Recently, I had an accidental Claire Danes double-bill, with back-to-back viewings of Shopgirl and The Family Stone. She can be an interesting actress, but she can also seem somewhat vapid, if not utilized properly.
Shopgirl was not bad, but it teetered right on the edge of being pretentious twaddle. Steve Martin wrote the screenplay, based on his book, and it just not a terribly good job. A piece of pulp fiction and a movie have common interests: an emphasis on plot and action and a disinterest in character. The difference between a literary book and a movie is that the book is about language. You can describe a setting for half a page, really painting a picture visually, bringing in history and culture, stirring emotions. In the movie, it will just be a shot of a house in the woods. In the book, a woman asks a question and the man thinks about how he feels about the issue, he struggles with the issue at hand, but is unable to articulate these feelings due to his dark past. In the movie, he shrugs.
This is neither good nor bad, but the literary quality of a book must be replaced by something else in the movie. Sometimes you can achieve the same effect through different means. For example, both the novel The Turn of the Screw (written by Henry James) and the film adaptation The Innocents (screenplay written by William Archibald and Truman Capote) communicate an ambiguity about the nanny. Is she haunted by ghosts or is she nuts? Both versions handle the issue skillfully.
Shopgirl has several points at which we are treated to Martin reading omniscient narration. It seems like he’s supposed to be the author’s voice, not his character. It comes across as a forced literary touch. For example:
As Ray Porter watches Mirabelle walk away he feels a loss. How is it possible, he thinks, to miss a woman whom he kept at a distance so that when she was gone he would not miss her. Only then does he realize that wanting part of her and not all of her had hurt them both and how he cannot justify his actions except that… well… it was life.
The photography is amazing, though.
The part I enjoyed was a subplot with Jason Schwartzman‘s character Jeremy going on the road with the (fake) band Hot Tears, on a sort of walkabout. Mark Kozelek plays the band leader; he is, in fact, the leader of Sun Kil Moon and formerly of Red House Painters (I wrote about him here). That small piece would have made a more interesting movie to me.
The Family Stone also seemed to have literary aspirations. It also did not achieve them, although it was okay for a romantic comedy of the “Wacky Family During the Holidays” sort. Some reviewers complained about a lack of sympathetic characters; I thought that was the point. I thought the flaws of most (if not all) of the characters were deliberately drawn; it was the only thing that made it interesting, that your alliances kept shifting.
Claire Danes was poorly utilized.
Tags: Claire Danes, Steve Martin, Shopgirl, The Family Stone