Hooray For Me!
A Column by Captain Spaulding

JOHN CUSACK TAKES THE LAST TRAIN TO GUYVILLE

[Chicago - 3/2/2000] Last Saturday, in the midst of performing the weekend ritual in which I browse my way up the Clark Street gauntlet of music stores, I was thumbing through the L's in Dr. Wax in yet another vain attempt to unearth a deleted Liquor Giants CD. In doing so I struck up a conversation with a fellow wanderer through the twelfth letter of the alphabet, a pretty brunette wearing a Northwestern Rose Bowl sweatshirt and a gold necklace that said "Victoria". We debated the merits of Rockpile-era Nick Lowe versus latter-day lovelorn cowboy singer Nick Lowe. She was wonderful -- animated, intelligent, and possessing the ideal combination of good musical taste and a less encyclopedic grasp of the pop music catalogue than yours truly.

Somewhere about five minutes into my conversation with Victoria I noticed a diamond ring on her finger. It threw me -- an engagement ring? An inherited-from-a-dead-grandmother-and-thus-romantically-insignificant engagement ring? A garden variety I-just-like-diamonds ring? While pondering this, I let the conversation grow slack. Victoria sidled away before I could recover and turn the chat in a personal direction that might have led to an exchange of phone numbers. Vexed, I moved on to the M's.

A half-hour later, I sat in a darkened movie theater at Clark and Diversey and watched a John Cusack film about my life.

$ $ $ $ $

It's hard enough to sift through the ambivalent feelings of elation and discomfiture that are brought on by seeing a film that strikes so many personal chords in the viewer. It's worse when you have to actually decide whether or not the movie is any good. So I decided that the best way to attack the Cusack film (which is called High Fidelity, by the way) was to list all of the differences between his Rob Gordon character and myself. Then I could apply the old grey whistle test and see if what was left in the character rang true to me, thus validating or invalidating the movie.

I came up with two good differences -- Cusack's Rob Gordon owns a record store (a record record store called "Championship Vinyl"), whereas I merely spend all of my money in them, and the Rob Gordon character once dated a woman who is played in the movie by superslurpee Catherine Zeta-Jones. If you took all of the women whom I have ever dated, siphoned all of the beauty out of them, and then poured it all into one female form, you'd have Catherine Zeta-Jones' comparatively homely sidekick. That, and the minor difference that High Fidelity's protagonist lives in Chicago's hip north side neighborhood of Wicker Park while I live in Chicago's unhip north side neighborhood of North Park, is all that I could come up with in terms of separating myself from Rob Gordon.

Having established that, I can confidently say that High Fidelity is a terrific film. It's terrific because Cusack is eminently believable as a brooding thirtysomething whose method of dealing with a disintegrating relationship with his girlfriend is to try to slot her on his all-time Top Five breakup list. Cusack, who has enough Hollywood muscle to write his own scripts now (he penned this adaptation of the Nick Hornby novel with his usual script associates Steve Pink and D.V. DeVincentis), is in an acting category unto himself. He isn't a pretty-boy movie star like Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt, and he isn't a character actor who is constantly threatening to go arthouse on you like Johnny Depp. Cusack's singular thespian virtue is that he not only looks like half the guys with whom you went to high school, but he can capture the nuances that made each of those adolescent peers of yours just a little bit different from the others. Some of the critics are already saying that Rob Gordon reprises Cusack's Lloyd Dobler character from Say Anything, but that's not true; Lloyd Dobler was an endearing puppy dog, whereas Rob Gordon can and does inflict a certain amount of damage upon the women in his life. Rob Gordon is the guy who sat next to Lloyd Dobler in tenth-grade homeroom, while on the other side of him sat Martin Blank, the nostalgic hitman from Grosse Pointe Blank. If anyone, the movie character whom Rob Gordon most clearly resembles is Shrevie, the obsessive record collector played by Daniel Stern in Diner (another essence-of-male movie) whose collection seems to outweigh his wife in importance.

Cusack has been assembling this gallery of single-male portraits ever since he was the believable anchor of such mid-eighties teen fare as One Crazy Summer and The Sure Thing. Some might argue that Cusack is making hay with a sure thing (sorry) by never expanding his palette beyond angst-ridden middle-class white boys who are afflicted with Peter Pan Syndrome. Well, the fact that America made Jerry Seinfeld a TV demigod is proof positive that this is a very popular typology. The difference is that you've never met a person who is even remotely like Jerry Seinfeld, whereas you've probably met a whole passel of John Cusack characters.

Cusack is a classic guy-movie actor, inasmuch as we're talking about the wafer-thin genre of guy movies that don't involve generous dollops of sex and violence. In that vein, his Lloyd Dobler was the generational equivalent to Dustin Hoffman's Benjamin Braddock from The Graduate -- a character archetypal enough to run counter to form and sell himself as a romantic lead more to men than to women. Cusack is still hitting some of the same romantic-lead notes with Rob Gordon -- like Dobler, he stands heartsick outside of a girl's window in the rain -- but he fleshes it out with quintessential (and objectively unappetizing) male behavior. Rob Gordon is obsessed with categorizing, enumerating, and ranking everything and everyone; he is emotionally solipsistic and prone to rationalization; he has a niche in life in which he can safely be an elitist (pop music); he willingly engages in the casual cruelty of male cameraderie; he pays unblinking allegiance to the sexual double standard; and he remains perpetually befuddled by the female psyche no matter how far down the trail of serial monogamy he moves.

Rob Gordon is stuck in the mud, an essentially lazy loner who has learned bits and pieces about adult relationships through his various romances but still can't seem to put them all together to form the sort of coherent whole that would allow him to move forward into something of a more permanent nature. His two accomplices, Championship Vinyl employees Barry (Jack Black) and Dick (Todd Louiso) -- they play extrovert and introvert riffs on music geekdom, and they're spot-on -- more or less enable Rob's inability to grow up. But the movie hinges on an epiphany -- rather than simply mull over how severe this breakup is compared to his previous ones, Rob decides to reconnect with the exes from his infamous Top Five breakup list in order to find out why he is seemingly doomed to have women hurt him over and over. This series of blasts from the past coincides with a tug-of-war with his former upstairs neighbor, an execrable New Age mushmouth named Ian Raymond (Tim Robbins), for the affections of his departing girlfriend Laura. Rob's ongoing infidelities keep him from attaining the moral high ground, as demonstrated by his dalliance with flesh-eating folk chanteuse Marie De Salle (an unnervingly vampiric Lisa Bonet).

Laura is played by Copenhagen native Iben Hjejle, whose stumbletongue name is belied by the fact that she speaks American English with nary a trace of the typical marble-gargling Danish accent. She's one of the better aspects of the picture. She is put-upon by Rob's inability to decipher proper relationship behavior, much less close out his romantic options and move ahead with his life towards permanent cohabitation. Still, she can't give him up entirely. The attraction and repulsion the two characters share is quite believable, and it's made even more believable by the fact that she is ping-ponging between Rob and a transparently loathsome man who is obviously set up by her in order to force Rob to get his emotional act together. The thread between Rob and Laura is kept together throughout the film by Laura's friend Liz (played by loyal sister Joan Cusack as yet another one of her patented confidante roles).

It's details that make the movie work, since details rather than the broad picture define the main character by his own choosing. A key detail is the setting; while the book was set in London (and by Cusack's own admission, any large city in the Western world would have done for the movie), Cusack has opted for a familiar milieu in which to comfortably swim. I can vouch for the fact that he pulled it off. Windy City native Cusack and director Stephen Frears (who previously directed Cusack in The Grifters) capture the city so well that John Hughes ought to sit in the theater with a flashlight and take notes on how to scout Chicago locations. There are no obvious shots of Lake Shore Drive, the John Hancock Building, or the lattice of downtown drawbridges across the Chicago River, and not every building in the movie is within earshot of the el tracks. It isn't just the references made to, and the scenes shot in, such music landmarks in the city by the inland sea as Vintage Vinyl, the Double Door, Wax Trax, Schubas, and the late, lamented Lounge Ax that makes the setting work -- it's a certain gritty tension in the air in which Chicago prides itself. For a world-class city with heaps of sophistication, there's still a strong provincial element in this town, and a certain bridling working-class-hero pride that emerges even in hipsters (witness Rob's telling reunion dinner party with the ex played by Zeta-Jones). Wicker Park (otherwise known as the "Guyville" of Urge Overkill and Liz Phair fame) is the perfect setting for this sort of half-yuppie, half-latchkey factory brat vibe. It would be easy to chalk up my endorsement to hometown favoritism, but the truth is that I've grown wary of seeing the city ripped off by having a couple of second-unit shots of downtown inserted for the sake of atmosphere into a film that's really shot in Toronto, or of seeing putatively-local films that really don't have a Chicago feel at all.

The second great detail is how well Cusack captures the music-geek flavor of the book. Every male pop music obsessive will get a frisson of recognition from the scene where Dick shyly hits on a female customer by pointing out knowingly that Green Day's sound is a combination of The Clash and Stiff Little Fingers. The scenario drew me in so thoroughly that I was tempted to turn to the stranger seated next to me and say, "No! Wrong punk band from Northern Ireland! Green Day rips off the Undertones and the Clash, not Stiff Little Fingers and the Clash!" It's no surprise how well Cusack pulls this off -- his films use pop music better than anyone else's. Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything cemented the truth that "Within Your Reach" by the Replacements is the great vulnerable-male anthem of the eighties, and by having Joe Strummer coordinate the soundtrack for Grosse Pointe Blank Cusack guaranteed that the disc jockey character played by Minnie Driver would spin all the right Clash songs.The specific twists that the High Fidelity trio of Rob, Dick, and Barry give to male trademarks make this work even better -- rather than the usual Top Ten lists, they opt for Top Five lists instead to catalogue their tastes and lives. They thus sucked me in with their "top five opening album tracks of all time" argument (tempting me to yell at the screen, "C'mon, guys! 'Papa's Got a Brand New Bag', 'Like a Rolling Stone', 'Brown Sugar', 'Search and Destroy', and 'Holidays In the Sun' !"). More tellingly, Rob describes Girlfriend #2 (in keeping with the movie's motto, "You are what you like") by saying, "Her top five favorite artists were Carly Simon, Carole King, James Taylor, Barbra Streisand, and Elton John". You don't need to be told that it's a putdown.

If you and your friends spend hours arguing over whether David Crosby hurt or helped the Byrds by jumping ship to form CSNY, whether Wilco is better off doing alt-country or power pop, whether the Left Banke or the Four Tops did the better version of "Walk Away Renee", or whether fIREHOSE or New Order was the better successor band to predecessor bands the Minutemen and Joy Division, this movie will push all of the right buttons on your psychic CD changer. And you won't be able to argue with a soundtrack diverse enough to include the likes of Katrina and the Waves, the 13th Floor Elevators, Belle and Sebastian, Love, Marvin Gaye, Bob Dylan, and the Beta Band.

But the device that makes the movie work best is the fourth-wall technique in which Rob speaks into the camera. It's ostensibly used so that Cusack and Frears can incorporate all of the best inner-monologue lines from the novel into the film. But it has a subtler benefit as well. Rob is a heel in both of the classic male ways -- he often hurts the women who love him without him realizing what he's doing, and when he does realize it he is able to explain it away with logic. The writers set up the dialogue in such a way that even the most clueless male in the audience will catch on to Rob's heel status. But the monologues allow us to peer inside Rob and see him struggle with his guilt and his inadequacies. It gives us a more full-orbed view of him as both sympathetic and loathsome -- in other words, a guy. And in the end, those monologues of Rob's provide the most familiar echoes of all for the male members of the audience...even for fellow music geeks from Chicago.

Despite its large-scale Touchstone Pictures release, High Fidelity probably doesn't play broadly enough to the groundlings to be a box office hit. Look for it to be a perpetual weekend-midnight cult movie favorite...sort of the film equivalent to, say, Television's Marquee Moon, the Velvet Underground's White Light, White Heat, or American Music Club's Everclear. And is that such a bad thing?

CAPTAIN SPAULDING

Email Captain Spaulding

View the Captain Spaulding Archives

This Aint' Some MTV Hack Job
Jody Beth Rosen reviews John Cusack's new film, High Fidelity