Reviewing Jane: If I Loved You Less, I Might Be Able To Talk About It More

In which we review (almost) every film adapted from or inspired by the works of Jane Austen, as I read through her extended bibliography for the first time. This review is a massive expansion of a frankly terrible mini-review I wrote back in November 2013.

Year: 1995

Director: Amy Heckerling

Cast: Alicia Silverstone, Stacey Dash, Brittany Murphy

Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Jane Austen's work as a whole is almost perfectly designed to be translated into a high school setting. The rigid class strata, overwhelming obsession with pairing off into romantic couples, and razor-sharp sarcasm of her novels is if anything more suited to the modern teen movie than the period piece. It's such an obvious thing to do that it took a genius to recognize it, and that genius was none other than Amy Heckerling, one of the only commercially successful female filmmakers to come out of the 80's (her debut Fast Times at Ridgemont High was a massively profitable, zeitgeist-defining hit).

When approached to write a high school movie, Heckerling reflected back on the novel Emma, which she remembered enjoying at that age. And thus, by combining a centuries-old plot structure with modern teen fashion and lingo, Clueless was born, jamming yet another massively profitable, zeitgeist-defining hit into that C.V. just for good measure.

It was a movie so iconic, it convinced Stacey Dash she could go ahead and keep on pretending that the world loves her and her every thought.

So, here we go. A decade before Mean Girls, Cher Horowitz (Alicia Silverstone) rules the campus with her matching plaid ensembles and boxy cell phone. Along with her friend Dionne (Stacey Dash), she matchmakes her way into better grades by keeping her depressed debate teacher happy, and she's more than willing to use her talents to mold crude new girl Tai (Brittany Murphy) into the perfect popular princess.

Together they navigate a tangled web of love involving the popular boy Elton (Jeremy Sisto), the loser stoner Travis (Breckin Meyer), the ostentatiously retro Christian (Justin Walker), Dionne's lusty boyfriend Murray (Donald Faison), and Cher's preachy, college-aged stepbrother Josh (Paul Rudd). If Cher hadn't meddled, it would probably be a lot less complicated, but also a lot less fun!

And thanks to her, the rest of the world who HADN'T seen Halloween 6 got to meet Paul Rudd.

The ways that Emma's plot corresponds to the beats of Clueless are frankly remarkable. Sure, it's all slathered with a heaping helping of dated hairstyles, slang, pop tunes, and brown lipstick that only increase the film's hilarity as time goes by, but there are certain scenes that are practically verbatim (especially the scene where Cher is insulted she wasn't invited to a party she didn't particularly want to go to, or where Tai decides to burn her last remembrances of Elton).

This is why it absolutely works as a comedy, because that's the exact element it isolates from Jane Austen's romance of manners and manors. I have constantly been frustrated by the way that the straight Austen adaptations rub out her idiosyncratic sarcasm as if it were a dirty thing to be ignored in the face of literary merit. But Clueless is the exact opposite, removing everything but the humorous character dynamics much to its benefit.

Of course, it does also naturally inherit one of Emma's flaws: Tai (just like her character analogue Harriet Smith) holds a major role, but shrinks into the background come the third act and is given a tossed-off conclusion without really completing an arc of any kind. But that's a small price to pay for one of the purest adaptations of Austen's tone we've ever gotten.

Somehow, I think she would approve.

Clueless is hilarious at all times, but it's perhaps most hilarious if you've ever lived in Los Angeles. Regional humor always gets me, but Amy Heckerling manages to toe a very delicate line between referencing very specific places and feelings, yet still making it universal. The iconic learner's permit freeway scene and the followup line "Getting off the freeway makes you realize how important life is," are freaking hysterical if you grew up terrified of navigating the labyrinthine L.A. freeway system, but yet they also strike at a truth that will resonate with anyone who's lived through high school. The way teenage emotions are so vivid and bold that they can make mountains out of the tiniest, most mundane molehills is effortlessly encapsulated in this funny, relatable, endearingly earnest line.

Heckerling may have been the one to strike gold here, but Alicia Silverstone is an all-important piece of this puzzle. One of the toughest things about reading Emma is watching the main character make so many mistakes. She's a supremely flawed heroine: venal, self-impressed, and wearingly meddlesome. That is what makes her interesting as a protagonist, but you don't always want to spend time with her. Silverstone finds the perfect balance here, knowing full well that Cher is an airheaded twit but humanizing her just enough that you can see her potential to be an actual good person and are always willing to follow her into the depths of her comically terrible decisions.

The rest of the ensemble is generally strong too, of course (only Stacey Dash is a major miss; her one approach to line reading is "shrill and catty"), but Silverstone is obviously the Queen Bee. Clueless just wouldn't work without her, and Clueless works tremendously well. In the terrifyingly vast landscape of 90's teen movies, this is one that truly deserves its status on the A-list, and that's not nostalgia speaking. I was one year old when this movie came out, so the fact that it still strikes a chord speaks to its generous and loving approach to the teen human condition.

TL;DR: Clueless is a delectable teen comedy only made better by its literary source material.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 984

Other Films Based on Emma

Clueless (Heckerling, 1995)
Emma (McGrath, 1996)
Emma (Lawrence, 1996)
Aisha (Ojha, 2010)
Emma. (de Wilde, 2020)

Popcorn Kernels: The Fairer Sexploitation

In which we present mini reviews of two female-directed entries in stereotypically male-directed genres.

American Psycho (For our Scream 101 episode about this very film, click here.)

Year: 2000

Director: Mary Harron

Cast: Christian Bale, Jared Leto, Reese Witherspoon

Run Time:1 hour 42 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A pent-up Wall Street VP lashes out in a variety of homicidal ways.

American Psycho is a crazy film. One of the few generally accepted horror classics that I hadn’t seen, it defied my expectations at every turn. Based on the controversial Bret Easton Ellis novel that divided critics between viewing it as a dressed-up misogynist tract or a razor-sharp satire, the film was directed by – of all species – a woman. In case you’ve never read this blog before, let me make it very clear that this puts me firmly in the movie’s camp pretty much from the get-go. As far as I can figure it, this is the only popularly regarded staple horror film to have a woman behind the camera (I’m not counting The Babadook, which is far too new to qualify as a classic, as much as I may love it. And I’m certainly not counting Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare).

And how does having a female director affect the horror and humor of American Psycho? Not one whit. Well, maybe we linger a little longer on a showering Christian Bale, but you ain’t catching me complaining there. Other than that, it’s a perfectly sharp yuppie satire for people who liked Fight Club a little too much.

Perfectly skewering the venal, acquisitive nature of Reaganomics-fueled Wall Streeters who are all shallow, greedy, and interchangeable, American Psycho depicts the meltdown of a single individual: Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman – in this massive horde. As he strains to rein in his homicidal outburst, his peers ignore him entirely, even when he publicly confesses to his many sins. This is best encapsulated in a key scene where Bateman trundles a body into the trunk of a cab and a passing coworker coos over the trendy duffel bag he’s using to perform the deed. This is a world where you can be a murderer or, in fact, be murdered yourself, and you won’t make the slightest dent in the indestructibly grinding clockwork of capitalism.

It sounds intense, and it is. But it’s also pitch-black hilarious humor so grim that even the folks on the gallows might find it distasteful. Patrick Bateman is a man who murders people who can nab reservations at better restaurants than he can, discussing the finer points of Huey Lewis and the News while zipping up a plastic poncho to protect his designer suit from stains. Patrick Bateman is a man who trembles at the mere sight of  trendy business card, who has a stroke of panic when an opponent’s apartment is nicer than his. His viewpoints and motivations are so pointlessly inane that you can’t help but laugh, even as you cringe at the thought that the world around him allows him to get away with his crimes.

The only thing stopping American Psycho from being a flat-out black comedy masterpiece is a tendency toward repetition in the second act. Every scene follows a very precise structure, hobbling its ability to shock. A glorious ATM scene that simultaneously implies that Money is God and kicks the film’s craziest sequence into gear provides the jolt that the system needs, but the film enters a holding pattern for a little too long to preserve my patience. But we can’t all be perfect. American Psycho is a clever, superb little lick that’s just as keen to reference The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as Ivana Trump. I love that, even if it houses a half hour that falls short of being a masterpiece.

Rating: 7/10

Fast Times at Ridgemont High

Year: 1982

Director: Amy Heckerling

Cast: Sean Penn, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Judge Reinhold

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

The teens at Ridgemont High really love bangin’.

Another entry in an exploitation genre secretly helmed by a woman, Fast Times at Ridgemont High definitely wears its gender on its sleeve, at least a teensy bit more. Despite its unfair proportion of bare breasts (a male full frontal scene was excised by the ever-progressive MPAA), Ridgemont High is first and foremost a story of a young woman discovering her sexuality and learning what she wants from men. Of course, this is a rote toss-up between a smooth talking stud and a namby pamby Nice Guy, but this was 1982. Let’s not expect too much.

This young woman, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh in the role that made her a star (though she showed great promise in the previous year’s Eyes of a Stranger), is a sexually active teenager treated with a tremendous amount of respect. Her sexual misadventures are never presented as shameful, and an abortion scene late in the film is presented as a natural – if difficult – part of life, used to further Ridgemont High’s sweetest relationship, between Leigh and her ne’er do-well brother Judge Reinhold.

Of course, she’s the only character given anything even remotely resembling a story arc. The movie around her is a haphazard explosion of random, occasionally comic vignettes following stoners, football players, cool guts, and nerds through their daily lives. Each fragmented piece is part of a vast mosaic, depicting nothing in particular. It’s vexing, and the tendency to showcase overlong, almost actively unfunny sequences (an imaginary surfing championship interview, an enraged football player winning a game) is damning. To be fair, I have the personal bias that Sean Penn’s stoner drawl and Robert Romanus’ droning deadpan rub me exactly the wrong way, like a sandpaper suit.

This total disconnection from the concept of “story” or “character” is intensely frustrating and the movie’s habit of poor continuity editing only highlights how scraped-together the overarching plot feels. Even Phoebe Cates’ iconic bikini scene suffers from – frankly – a dreadful botch-job on the part of the splicer. This is less like cutting a movie and more like cutting the cheese (Hey! Rimshot!).

Of course, the “time in a bottle” aspect of Ridgemont High does much to soothe any wounds it may have caused. With a pitch perfect soundtrack of 80’s hits that have actually aged terrifically (Jackson Browne, The Go-Go’s, The Cars… This is a synthcrap-free zone) and a horde of future stars (joining Penn and Leigh are Forest Whitaker, Nicolas Cage, and horror icons Amanda Wyss – Freddy Krueger’s first victim in A Nightmare on Elm Street – and Kelli Maroney, who would eventually return to the Sherman Oaks Galleria where this film was shot four years later in Chopping Mall), Fast Times at Ridgemont High is a dreamy time capsule of days gone by.

It might not be a perfect high school sex romp, but it’s decently funny and occasionally sweet. I can make do with that while jamming to “We Got the Beat.”

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1155
Reviews In This Series
American Psycho (Harron, 2000)
American Psycho 2: All-American Girl (Freeman, 2002)