Metropolitan

I was prepared to hate this movie, even though or because I was one of the extras in it. Most of us were dazed by the mere fact that we were picked for background because we apparently looked upscale, since most of us were sporadically employed actors living in creepy lofts with too many unregistered roommates, creepier basement illegal sublets, and (in my case) an all-female SRO populated equally by out-of-town career girls and old biddies on pension, many of whom were well along the process of losing their marbles. Since I was also being stalked by a genuine upper-class twit at the time of shooting, I had little sympathy for the characters of a project that I assumed (like many other extras) was a student film helmed by a trust baby.

When the film came out, it upended all these expectations. I *knew* these characters: the outsider who doesn't know if his longing to fit in means he's selling out, the snotty guy who's actually kind of sweet, the "nice" girl who's never properly appreciated, and the cool girl who takes her power for granted. Even the way the girls try to support shy Audrey over slinky interloper Serena is true to type. They may be stereotypes, but you've met them too, regardless of your socio-economic level. The pseudo-intellectual dialogue didn't make them less sympathetic, it made them more so--they are *desperate* to impress. Well who, at that age, isn't? Some people do it with clothes or athletic achievements: these kids do it with words. As for the pony-tailed possible sociopath, he reminded me painfully of my stalker--now I knew that these jerks who think they can get away with anything don't just target little peasants like me. They endanger their own class too.

Everything that people have criticized in this film, the stilted delivery, the awkwardness, is what makes it wonderful. It captures perfectly the struggle to be accepted. You could point out that Stillman does a certain amount of this in "Barcelona" and "Disco" also, but then do we ever really outgrow the need to be accepted? Only the settings change.

While every other social and ethnic group is deemed off-limits to filmmakers, one remains a target for cheap laughs: Preppies. From "Animal House" and "Caddyshack" ("the slobs versus the snobs") to John Hughes and Savage Steve Holland, to more serious fare like "Six Degrees Of Separation," filmmakers have availed themselves of this last group of people they can target with a broad brush of easy scorn.

Which is one reason why Whit Stillman's debut film, "Metropolitan," is so refreshing. By taking a more sympathetic, inside look at a group of affluent East Side Manhattanites home from college, Stillman makes a case for an underlying core of goodness beneath the Thurston-and-Lovey veneers.

Making the foray into their world for us is Tom Townsend (Edward Clements), literally and figuratively a red-headed stepchild in this world of privilege, having little money (his big secret, which he guards carefully with the help of mass transit, is that he lives on the West Side) and a defensiveness about his place in high society he manifests by adopting the stance of a disapproving socialist, though in reality he is more than a little too shallow to feel anything that deeply.

The truth of Townsend is immediately obvious to members of an upscale social set that call themselves the Sally Fowler Rat Pack, but they take him in anyway because he knows their world and seems like a good audience. Running the group is Nick Smith, who you can call a snob, as well as sexist, obnoxious, and of late, rather weird. Just don't call him tiresome, or you'll get an argument.

Nick is also a good guy beneath his preppie bluster, a fellow who champions Tom and breaks down Tom's highminded resistance to joining their circle with snarky logic ("You'd rather stay at home and worry about the less fortunate, but has it ever occurred to you you ARE the less fortunate?") He also has real values he honors, sometimes at no small risk to his nose. Chris Eigeman plays him with such panache you understand why Stillman kept using him in his movies; Eigeman's delivery is a thing of wonder, especially with lines that sound a mite too polished for instant expression. He can speak of his stepmother as "a woman of untrammeled malevolence" and make it sound like the most natural phrase in the world.

Another familiar face from Stillman's movies is Taylor Nichols, who plays Charlie Black, who when we first see him is stumbling through an explanation of why he believes in God and you do, too, even if you don't know it, and later on offers his own alternative definition of the preppie elite as the Urban Haute Bourgeoisie, i.e. the UHB. "Is our language so impoverished that we have to resort to acronyms of French phrases?" a woman asks.

Charlie's more of a preppie snob in his dislike for Tom, though as Tom trifles mildly with the affections of a woman in their circle, Audrey Rouget (Carolyn Farina), we understand Charlie's attitude. The movie is most fun as a platform for Eigeman and Nichols' pithy one-liners, and there are many great ones, but the complex relationship between Audrey and Tom is what gives the movie its plot and much of its interest.

It's bizarre how Clements and Farina vanished from the movie scene right after making their accomplished twin debuts. Farina, with her fetching dark eyes and wry, timid smile reminds one of Molly Ringwald at her pre-"Pretty In Pink" peak. Clements is good as a character that guards himself closely, with a scholarly front that falls apart fast.

Pressed on why he doesn't like Jane Austen's "Mansfield Park," Tom admits he hasn't read it, just that he doesn't like it from reading critical essays about it by Lionel Trilling: "I don't read novels. I prefer good literary criticism - that way you get both the novelists' ideas and the critics' thinking." "Metropolitan" is full of quotes like that, the product of young people who think they know more than they do but aren't quite bad beneath their smugness. It's not a film of great depth or revelation; Stillman isn't so interested in dissecting his creations as he is in giving them room to express their ideas, goofy and grand. His first film does exactly that, pulling off the twin feat of having cinematic fun and giving a preppie an even break.

Whit Stillman managed to make a talky movie about a bunch of pampered, privileged, opinionated college students running around in the most elite New York society, and not make me hate all of them.

That really is a testament to the tone Stillman is able to strike, because I should have found these people to be intolerable. Instead, I found them weirdly endearing, even the cockiest of them, because they seem so fragile and vulnerable underneath their rich swankiness. These are a bunch of kids who have been so isolated from the real world that all they know how to do is act like their parents, which means they're all 20 going on 50. Seriously, they wear suits and dresses all the time and go to cocktail parties where they dance the fox trot. And the movie's saving grace is that they all seem to know to one degree or another that they're not entirely ready for the big world out there, and they cling to their social group because they're scared of the alternative. This makes them very human. After all, aren't we all, no matter our specific circumstances, just trying to do the best we can with what we're given?

"Metropolitan" brought Stillman a Best Original Screenplay Oscar nomination in 1990.

Grade: B+

Brilliantly written. Stillman's first in his trilogy, this sets the standard for the offbeat banter and dialogue of the two films that followed, "Barcelona," and "The Last Days of Disco." Surprisingly great acting, I think, as well--from a cast of, at the time at least, relative no names. As talkfests go, this is a keeper.

This film is a brilliant talkfest, with the decline of the New York WASP social setting a major point. It's set on a couple weeks during the Christmas season, with Tom Townsend being invited to a party, much by chance, by Nick and his friends. He doesn't "belong", but everyone likes him, some more than others. He does seem rather odd, with his socialist ideas, and his anti-party attitude. What develops is an odd relationship between Tom and Nick, as well as between Tom and a girl named Audrey.

Christopher Eigmann, as Nick, is a stand out in this cast. He is cynical, pessimistic, yet probably the smartest one in the group. He spouts of dialogue with conviction and care.

What makes this film work is the slight sadness we feel at the disintegration of this class, without having ever been part of it.

Some people will find it boring. It doesn't have the prerequisite number of explosions for the action fans, and not much does happen. But the way this film is executed, where dialogue is the key, makes this film one of the ten best of 1990.