Ben Saw: Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World

One of the nerd-crush movies of the summer. So how was it?



I went in to ‘Scott Pilgrim’ with some trepidation. Having read the series of graphic novels, and really enjoying them, I had deeply mixed feelings when the movie was first announced. Edgar Wright was undeniably an inspired choice to helm the project, but whom would they cast for the title character? On my reading, it had to be someone fairly young, semi-scrawny, capable of a hyperactive slacker charm, a goofy sense of humor and enough charisma and good looks that you understood why a woman would ever be drawn to this man-child dunce of a character. Someone like..........

Michael Cera?

Really?

That rang false for me from moment one. It screamed ‘oh crap, we have a no-name genre-blending property that will be hard to summarize in a trailer! What young comic actor can make this more commercially viable??’ And so they said Cera. Because Hollywood is usually stupid and, despite it all, Cera’s star has shone modestly bright for the past few years.

Admittedly, I don’t like Cera in the first place. No, I didn’t like ‘Arrested Development’. I watched a number of episodes and I found it poisonous; smug, self-satisfied, sneering non-jokes that weren’t half as clever as the folks involved thought. That was the writing’s fault more than Cera’s, but his performance as a stuttering jellyfish did nothing for me. And that’s always the character he plays. Cera was intolerable in his bad movies (‘Nick & Nora’, anyone?) and a neutron rod in the good movies (‘Juno’, ‘Superbad’). So, like I said, I don’t like Cera in the first place, but I just couldn’t see how someone read 'Scott Pilgrim' and thought of him or the simpering character that he plays in everything he ever does.

I say all this because, while I tried to go in with an open mind and a willingness to not judge the movie in comparison to the books, I’d be lying if I said it probably didn’t influence me. As you can perhaps guess from all of the above, I wanted to like ‘Scott Pilgrim’ a lot but it ultimately didn’t work that well for me.



I’m assuming you know the plot already (if not, feel free to check IMDB’s summary: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0446029/synopsis), so let’s talk about the movie itself. (Finally, right?) There’s a lot to like about the movie. The creative team clearly LOVED its source material and tries to be a faithful channelling of the source material’s tone and themes in to a new medium. They put a busy, scattershot aesthetic to good use by packing the movie full of gags, asides and clever references.

‘16-bit’, ‘nerdy’ and ‘arty’ clearly served as the watchwords in cinematography and post-production; as a result, the movie has a striking visual style that tries to blend the fantasy of video games in to real life. Scott ‘levels up’ on screen. ‘POW!’ flashes on screen when someone gets punched. Not everything works (‘Bollywood dance fight’ sounds more amusing than it turned out to be) but it is fun and not overly intrusive. The visual guys should probably get an Oscar nod because it’s just so different and fully realized than anything else out there today. And the cameo by Clifton Collins Jr. and Timothy Jane was genius.

That scattershot aesthetic I mentioned is part of what makes the movie so hard to market. It’s a love story! It’s a comedy! An action movie! A rock band flick! There are trippy asides! Bi-sexual ninjas! Psychic vegan rock stars! Did I mention Jason Schwartzman is running around here somewhere? And the new Superman? But the movie finds that tone and often makes it work well, especially in the first half.



The supporting cast deserves props for this. Most of them understand the silliness of the movie they’re in and are willing to be a part of the joke as opposed to recoiling from the ridiculousness of it all. ‘Great’ is too strong a word, but ‘very good’ is spot-on for the cast’s high points: Chris Evans, Brandon Routh and (to a lesser extent) Jason Schwartzman all stand out as the most enjoyable of Ramona’s evil exes (keep an eye out for hilarious fake promotional materials for Evans’ movie star character) and Kieran Culkin kills as Scott’s roommate.

But as much as there were many things to like, the movie fell flat for me. There were two problems: Cera and the script, and if either of them had been better, ‘Scott Pilgrim’ could have really soared. Let’s start with the script. It tries to distill the 1000+ pages of the graphic novels in to movie form and that caused a lot of problems. Not as an adaptation (I’m trying not to judge on that basis), but as a story in its own right. That supporting cast that I had such nice things to say about...? Diluted by the fact that the film tries to cram about 20 fairly relevant characters in to a two-hour narrative. So as much as I liked Culkin’s witty, acerbic and sometimes off-kilter performance I didn’t get to see much of it because the movie gave itself very little time to let any one aspect of the film develop. The script tries to bring so many things in that lots of characters and interactions feel perfunctory, notably Scott’s fights with the fifth and sixth evil exes, as well as virtually every female character. It’s worth an aside: In retrospect I was struck by just how the female roles, often with talented actresses filling them, are given no room to breath due to the script’s race through the material. Anna Kendrick, Brie Larson and Ellen Wong are particularly poorly treated.

This compression not only prevents most of the cast from airing out their characters, it also forced the writers to pick different themes than the book to focus on, and introduce ‘neat’ resolutions in to the narrative. The former is only a problem because of the latter; there’s nothing wrong with a new focus, two hours is not a lot of time, but if you want to make this about Scott’s emotional maturity then let us see a somewhat believable arc. I know it’s a silly movie, but it’s ultimately grounded in pathos and not action, so telling us the whole thing takes place over a week or so rings incredibly false. I don’t think of ‘declaring love for someone after a week’ and ‘emotional maturity’ as particularly compatible. And some of the ‘neat’ decisions carry the hallmarks of bad writing: What makes Ramona so desirable? Why does the band make certain sacrifices for Scott? Why is Knives necessary in the climactic fight? Stuff like this makes the script feel like an early flying machine: it’s full of admirable, inventive and clever things, but bumps along on the ground without ever taking flight for more than brief spurts.



To really soar, the movie needs to give the audience something to latch on to, so a choppy script would be less of a problem if we had a charming, likeable lead who helped us be more inclined to overlook the problems. Instead we get Cera who is, by far, the weakest aspect of the cast. He’s not awful, that would be unfairly harsh since he is surprisingly fine in the fight scenes and does sell some of his better material fairly well, but he has much less energy than the rest of the cast and gives no sense of depth or interest to his character. The story is about Scott winning over Ramona, so it rests on Scott Pilgrim being eminently likable despite his obvious flaws. Michael Cera is not likable, making ‘Scott Pilgrim’ fall back on it’s admirable creative energy and crackling supporting cast. It’s not enough, making this a movie to rent unless you are curious about the imagery or really, really like Michael Cera...........although I can’t imagine why.

Grade: B-

Best scene: The movie is filled with more great split-second moments than great scenes, but if I had to pick one it would probably have to be the battle against Brandon Routh.