Writer/director Whit Stillman has only made three movies, but they’re all magnificent. Now, thirteen years since his last release, Stillman is prepping a new film for release. It’s about freaking time.
Stillman is an underappreciated talent in modern cinema. His stylised, genteel dramedies are rarely-acknowledged antecedents to the aesthetically similar work of Wes Anderson. Try to imagine if Woody Allen and Jane Austen had a son, and said son hung out with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Evelyn Waugh in his teenage years. That’s the kind of filmmaker Whit Stillman is.
His dialogue has the mannered singularity of David Mamet’s, but it’s all delivered so politely, I find myself wanting to step into the conversations occuring on screen. His films are filled with old fashioned ideas about group social activity; upward-directed snobbery and how we define happiness in life. They simply ooze cultivated charm.
Stillman’s first film was 1990’s Metropolitan, a minor arthouse hit that enjoyed a multi-year run as my all time favourite movie. A classic example of the subgenre I have come to refer to as “Specious Clique Adoption” (see: a future blog entry), it tells the story of one Tom Townsend (Edward Clements, never to be seen again), a college student of modest means. Throughout the Christmas debutante ball season, Tom becomes acquainted with a group of rich preppy Upper East Side types, whom he charms with his outspoken political views and understated wit.
Most of the film is set at after parties following formal debutante events, where the young cast drink, spar and play strip poker as they navigate the journey into adulthood.
In Stillman’s mind, the film was set in the late 1960s, but he didn’t have the budget to make it period, so it exists in a kind of timeless New York, where the old traditions remain and the idea of ‘society’ still carried some dramatic weight.
It’s a superlatively charming film that gets better with every viewing. It also introduced an awesome actor named Chris Eigeman to the world. Eigeman works steadily, but he’s never broken out as an actor, and it’s a pity. He will be familiar to some people from the short-lived Seinfeld-wannabe It’s Like, You Know or as one of Lorelai’s love interests on Gilmore Girls. He brings a little bit of Stillman to every role he plays. They should cast him in Mad Men.
In the clip below, Eigeman’s Nick responds to a typically grandiloquent statement from his friend Charlie (played with hilarious pomposity by Taylor Nichols):
The acronym discussed above by Nick and Charlie came to be utilised by fans in an informal name for Stillman’s first three films, which are often referred to as the ‘UHB Trilogy’.
Stillman recruited Nichols and Eigeman for his follow-up film, 1994’s Barcelona. Set in the mid 1980s, it’s a more political film that the other two, and builds on Stillman’s experiences as a young American working in Spain, where he encountered much anti-American sentiment. Nichols and Eigeman’s characters have different names to those they played in Metropolitan, but they could almost be the same people.
Barcelona is my least favourite of Stillman’s films, but it’s very much worth watching, and makes for an appropriate finale to the UHB trilogy – even though it’s the second film in the trilogy, it’s chronologically set after Stillman’s most recent film, 1998’s The Last Days of Disco.
Stillman’s broadest success to date (but still criminally underseen), The Last Days of Disco is in many ways the culmination of his unique style. Chris Eigeman returns, but Stillman broke from his tradition of using unknowns by casting the then-nascent starlets Chloe Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale in the leads.
They play Alice and Charlotte, two young college graduates working at a large book publisher in “very early 80s” New York. Their social lives revolve around ‘The Club’, a clear analogue for legendary New York nightclub Studio 54, where they hook-up, break-up and break out on the dance floor. But mainly talk.
Indeed, the dialogue in Disco fires on all cylinders. It brings the playful group banter of Metropolitan into a more emotionally and sexually frank context. And it all seems to occur on some heightened level that gets more intriguing with every viewing.
Sevigny, and especially Beckinsale, have literally never been better, and the way their ‘friendship’ plays out is both hilarious and insightful. Beckinsale delivers quite possibly the greatest portrayal of female-to-female bitchiness ever seen on screen. She really should play more villains.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoCyQcUh7Ug&feature=related
I re-watch The Last Days of Disco every couple of months, and I never get sick of it. The cast is uniformly excellent, the dialogue always pops, and the soundtrack is absolutely kick-ass. The equally cynical and romanticised portrayal of working at a massive publishing house in New York in the early 80s is worth seeing the film for alone.
Characters from both Barcelona and Metropolitan show up in cameos, and several others are name-checked. Taylor Nichols has two cameos – one as his character from Metropolitan, and one as his character from Barcelona. Much the same way Stan Lee did with Marvel Comics in the 1960s, Stillman enhances his films by setting them all in the same universe. It makes for a very rewarding trilogy.
In the commentary on the Criterion Collection edition of Metropolitan, Stillman talks about how most of the actors in his first film struggled to get follow-up work because casting agents presumed they were actual upper crust society kids playing versions of themselves, which only speaks to the authencity of their performances.
In pleasant contrast, many of the actors in The Last Days of Disco went on to do interesting work. Big Love fans will especially get a kick out of the sparring between the polygamy show’s Nicky (Sevigny) and Alby (Matt Ross), who plays a nerdy socialism-loving co-worker of Alice’s here.
In the past decade, Stillman’s name has popped up here and there, most notably as a journalist for The Guardian, covering film. I’ve eagerly awaited news of a new feature, and grown impatient as various projects were mooted and then fell over for various reasons.
But now, he actually has a new film coming out titled Damsels In Distress, and I couldn’t be more excited. It’s not clear yet whether or not the new film is again set in the UHB universe (although it’s highly unlikely I suspect), but the details that have emerged have whet my Whit appetite considerably.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, Greta Gerwig, the charming young actress who was Ben Stiller’s love interest in Greenberg and Natalie Portman’s wry friend in No Strings Attached, plays one of a group of three co-eds at an East Coast college who start an arts program to help depressed students. This leads to the three girls becoming entangled with a group of guys that challenge their friendship and sanity.
It’s an odd plot description, but Stillman’s tend to be. The fact that it’s set in college and involves friendship and romance is all I need to know. Film projects of Stillman’s that failed to come to fruition over the years include one about the Spanish Civil War and another set in Jamaica, so I’m just stoked this film sounds a bit more closer to his early work.
In this Stillman fan’s mind, Gerwig is a perfect fit for his style, as is Adam Brody – probably the biggest name in the cast – still best known for playing cool geek Seth Cohen in The OC. It doesn’t appear that Stillman muse Chris Eigeman is showing up, but I’m not ready to discount a cameo yet.
There is no release date currently set for Damsels In Distress but we will track any significant developments here at Eating Movies.
In the meantime, if you’ve never seen a Whit Stillman film, and like what you’ve read here, go forth to your video store or Fatso queue, and enter the wonderful world of the UHB Trilogy.
