Archive for March, 2000

Back in col­lege I dumped a girl I had been going out with for 6 or 7 months. She’d started using phrases like, “What do you think our chil­dren will look like?” and stuff like that, stuff that unnerved me enough to reeval­u­ate our rela­tion­ship and see if it was worth it or not. She wanted to get mar­ried; I wasn’t so sure. So she went to Europe for about a month, and over the course of that trip I real­ized that she annoyed me more than intrigued me. I dumped her when she got back.

She yelled at me and called me names and she cried. She made me feel bad (rightly so, since I was dump­ing her) so after the mess was sorted out and I was alone again I went over to my best friend’s apart­ment and told him what had hap­pened. “Why are you upset?” he asked. “You got what you wanted. Why should you feel bad?” And he was right.

Of course, this all works won­der­fully when you’re not on the other side of the coin. In High Fidelity Rob Gor­don (John Cusack) has two loves in his life — music and his live-in girl­friend Laura (Iben Hje­jle). At the begin­ning of the film he’s just felt the sting­ing rebuke that my ex-girlfriend felt that night so long ago. Laura is mov­ing out because she’s tired of Rob’s hipster-dufus quirks and his inabil­ity to grow up. He runs a record store in Chicago and lives out his ado­les­cent fan­tasies of maybe some­day pro­duc­ing a great rock-n-roll record. As Laura puts it, “You’re the same per­son you were, and I’m not.” Rob is sud­denly alone and attempts to dis­cover what is going on and why he can’t make it work with women.

While on his quest for inner ful­fill­ment, Rob seeks out the other half of his top five (a com­mon phrase in this flick) worst breakups and attempt to find out why they went the way they did. The women range from sweet to dis­turbed to aloof, and Rob, in his infi­nite dopi­ness, never seems to be able to hit the nail on the head as to why things go so wrong for him. But some­thing hap­pens inside of Rob’s head near the end of the flick where he sud­denly seems to grow up and become the kind of man that makes you start root­ing for him where before he seemed like a leech in search of a host. In the process he nat­u­rally learns impor­tant tid­bits about him­self and will pos­si­bly come to real­ize that monog­a­mous com­mit­ment and love aren’t such bad things after all.

I like John Cusack. He’s been in many films I’ve enjoyed immensely (Bob Roberts, Bul­lets Over Broad­way, Being John Malkovich). Like many actors, he’s also been in sev­eral pieces of com­plete garbage (Con Air, Mid­night in the Gar­den of Good and Evil, Cra­dle Will Rock). This is one film he obvi­ously loved mak­ing as it’s tailor-made for his style of act­ing. Here he’s th Loser Every­man, the Bizarro World ver­sion of Tru­man Bur­bank from The Tru­man Show. Cusack was nom­i­nated for a Golden Globe for his por­trayal, but he lost out to George Clooney in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which I would agree with. His por­trayal here of a Gen-X slacker is prob­a­bly the best work he’s done in the past 5 years. He’s nuanced and funny and easy to iden­tify with (at least he was for me).

I haven’t really talked a lot about the actual movie in this review I real­ize. My wife loves this movie (we saw it twice in two days when it was in the the­aters) and I love it too, but prob­a­bly with dif­fer­ing rea­sons behind our mutual love. She loves the funny parts; I love the funny parts too, but all guys at some point in their lives have been in the same boat as Rob. I likened him above to the Loser Every­man. He’s the dop­pel­ganger half of our per­son­al­i­ties that want to stay the lit­tle boy for­ever, play­ing with Star Wars fig­ures and video games while the grown-up world waits for us out­side, look­ing in. I like this movie because of that.