had no prospect of having one for months more. I could imagine my life drifting on like this, endlessly, as I grew older and then died. This is how I remember my graduate school years—alone, in despair, no future. The few friends I had did make a difference.

I am not of the same gender as the main character in Shopgirl, and my circumstances were significantly different from hers, but it is from this remembered perspective of mid-20s despair that I watched and immensely enjoyed this film about a young woman waiting for her life to begin and not convinced that it ever will.

Steve Martin wrote the screenplay for this film, based on his short novel of the same title. Martin has written several fine small novels. He’s an intelligent, ironic writer with a canny sense of whimsy that one can associate with his comic stand-up routines. Roxanne (1987) was another fine film scripted by Martin. It is more exuberant and outright comic than this subdued and poignant film. Martin has appeared in films of wildly varying quality. Recently he starred in the unfortunate and unnecessary Cheaper by the Dozen and its sequel, and well as in the recent remake The Pink Panther, by all accounts a bad film. Is the problem that good film roles aren’t available for Martin? Or is it his own poor judgment—he did write the screenplay for The Pink Panther. But Shopgirl is quite good. Martin plays one of three main characters, but the lead character is Mirabelle Buttersfield, a salesgirl in her mid-20s at Sax 5^th Avenue, played by Claire Danes, who underplays her role to just the right extent. The film is about her struggle to connect—she is lonely and reticent. She is waiting for something to happen, and it is just possible for her to imagine that something will not happen at all.

Shopgirl is about Mirabelle's romantic encounters with a young man who specializes in stenciling and with a wealthy and much older man, Ray Porter, played by Martin. While he is basically just out for a romantic relationship and for sex, with no permanent strings, she falls in love with him.

There is much one might find to criticize in the film—inconsistencies in character and in plot—but the film as a whole seduces you into overlooking those flaws and into falling under the thrall of the movie’s charm and its wonderful study of the characters played by Martin and Danes.

Cinematography is a noteworthy element. It transforms the landscape of Los Angeles into a dynamic setting against which the characters play out their lives. There are a number of distant shots of the unremarkable and nondescript apartment in which Mirabelle lives. The perspective emphasizes that she is one small part of a much larger scene, that she is a small speck in the urban sprawl. Much of the film takes place at night, and the lights of the city are always flickering in the distance. Los Angeles comes across as beautiful, huge, and impersonal.

The music is a strange combination of neo-romantic and minimalist. It works well and the film is edited in such a way that cinematography and music fuse to create the overall ambiance of the film and the internal rhythms of a number of scenes.

Surely many of the virtues of the film can be attributed to director Anand Tucker, whose previous major work was Hillary and Jackie (1998).

As Ray Porter, Martin plays the older man who picks out Mirabelle to befriend. He invites her to dinner, seemingly out of the blue, charms her with his courtliness, and it does not take long for them to become lovers. Although he is initially a likeable character, his desire to have a relationship with no future—a desire he does not effectively communicate to Mirabelle—and his inability to read her emotionally—or himself—gradually makes him less sympathetic. He is nice enough to her, but the more deeply she falls for him, the more he backs off. In many ways, she is little more than his mistress, though she never seems to think off herself in that way, and one can certainly argue that Mirabelle doesn’t think carefully about the nature of the relationship and some of the “no commitments” comments Ray makes to her. Some of the inconsistencies in characterization center on his character—who at one moment seems genuinely in love with Mirabelle and at the next moment is cold and unresponsive.

Part of the problem lies in the age difference between the two characters. Mirabelle is young and looking for companionship, for someone to connect to in a lasting way. Ray is thirty years older than she, and, we can assume, has been through at least one marriage (we see his ex-wife, briefly). He is not comfortable with intimacy, and relationships work best for him if he can periodically withdraw, as he does when he goes to Seattle, where he has a home and where his ex-wife lives. One might say that Mirabelle and Ray simply meet at the wrong time.

Jason Schwartzman plays Mirabelle’s other love interest, Jeremy Kraft. He is a gangly, silly, awkward figure and at points he seems more a caricature than a real human being. But he grows and changes more than any other character in the film, and though at the end he remains goofy, he has matured and offers an alternative for Mirabelle.

Woody Allen in Annie Hall (1977) offered a similar treatment of the patterns of love and romance, but Martin does not imitate Allen in his screenplay and instead goes his own way. I actually prefer this film to Annie Hall, which has not aged well, and whose immature one-liners have become over the years more and more painful. This film actually has more in common with Allen’s film Manhattan (1979)—his real masterpiece from the 1970s.

Shopgirl is a quiet film and perhaps a small one, but it is moving, sweet, and poignant. It has a deep understanding and appreciation of human character, especially of Mirabelle Buttersfield. This fine film makes up for any number of the clinkers in which Steve Martin has recently appeared.