“A beautiful girl can make you dizzy, like you’ve been drinking Jack and Coke all morning. She can make you feel high full of the single greatest commodity known to man - promise. Promise of a better day. Promise of a greater hope. Promise of a new tomorrow. This particular aura can be found in the gait of a beautiful girl. In her smile, in her soul, the way she makes every rotten little thing about life seem like it’s going to be okay.”
That bit of dialogue is spoken by Paul Kirkwood (played brilliantly by Michael Rapaport). Unfortunately he’s talking about supermodels when he says it, trying to prove a point about why an almost 30 year old man has pictures of these women (“bottled promise” he calls them) plastered on his walls. Turns out he’s the most juvenile, sexist person in a film filled with juvenile, sexist ideas (he named his dog Elle MacPherson), but he’s not wrong. Misguided, for sure, but not wrong.
Earlier in the film Rosie O’Donell, in a performance that makes me love the woman (too bad everything she’s done since makes me just roll my eyes) gives a similar speech about how beauty is ultimately where you choose to find it. She doesn’ say it so nice, but, that’s the gist. It’s a good companoin piece to Paul’s little tyrade.
So…Beautiful Girls.
I say it’s filled with juvenile, sexist ideas…and I know that SOUNDS negative, but it’s a film about a group of people who can’t deal with the fact that they’re no longer in high school, so, the way they see the world is in stereotypes, there are no shades of grey. So, don’t let that be a turn-off.
I’m pretty sure it was my brother Ryan that introduced me to this movie, and I’m pretty sure it was his infatuation with Uma Thurman that brought him to it. Since then, for us (and probably a ton of other people) it’s become one of “those movies.” The one’s you talk about all the time, you quote, and when a new guy shows up to the group and hasn’t seen it, you look at him real strange. It’s the password to a secret club that doesn’t exist…This movie also introduced me to Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” and I’ve loved it ever since.
Not to say that it’s a guy’s movie. Not at all. It’s a movie about a piano player named Willie (played by Timothy Hutton) who comes back home for his ten year high school reunion to a town and friends he ultimately discovers he’s outgrown.
There’s a scene between Willie and a girl named Marty (played by a very young Natalie Portman) where he talks about coming back home to make some sort of life decision. He’s at a crossroads where he has to weigh what it is he wants to do against what it is he should be doing. Or, what he THINKS he should be doing, rather.
He looks at the world disappointed by what he hasn’t accomplished, and, as sad as it might be, only realizes what he has when he weighs his life against the lives of the people he left behind. Well, all that and some realizations with the old-soul, Marty.
It’s lessons in life, harsh ones. It’s about love; unrequitted, unwanted, undeniable and a lot of it’s ugly, but it’s all true. There’s a scene with Matt Dillon, where he’s in the hospital afer getting beaten up, telling his girlfriend about how this isn’t the person he thought he was going to be or the life he thought he would have. And, I gotta say, watching it now, it hits home, hard.
Ted Demme directed it, one of the few films he got under his belt before he passed away in 2002, based on a script by Scott Rosenberg (he also wrote the script for High Fidelity). Rosenberg based it on his friends and the small town he grew up in, and oddly enough created the series October Road based around his life AFTER Beautiful Girls and the chilly reception he got from his friends and family about the way he depicted their small town life.
The music is amazing. I already mentioned Neil Diamond, but the tune Beautiful Girl (what else?) by Pete Droge & the Sinners is peppered throughout the film, sort of a psuedo-score I guess, and the song is truly haunting. The Afghan Wigs perform Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe in one short scene (the full version is, of course, on the soundtrack, which also includes Me & Mrs. Jones and Could It Be I’m Falling In Love). There’s a Chris Isaak song that plays as the credits roll, called Graduation Day, that’s extremely poignant and it really is a shame it didn’t feature more prominently in the film.
Going back to Ted Demme for a minute…
This definitely isn’t his best film (I’m sure almost everyone would agree that Blow deserves that title), but it probably is his most personal. Outside of Blow he’s probably best known for his comedic stuff (Life, Who’s the Man? and The Ref), which is just a shame. His other dramatic turn behind the camera was a film called Monument Ave. with Dennis Leary (one of Demme’s closest friends) and it’s pretty darn good. It would have been really interesting to see what he followed Blow with, but sadly, he’s just another example of great talent cut short by bad choices. Demme died from a cocaine induced heart attack in 2002 at age 38 while playing in a celebrity basketball tournament.
So…that’s me rambling about Beautiful Girls. Funny, it’s always the movies nearest and dearest to me that I have the hardest time talking about. I’ve seen it a hundred times and can tell you minute details about the plot and what went on behind the cameras and whatnot, but I end up having a difficult time saying exactly WHY it’s so moving and important to me. In the end though, the movie is a lot like life, love and relationships; what you get out of it depends a lot on what you bring into it.
