Ghost World (dir: Terry Zwigoff, 2001) (review © Jon Horne 2001) from Touch Nottingham (internet magazine and What's On guide) I'll be honest with you: the following review is not going to be an objective, cool-headed piece of journalism. You see, I'm at that 'difficult' age: my body is going through unaccountable changes, unsightly hair is sprouting where I never expected it to, and hormones are doing strange things to my libido. No one understands me, and no one cares. When you're trying to cope with a mid-life crisis, the last thing you want to have to deal with is the whining of a spotty adolescent. Which brings us to Ghost World, Terry Zwigoff's live-action adaptation of Daniel Clowes' graphic novel of the same name (itself adapted from his half-yearly serial comic, Eightball). Here's the story. Whining adolescent Enid (Thora Birch) and the slightly less annoying Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson) are a couple of misanthropic seventeen-year-olds brought together by their mutual contempt for everyone else. Leaving school, and immediately bored, they decide to torture a random loser by answering an advert in the personals column, and watching what happens to the man who placed the advert (Seymour, played by Steve Buscemi) when his prospective date fails to turn up. As it turns out, Enid finds him rather interesting, and continues to follow him around until they accidentally-on-purpose meet. They hang around together for a bit, during which time she plays all sorts of games at his expense. Eventually he gets fed up with her, and drops her. Meanwhile Rebecca starts to feel that she isn't getting enough of Enid's attention, and the pair of them have a bit of a falling-out. As far as the plot goes, that's about it. I hope I haven't spoiled the suspense for you. OK, so the plot doesn't matter. The film is about the relationships between Enid and Rebecca, and between Enid and Seymour. More than that, it is about the relationship between the part of Enid which sneers at everything, and feels nothing but self-pity, and that part of her which is capable of having feelings towards other people. It is about the deadening sameness of turn-of-the-century lower middle class America - the 'ghost world' of the title - contrasted with the colour and variety of the old and the exotic. Equally it is about the difference between surrounding oneself with retro-crap, and getting genuinely involved with something from the past (Enid's introduction to a Skip James country-blues song). Unfortunately, it is also about the writers' relationship with their own work. Zwigoff's previous best-known film was the (great) documentary Crumb, about the cartoonist Robert Crumb, and references to Crumb are all over Ghost World, mostly in the form of little digs and in-jokes. This self-referencing gets tedious; it doesn't help that Enid is (guess what!) a cartoonist in her spare time. Like, maybe she'll grow up to be someone like, y'know, Daniel Clowes. Complaints aside, there are many things to admire in Ghost World. For a start, it is a comedy (sorry, I forgot to mention that), and some of the jokes made me laugh out loud. Thora Birch, in a role which in some ways parodies her part in American Beauty, makes for a superbly obnoxious suburban teenager, and Steve Buscemi does dismal self-pity like no other actor can. Made using (not much of) John Malkovich's money, the look of the film is an impressive re-creation of Clowes' magically-unreal cartoon landscape, from the opening sequence, where the camera tracks past a row of windows in a block of flats, mimicking the panels of a comic strip, to the flat colours of Enid and Rebecca's clothes. Credit must go to the costume designer Mary Zophres for making real actors look as if they've just wandered off the set of a Scooby-Doo cartoon. (That was a compliment; the effect is very funny). Actually, the more I think about this film, the more I like it. The fact that Enid does something (drawing cartoons) is a nice overturning of Generation-X clichés about cool laziness. It's nice too that it doesn't really turn out alright in the end. I was reminded more than once of High Fidelity, another film in which the main characters are defined by their tastes rather than by whatever personal qualities they may have. Unlike High Fidelity though, Ghost World doesn't batter you over the head with the message about how shallow this is, and how we'd all be better people if we stopped listening to records and went off to have babies or do proper jobs, like proper adults. Instead, we just get 'OK, she's shallow - now let's do some jokes about it'. The problem is that overall, Ghost World is not consistently funny, or engaging enough to make you care about any of the characters. When it comes down to it, Enid and Rebecca are a pair of over-tolerated brats, and Seymour is a loser, without too many redeeming qualities beyond the fact that you might feel sorry for him. A bit of charm, from someone at least, wouldn't have gone amiss. The truth is, Ghost World works a lot better on the page. In fact, it works better in single-panel cartoons than it did even as a graphic novel. A large chunk of the promotional budget for this film has gone on a handsome programme which gets handed out to people like me (society's élite cultural tastemakers) as we swan into preview screenings without paying. Along with some really interesting stuff about the actors and the background to the story (which I should have included in this review, but... well, I just didn't), there are some wonderfully cool and economical drawings taken from the original Eightball comic. One of these is of Enid and Rebecca on high-school Graduation Day, dressed in mortar-board and gown, looking sad, bored and the same as everyone else. With a perfect deadpan face, Enid is lifting her arm and giving the finger to an unseen observer - as if she's giving the finger to the world. This on its own is so funny, and so perfectly descriptive of what it feels like to be a teenager, that it makes anything in the film seem superfluous. Oh bugger, I've gone and slagged off another film. Look, it's not a disaster: it's quite funny, the people in it are great, and it's short, so don't be afraid to go and see it. Just don't expect too much, and you'll probably leave happy. - - - Links: Ghost World - the movie Daniel Clowes on the Fantagraphics website read more rants and raves