Opinion

Ghost World

Dir: Terry Zwigoff
Starring: Thora Birch, Scarlett Johansson, Steve Buscemi

Accentuate The Negative

Enid and Rebecca have just graduated high school (excepting the art class summer school Enid finds whe has to attend), and the two are faced with decisions about what to do with their lives now. Having set themselves apart from their schoolmates, and facing an uncertain future, their relationship enters a turbulent phase as Enid strikes up an unexpected relationship with an older man, and Rebecca finds a life of work and domestic concerns beginning to entice her.

Based on Daniel Clowes' cult hit comic of the same name, Ghost World shares many of its sources indiosyncratic stylings, not least in Birch's depiction of Enid, who looks exactly like the comic version. And like that other version, it is her darkly comic observations of her world and the people in it that give the film its best moments. There are only a few laugh-out-loud moments in Ghost World, but many, many big-grin and hearty-chuckle incidents.

The story of the film expands greatly on that of the comic, which is primarily about Enid, and opens up her world to include her unlikely new soulmate Seymour (Buscemi, adding another to his role call of seedy losers), and the environment of strip malls and prefab housing that Enid and Rebecca live in. It's a depressing prospect to see the two of them apparently alone in their understanding of exactly how grim the reality of their world is, and grimmer still to see Rebecca begin to be assimilated.

The performances are top-notch, with Birch in particular enhancing her resumé. Enid's hard-as-nails exterior is delicately revealed to be painfully fragile through tiny touches such as the way she looks at the boys she actively ridicules, and most tellingly by her growing devotion to Seymour the mission of finding a date for him. When the facade is finally shattered, the reaction is quite shocking; Enid displaying raw emotion for the first time in the film, and devastated when her father, trying to cheer her up, actually only succeeds in adding to her misery.

If the film has a weakness, it's that it lacks a real ending. That said, like real life, it consists instead of a series of endings that run together; the end of relationships, of aspirations, of individuality, and possibly even ultimately of hope. Enid's direction at the end of the film has an inevitability about it that suggests a lack of choice, though with unusual optimism, I'm choosing to interpret it as signalling a rebirth of hope.

To be honest, with a script co-written by Clowes and director Zwigoff (whose last film was the frankly too-good-to-be-true Crumb), I went into Ghost World expecting to like it. I came out having loved it, as much for its having made me think as for the wit, intelligence and charm in display.