SCOTT PILGRIM vs. THE WORLD! (A Review)
Screened @ The Ritz Five, Thursday, July 29th.
Ya know – it’s ok if you don’t get this one. It really wasn’t made for you. That seems like the best response to anyone who files out of Edgar Wright’s latest film with a look of perplexed annoyance on their face.
Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World has a very specific audience. It limits audience understanding though an overwhelming assault of visual, textual and audio clues largely drawn from the soup of GenY popular culture. Wright’s previous films all played on the tropes of genre to tell their story but also had a solid enough through line and enough tertiary comedy to allow the specifically uninitiated to revel in the broader communal fun. With Pilgrim, he’s communicating in a more insular way and places the onus squarely on the audience to show up with their baggage and deconstruct a rapid fire torrent of semiotic clues.
It’s obvious that pacing has a lot to do with the insular nature of the film as well. The speed at which the narrative is propelled forward is unlike anything Wright’s done before. With apologies to Canada, the tone of Pilgrim is much more Japanese/American. This is a significant departure from the source material which unfolded over six volumes with a story that was able to breathe in quite a few panels of black bordered flashbacks and washed out alternate realities. What it does draw from the comic source in, well, comic style. The FX laden action scenes and quick cutting musical numbers not only contain the sensibilities of the source but also a good deal of the overlaid visual communication – though used in a more ironic fashion now that they’ve made the jump to a moving picture, inviting another layer of context and thus avenues for decoding. For those looking for a well developed characters though, the kind so prominent in Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, you may be turned off by this film. In keeping with the visual and auditory shorthand, the characters also tend to be well known archetypes. They are mere symbols, and you don’t really have to get a deep sense of them to get what you need to out of the film.
So now a bit about the flick… Absurdist at its very core, Pilgrim is a nerd fantasy - not some goofy-ass Middle Earth troll crap, but an idealized life in the real world, with some super-powers. Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) is an average self-centered kid living in this FanToronto. He (like everyone else in fantasy world) is in a band, hangs out at the most awesome clubs, wears interesting clothing an knows everyone. He’s 23, dating a 17 year old private school girl (Knives Chau, played by Ellen Wong) and, ya know, just going with the flow. Oh, and he’s poor. He lives in a small apartment with Wallace Wells (Kieran Culkin) where they share a single mattress on the floor. Wallace is sardonic. Also gay. One day Scott meets Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) – the most awesome girl in the world (she has purple hair – for at least 25 minutes). He falls hard for her but there’s one problem. She has a LEAGUE OF SEVEN EVIL EXES that insist on controlling the future of her love life. In order for Scott to find piece, he has to defeat them. This happens in a series of epic battles that can most closely be compared to the driving segments of the Wachowski ¿Brothers? criminally underrated Speed Racer in terms of sheer visual magnificence. Along the way he comes to know his own faults and becomes less evil himself or something like that. There’s also something to do with subspace and veganism.
If you flip over a copy of one of the Pilgrim novels… like say, this one:
You’ll see (amongst other symbols - nearing the density of the film) a little pink box (giggle) in the lower left listing genre information. It says (assumingly in layers of increasingly greater importance) “Comedy”, “Action”, “Romance”, “Graphic Novel.” This is what the kids expect these days. They’re tired of neatly categorized entertainment options. Even more so than the source material Wright offers in the film a tangy emulsion that becomes an altogether new taste, unclassifiable by standard taxonomy. But like that emulsion the film remains remarkably consistent in its tone, shifting amongst its various elements quickly and smoothly enough that the complexity of the whole is so much greater a satisfier than any of those individual parts.
That is the real art behind this film. Wright exceeds by far, all his previous efforts and displays the mastery of a master chef in combining the technical elements at his disposal to offer the viewer a feast for the eyes and ears – but in order to get the most out of his offerings I strongly caution one approach with a palate immature enough to pick up on the lack of subtleties, otherwise Pilgrim may leave a sour taste - in your face.
A
