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With the always enjoyable Hugh Grant, “About A Boy” is filled with the usual dosage of English humor that many mainstream American moviegoers find so charming: the dry, self-effacing wit of the ironic Englishman who can’t quite chill himself out completely. Though it is surprisingly less inventive than, say, Adam Sandler’s emotionally stunted frat boy in “Big Daddy”, and equally bereft of real insight, on the surface it has a certain cloying appeal, mainly in its dual voiceover narration, effeminate spiritedness of Nicholas Hoult’s Marcus, and admirable restraint in not bringing Will and Marcus’ mother together as lovers. And “About A Boy” has that aforementioned English wit, so wonderfully alive in Hugh Grant’s expertly inverted grins. Neither profound or original, it aims low and delivers.
But “About A Boy” is more interesting for what it lacks. From the opening scene the theme is adumbrated: “No man is an island”, we are reminded by a game show clue, and it’s obvious the film will culminate in Will’s return to the mainland. However, Will stumbles onto his brave new world literally by accident. He never questions himself, preferring to justify his shallowness with glib affirmations of his emptiness that betray no hint of genuine introspection. Instead, the epiphany comes courtesy of an unexpected and incredibly contrived comic device. The rake he played in “Bridget Jones’ Diary” was much more complex and self-aware, even though he was as one-dimensionally foppish as the Jane Austen villain after which he was modeled. Will, on the other hand, is wholly a cipher. He has no taste, no enthusiasms, no education, no religion, no ideas, no thoughts of any kind, and, most intriguingly for the class-conscious British, though he has money he has no clear membership in the upper class. What Will does have is a decimating wit, but his amusing articulateness only underscores the point that he has nothing to say. His wit is a balloon lingering lightly over a yawning void.
Will suffers from the very thing that so distinguished the other two films culled from Hornby’s scribblings. In “Fever Pitch” and “High Fidelity”, good films both, the protagonists are madly in love with football and pop music, respectively. They are just as likable as Will is here, but they are infinitely more promising because they are clearly passionate lovers, just of things and not people. They are winning because we see that if their energies could be redirected, they might become real romantic heroes for the long-suffering women who stay with them against their better judgment. But Will has no passion for anything, and even his droll, self-deprecating admissions of shallowness fail to charm us into overlooking the fact that he is, irredeemably, a walking, talking nothing. He is indeed an island, but an island devoid of life, barren as a volcanic slope and just as slippery. At least Rob in “High Fidelity” could tell you all about his desert island discs.<p>This might seem to be the point of the film, that Will has a hollowness that he must learn to fill with “real” connections to people, but in fact the void is calculated to serve a different end. Will is a man of the new order in international cinema. His is a featureless soul grafted onto a modish yet unremarkable mannequin built for trans-Atlantic corporate tie-ins. In the past we said our movie heroes had sex appeal. Now they must have export appeal. Minus their accents the players in “About A Boy” could very well be American, following an intriguing trend in recent films that seek both American and British audiences. So far the British have exported their suave leading men (Grant, Pierce Brosnan) while we’ve lobbed them pretentious tomatos (Gwyneth Paltrow and Renee Zellweger). They give us sexual hangups and the King’s English, while we give them straight teeth and Diet Coke. All for the purposes of filling multiplexes on both sides of the pond. This is perhaps a bit cynical, but then again, “About A Boy” is the sort of sentimental, warm-hearted film where a boy and his mother go through a series of nasty emotional traumas including, but not limited to, spousal abandonment, social ostracization, and attempted suicide, only to emerge at the end of the movie blinking in the dawn of the new global consumerism, ready to pop over to McDonald’s for some Super-Sized Quality Time. Eyes red from proud tears and emotional fatigue, Fiona wraps her arms around Marcus and sniffles, “Hey, we can go to McDonald’s some time. Any time.” Pass the tissue, please.
There is more. The tactic Will employs to keep himself an island is that of instant and total retreat whenever it appears that he will be asked to sacrifice his personal freedom. This is obvious enough, and provides the few real laughs to be had. Will’s slowly dawning relief when the first single mom breaks up with him, for instance, is brilliantly played by Grant, all the more so because we feel the intense lack of imagination that leads to his surprise that she, and not he, wants to end the affair. But hidden in the story, unaddressed but clearly there, is Will’s own counter-response to his self-isolating behavior. There is one thing he does to maintain his relations with society, and does well. He spends money. Will is a conspicuous consumer par excellence, and a distinctly international consumer at that. He drives a German car, wears trendy American clothing, and is entertained by American-style British game shows watched on Japanese equipment in an apartment decorated by Swedes. Emotionally disconnected, Will keeps up excellent diplomatic relations with the world through his charge card.
Disturbingly, it is this solution that he attempts to use on misfit Marcus. At first, a new pair of sneakers do the trick (presumably Nikes, of course; halfway in, Marcus suddenly begins wearing a ‘swoosh’ cap). Later, Christmas morning brings a rap album for a little profanity-laced Yuletide cheer, but wait— what’s this? No compact disc player on which to listen to the urban American stylings of Mystikal? Samsung or G.E.— uh, Will, has thoughtfully provided a CD walkman. If only he could wear the latest American clothes, listen to the latest American music, and interact with others using American gestures such as the high five, how much better off Marcus’ life would be! And sure enough, it isn’t long before Mystikal helps him bag the woman of his dreams (an older punk rock girl with whom he makes a most improbable match, resembling as he does an effete little Vulcan— is there a reason he keeps his ears hidden?). At the end of the movie, when he has finally become a well-adjusted member of consumer society— ‘cool’, if you like— we find Marcus shorn of his hair, which had been shaggy and girlish, and dressed not in his usual neo-hippie sunshine garb (rainbows knitted into floppy cardigans, snot-encrusted corduroys, etc.) but in the drab monotones of fashionable teenage attire. The message is clear. Marcus’ problem, like Will’s, is one of maladjustment, a problem easily solved with money. Marcus may very well be a “special” kid raised by an idealistic mother who has spent a lifetime living by such laughable ideas as human rights and vegetarianism, but never mind all that uncommercial stuff. Marcus just needs a good shopping spree so he can look like everyone else. The film should have been called “The World According To Gap”.
It is precisely this soulless consumerism that Mary Harron skewered so effectively in her adaptation of a much less good-natured novel, Bret Easton Ellis’ “American Pyscho”. The parallels between Will and Patrick Bateman are strong, although Will is no murderer, of course. He doesn’t have the dynamic imaginative life that marked Patrick Bates, a Walter Mitty with a chainsaw. But both characters' relationship to the world is defined by what he can buy. Each is a human nullity whose outward—that is, only—identity is nothing more than a mirror reflection of the consumer culture in which he is immersed. Whereas Harron and Ellis saw this terrifying condition of modern alienation and felt an overwhelming compulsion, perhaps even a civic duty, to create a satire brutal enough to meet the issue head-on, the makers of “About A Boy” saw the same thing and turned it into a goofy coming-of-age tale in which shallowness is a vice about as objectionable—and as easily cured—as cellulite or snoring. There is simply no recognition that there is anything wrong with Will on a deeper level than typical male immaturity. They present a work of art whose subject and form embody the listless acceptance of a ubiquitously commercialized world, yet somehow refuse the obvious mandate to comment on it. “About A Boy” is as shallow as the man we are supposed to laugh at. |
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