>>REVIEW
SHOPGIRL
STARRING Claire Danes, Steve Martin and Jason Schwartzman
DIRECTED BY Anand Tucker
Opens Friday, October 21
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There’s a melancholic charm to Shopgirl that makes its considerable flaws easy to forgive, at least while you’re watching it. Once you have time to reflect on what the movie says about women, you may want to smack Steve Martin upside his considerable head.
Martin does quadruple duty here, authoring the original 2000 novella, adapting much of it for the big screen, narrating the parts he gave up trying to adapt (the film feels as disjointed as a first draft), and starring as Ray Porter, a computer mogul competing for the affections of young glove salesgirl Mirabelle (Claire Danes, reliably earnest and haunted) against a slacker stencil artist named Jeremy (Jason Schwartzman).
No wonder Martin looks tired. His low-key demeanour sets the tone of the film, which, as directed by Anand Tucker (Hilary and Jackie), turns out to be less a comedy and more a gentle character sketch about a depressed woman who just needs to find the right man to love her so she can be happy. (Who knew Martin was such a patronizing fuddy-duddy at heart?)
That Mirabelle is only given two yokels in the whole wide world to choose from seems a bit stingy. It doesn’t help that Schwartzman broadly overplays his character’s eccentricities, making Jeremy about as romantically appropriate as an 11-year-old.
But while the film doesn’t hang together as a whole, it has moments of gawky brilliance, like when Ray shows up at Mirabelle’s dumpy apartment for their first date and she serves him stale wine, or when her cat seems to have an opinion on whether she should have sex. Tucker allows scenes to unfold leisurely, bringing each background detail, each character trait, each turn of phrase, to bemusing life. Fortunately for Shopgirl, the parts are greater than its sum. |
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