I’ve heard nothing but good things about this movie. That it’s a real, geUwine comic book come to life.
It is. But that don’t make it good.
It’s annoying and difficult. I would stack it next to Kick Ass as the hyperbolic comic book movies of the year. Kick Ass, while violent as hell, is a better companion piece to Watchmen (A movie I truly loved, but in a geek that knows it’s not as good as he wishes it was kind of way).
Pilgrim is so self aware, so self conscious and so pretentious that it left us with nothing to hold on to.
This could just be generational. I felt as detached from Napoleon Dynamite earlier this decade and I realize that I am in my mid-40s and movies aren’t made for me anymore.
Fine. No problem. I’m happy to go into that good night. There is something more at work in Scott Pilgrim, though.
I grew up in a golden age of comedy. Steve Martin, Bill Murray, David Letterman. These were anti-comics working in the world of ironic detachment. Where they are superior to the characters they are playing and, while not embracing of them, certainly not hateful of them either. This is different from irony, which is the standard bearer of comedy. Ironic Detachment is snootier. And probably why I don’t care for Conan O’Brien. He traffics in earnest doofusness. And Sandler, Farrell and early Jim Carrey. They don’t love their characters. Those characters are just dumb and they aren’t smarter than them, winking with us. They are more callous and indifferent.
Pilgrim traffics in what I am calling Ironic Alienation. The characters are so far removed from reality that they border on meta-people. There’s no humanity but the actors playing them play them like the characters themselves are smarter than the people playing them. (I’ll give you a second, it’s a pretty bad sentence) It is the direct opposite of The Jerk. And there’s nothing for me to grasp on to as there no place for me to relate. The audience can’t fall in love with Pilgrim or Ramona or Knives because they have no semblance of human-ness. They aren’t people, they are aliens in human clothing. At least in Kick Ass the characters bled and felt loss. The teeniest amount, perhaps but it was something.
Scott Pilgrim is the uber-meta-outside observer. And everyone who populates the film is as well. It’s a good sign that the film was a flop.
Thoughts?
Grade: C
