Ghost World (2001). The dream of every high schooler, to merely graduate, is the drab starting point for the journey into the real world for our two protags. Unfortunately the real world sucks more than high school. This is a tale that examines the creation of an artificial facade of personality in order to stave off the loneliness of eccentricity. Being true to the self might look good on paper, but its main contribution to our lives appears to help keep the weekly planner ink free. Sadly, this gem of a flick hits its mark in the truth of Western civilization. On the bright side, this film has so much fun making light of humanity that its bitter bullet is thoroughly sweetened.
Thora Birch steals the show amongst a throng full of wonderful performances. Her refusal to hold back her caustic opinions is delightfully entertaining, but her character is so painfully authentic, her tongue so biting, that it is hard to imagine her not becoming a nasty old cat lady that is the terror of her favorite haunts. Scarlett Johansson's character is equally believable, though it is unimaginable that at such a young age anyone could capture such a villainous sense of depression and then express it with piercing aplomb. Steve Buscemi is equally delightful, his role almost glamorizing the quirky dork with a sentimentality such that we completely understand how Thora's character could almost canonize the fuel of his sadness. The other characters are a genius collection of clones that we all end up hanging out with and eccentric types that we keep at a social distance but secretly admire.
Director Terry Zwigoff takes this script from a comic and weaves it into a highly entertaining dark comedy with a message that neither criticizes the hopelessness of conformation nor offers any instant solutions. Instead, ours is a world where the cultural foundation always exists in our memories but is ever elusive in the present moment, leaving us empty on the one hand or lonely on the other. The ending, so simple that it tempts us to cry foul, poignantly leaves us filled with the clear message that either way, our lives or our spirits are doomed to suffer invisibility.
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Fate is my mistress, mother of the cruel abomination that is hope.
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