4.5 stars out of 5
A couple of quick things:
—You know you’re in trouble when Bubs from The Wire is a major positive influence in your life.
—Maybe Miles Teller should’ve played Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network. He looks more like him than Jesse Eisenberg does. He might look more like Zuckerberg than Zuckerberg does.
And also, this is a fantastic movie.
There is so much that could’ve gone wrong with The Spectacular Now. You’ve got the bad boy/good girl dynamic, with the hot ex-girlfriend tossed in. (Hey jealousy!) You’ve got the parents who just don’t care. How about a cautionary tale about the dangers of alcohol? And it’s from the writers of 500 Days of Summer, which I liked a lot, but was a bit too clever for its own good; it tried a little too hard.
Credit the young leads here, Miles Teller and Shailene Woodley, and the director James Ponsoldt, with deftly avoiding all these potential pitfalls. Teller plays Sutter, a character I don’t recall seeing before. He’s a super-likable prick, a nerd-popular kid, but with an underlying decency. Sutter’s Achilles heel is oh demon alcohol. Sutter drinks a lot. It seemed a little weird to me; I didn’t know anyone in high school who drank remotely as much. (Then again, I didn’t get invited to a lot of parties.) Teller brings so much subtlety to the characterization, showing so many layers. He doesn’t let it devolve into Anthony Michael Hall in Sixteen Candles.
Sutter meets Aimee, portrayed by Shailene Woodley. She was so excellent in The Descendants, another movie that flirted with but totally overcame a possibly clichéd set-up. Woodley once again brings her A game. She is brilliant as the nice girl who can’t believe the popular kid is paying attention to her. Kaitlyn Dever is great as her even dorkier pal (shades of Freaks and Geeks), warning her, and looking out for her—this can’t be as good as it seems.
Sutter and Aimee rub off on each other (and rub up against each other), for better and for worse. And a lot of the tension here comes from waiting to see whose influence will win out.
The supporting cast helps keep the realism extremely high. Jennifer Jason Leigh (!) is Sutter’s tired mom. But instead of being one-dimensional, there’s genuine compassion there. That’s a running theme in the movie. Andre Royo (the aforementioned Bubs) is Sutter’s teacher who doesn’t want to give up on him. Bob Odenkirk (Mr. Show With Bob & David) is Sutter’s boss/father figure. The only scenes that get kind of obvious and heavy-handed involve Sutter’s deadbeat dad. (Spoiler alert: The distance between a tree and a apple which falls from it is not particularly great.) But the remarkably consistent Kyle Chandler prevents him from turning into a cartoon character. And it’s fun to see Chandler, the classic authority figure, play a complete fuck-up.
It’s the sweet ache of life that I really look for in a movie, and The Spectacular Now absolutely brings it. When it was over I had to sit there in the darkened theater for a while and let it sink in. Definitely the best movie I’ve seen so far this year.
Jack Silbert, curator