Children are children, whether they’re rich or poor, well-educated or otherwise, and though a regular diet of books often points to a cultivated personality, it is never a surefire sign of genuine depth; especially when, again, you’re only a child, and the issues of serious literature—of life, as it happens—must more often than not be mediated to you through more experienced interpreters.
Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan is about a group of people on the cusp of young adulthood, who are mired in the preppie culture of Manhattan circa the late 1980s—though Stillman makes it vague enough to accommodate much of the early-to-mid 20th century, too. They have all gone to the best schools, have read a precocious amount of literature and philosophy, and are the scions of a class one of them coins the “urban haute bourgeoise” (or the “UHB” for short), an extraordinarily privileged slice of the population just enough removed from the highest echelons of the wealthy and powerful to afford them a faint measure of ironic self-awareness regarding their own position on the hierarchy.
Though it is a high enough level of social standing for most viewers to feel alienated from these characters’ situation(s), I’d wager, and for many of those same viewers to denigrate Stillman’s script as too uneventful, too meandering, or too involved in its snobbish witticisms to develop a genuinely interesting plot.
But Metropolitan is not the kind of film where too much has to happen, since it is primarily concerned with a time in these characters’ lives when balls, dinner parties, flighty sidewalk conversations and basic teenage gossip is of tantamount importance. That they read Regency-era novels and the writings of Fourier, and tune into the televised International Debutante Ball, is simply a matter of their circumstances; what matters, artistically, is how they hide their wants and insecurities behind the veneer of sophistication, or how they expose their own naïveté by acting older than they actually are, which is how young people from all sorts of socioeconomic backgrounds behave.
Stillman’s dialogue moves with the dynamism of lived experience, but even if one did not know that the writer-director grew up in/around the same milieu—his father was a classmate and eventual political ally of John F. Kennedy, and he went to a private all-boy’s school in New York before attending Harvard—as the one depicted, it is hard to deny its wittily literate charm; even if many of the name-drops fly over one’s head, much of the humor still sticks, since you don’t have to read high-level literature to know when someone is talking out their ass about it.
Take the running bit of Tom Townsend’s mini-feud with Audrey Rouget over the fiction of Jane Austen. Townsend, similarly educated as the group locally known as the Sally Fowler Rat Pack (with Dylan Hundley as Ms. Fowler), but of comparatively “limited resources,” takes great pains to distinguish himself as very learned, and even philosophically opposed to the lifestyle of his newfound friend group—though it ought to be clear that he’s really just embarrassed about his West Side apartment, which he shares with his divorced mother, and the fact that he has to rent a tuxedo in order to hang at the same parties as these folks.
So he starts talking to the sweet, softspoken Audrey, who is very smitten with him, and who sees his social awkwardness as mystique whilst laboring hard to ignore the massive torch he carries for Serena Slocum (Ellia Thompson), a popular heart-breaker who attended the same boarding school as Audrey and some of the other girls in the Rat Pack.
She adores Jane Austen, particularly her Mansfield Park, but during one of the many pseudo-intellectual conversations these characters have, Tom won’t have any of it:
TOM: Mansfield Park? You’ve gotta be kidding!
AUDREY: (confused) No…
TOM: But it’s a notoriously bad book. Even Lionel Trilling, one of her greatest admirers, thought that.
AUDREY: Well if Lionel Trilling thought that, he’s an idiot.
TOM: (scoffing) The whole story revolves around, what, the immorality of a group of young people putting on a play?
AUDREY: In the context of the novel, it makes perfect sense.
TOM: But the context of the novel, and nearly everything that Jane Austen wrote, is near ridiculous from today’s perspective.
AUDREY: Has it ever occurred to you that today, looked at from Jane Austen’s perspective, would look even worse?
Later on, when Audrey finally gets a hold of some Trilling, they continue to spar, and it is revealed that Tom hasn’t actually read Mansfield Park—nor any Austen at all, for that matter—much to Audrey’s bafflement. “You don’t have to have read a book to have an opinion on it,” Tom says, confidently, stupidly. “I haven’t read the Bible, either.”
It is funny because bookish boobs like Tom unfortunately do exist—for I too, sadly, have expressed opinions about works of art that I never actually read or watched, too trusting in the claims of critics I admired, and too eager to toss out a hot take in the guise of authority; and it also nicely accords with the overall atmosphere of Metropolitan in that Tom’s gullible reception of Trilling parallels the Rat Pack’s imitation of their parents’ lifestyle(s), and that of their parents’ parents, etc. because it is all they know, and what gives them identity, despite how clearly passé such activities are, even to them. For as self-aware and “above it all” these young people like to consider themselves, they are all, at the end of the day, helplessly compelled by that same authority of the prior, of what older generations want for/from them, however sclerotic.
This sense of outmodedness that some of the characters harp on about—most notably Charlie (Taylor Nichols), the stammering sociologist of the group, who rattles off facts about the fading way of life of what he dubs the “UHB”; and Nick Smith, the Rat Pack’s mischievously cynical raconteur, and anthropologist to Charlie’s sociologist, who takes Tom under his wing—gives Metropolitan a tinge of the elegiac. Although Stillman does skewer when and where it is comedically appropriate, the film nevertheless bears a sentimental fondness for late Manhattan nights spent in evening wear at your friend’s parent’s Upper East Side apartment, escorting each other to fancy balls right before you head back to the Ivy League or spend a few months at your summer home in Connecticut; or fly to France for a spell, because why the hell not?
Does this performative ostentation (even Tom’s “limitations” are buoyed by a trust fund) outright kill the film? No, not really, for despite the glamor, the emotional core of Metropolitan is more about forming an unlikely friendship with a group of people only for that friendship to, for a variety of reasons, ultimately wither; and more pointedly, falling head over heels for someone who won’t give you the time of day only to realize later on that the person you should have focused on was right under your nose the whole time.
Is it groundbreaking? Clearly not. Is Metropolitan, for all its cleverness and well-judged admixture of emotion, pretty lightweight when compared to other dialogue-driven dramadies of a similar nature (Woody Allen being the prime exemplar, here)? Definitely, though for a feature directorial debut, it is quite solid, and by virtue of its very slightness, fortunately does not commit many of the excess-related errors beginning filmmakers are prone to in their eagerness to impress.
And the film would be dead in the water were it not for its cast, who ably bring Stillman’s dialogue to life despite its difficulties. The trick is to convince the audience that, yes, people actually do talk like this (or did, at any rate) and to somehow retain a sense of vulnerability behind all that posturing, verbal or otherwise. Edward Clements as Tom is serviceable, though he is very much upstaged by Christopher Eigeman’s Nick, an asshole who knows he is an asshole (which might be the worst kind) though Stillman does well to round him out with some potentially redeeming qualities, particularly when it comes to roasting the blue-blooded Rick Von Sloneker (Will Kempe). Many of the film’s best lines come courtesy of Eigeman’s devilish delivery.
But the central performance has to be Carolyn Farina as Audrey, for she is certainly the most “likable” of the Rat Pack, being its resident ingenue, and has the nuanced job of fleshing out a character who does a lot of clichéd moping about over a love interest as stolid as Tom Townsend. Though one is dumbfounded by her continual interest in him, one never disbelieves her tears when she is wounded by a stray comment of Tom’s, or the hilariously nonplussed look she displays when he regurgitates some pretentious claim. And when she expresses uncertain hope about her prospects, or fixes Tom’s coat collar when they stand on the beach, near film’s end, it serves as a good reminder of how much mere earnestness can ground what is otherwise so taken in by decadence.
The ending, with three of the Rat Pack castoffs walking down the street of a seaside town, hitchhiking in vain, is a weak ending (which not even Stillman can deny) but it is, at the same time, somewhat appropriate. After all, don’t so many of life’s episodes terminate in this way? All those nights of amusement and intimations, immersed in the he-said-she-said of adolescence, the overwhelming feeling that times like these won’t ever end—and yet, unexpectedly, they do end, and with the disenchantment so characteristic of the discovery that some people don’t like you the way that you like them, that growing up often means getting turned down, and everything eventually just gets so…well, tiresome.
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