Metroland
Rated R
Now showing
Metroland is a perfectly fine film about two perfectly
fine people who live perfectly fine lives...and that's the
problem. Adapted from Julian Barnes' novel and directed by
Philip Saville, Metroland attempts to study a man as
he slides into conventional family life and asks whether this
outward normalcy is soulful or soul-sucking. It challenges
the popular notion that freedom is better than conformity,
and it shows that neither is as simple as it seems. We meet
some pleasing characters, hear some intelligent dialogue and
get to watch some sensitive sex scenes. We watch, think a
little and are left perfectly content...sort of.
The film takes place in 1977 in the town of Eastwood, England.
Residents call it "Metroland," however, because everyone
commutes to work via the subway, the Metropolitan. Living
in a warm, sweet, smelling-of-cookies home are Chris (Christian
Bale) and his lovely wife, Marion (Emily Watson). The two
make an attractive young couple. They go grocery shopping,
eat Ritz crackers and have a baby daughter named Anna. To
the outside world, they seem to be a typical, happy, perfect
couple. They are easing into their 30s with the help of
Chris' nice job as an ad-agency photographer and Marion's
pleasing flower and vegetable garden. Inside, they feel
almost as idyllic as they seem externally, but like most
people leaving the wiles of youth, they are subtly troubled
and wistful--so wistful it hurts.
Along comes Toni (Lee Ross), Chris' oldest and best friend.
Toni lives a freewheeling bachelorhood, going to punk clubs
and swinger parties. He earns his money teaching English
abroad, while attempting to be a poet and screwing his young
students. Opposing everything Chris has supposedly bought
into, Toni all but pisses in Marion's nice vegetable garden
and riles Chris with memories of literally and figuratively
spitting on the "bourgeoisie dormitories" of Eastwood. Taunting
Chris with their former value systems, Toni helps bring
back memories of Paris during the late 1960s, when Chris
thought he would become a famous artistic photographer and
frolicked with his foxy Parisian girlfriend who loved to
have sex, particularly in the afternoon with the lights
on. Chris' memories are the center of this picture, and
their relevance hammers across the picture's main point:
panic. Or as Chris explains to Marion, panic over having
nothing to panic about, panic over not living up to the
aspirations of youth.
This is an interesting but all-too-familiar theme, and
it gives Metroland a tired flavor that leaves one
a little depressed about having to sit through another coming-of-middle-age
story. But this same depressing tone gives the film an odd,
understated power. This story is not simply about the conventional
notion of the loss of youth, a youth revisited in flashback
sequences, but about Chris' inability to recapture this
youth as he enters his 30s. The best example is a scene
where Chris is tempted to cheat on Marion at Toni's party.
He checks out a beautiful woman and gets her into bed but
finds it a jarring, embarrassing experience. She is so forthright
about what they are going to do--stripping off her clothes
and not caring that he is married--that there is no mystery.
It only makes Chris' reminiscences of Paris all the more
painful. His French girlfriend was also up front and into
sex, but those times were so much more innocent--and, more
importantly, he was a different man. Her availability was
sweet, fresh and sexy, while the party girl's behavior is
boorishly unromantic. In the past, this type of exchange
may have been exciting; now it signals middle-age desperation.
Though not as complex as Ang Lee's similarly themed The
Ice Storm, Metroland still manages to deflate
the clichéd notion of the swingin' '70s. Like Sigourney
Weaver's sex kitten in The Ice Storm, Toni pretends
to love his free, swingin' life, but underneath the selfish
exterior is someone who really wants to be cared about.
Unfortunately, the movie does little with his character,
and we don't care about him. Ross is almost too well cast
as Toni--he's so drearily pretentious and poetic that we
can't imagine why Chris would even hang out with him. Still,
his character is almost a cipher; this film is all about
Christian Bale and his nice, crooked smile.
The problem is that neither man can compete with Marion.
It's too bad she gets so little camera time, because she
burns up the screen with understated eloquence. Playing
the nice, well-balanced hausfrau, Watson again shows us
why she is one of the most interesting actresses around.
She plays Marion exactly as she should: supportive yet mildly
unpredictable. Watson has shown she can be "challenging"
or weird in Breaking the Waves and Hilary and
Jackie, but here she accomplishes something more difficult:
She's normal without being boring. Elizabeth Taylor once
said that even though her tough roles (Who's Afraid of
Virginia Woolf? for instance) gave her critical acclaim
and deemed her an accomplished actress, they were really
the easiest ones. To her, it was harder to be normal on
screen.
The same idea applies to film in general. Metroland
tackles situations and angst we've seen hundreds of times,
and yet it never becomes boring. It contains a lingering
idiosyncratic tension. Do we learn anything new? Not really.
We are just reminded that we all grow old and out of the
ways of our youth. How perfectly depressing.
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Willamette Week | originally
published May 5, 1999
|
