Flickchart Road Trip: Ohio
Welcome to the latest installment of Flickchart Road Trip, in which I’m starting in Los Angeles and “driving” across country, watching one movie from each state and posting about it once a week. The new movie I watch will go up against five movies from that state I’ve already seen, chosen from five distinct spots on my own Flickchart. Although I won’t tell you where the new movie actually lands in my chart (I don’t like to add new movies until I’ve had a month to think about them), I’ll let you know how it fared among the five I’ve chosen. Thanks for riding shotgun!
I missed the Baseball Hall of Fame in New York. I wasn’t going to let the same thing happen with the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame in Ohio. In Cleveland, to be exact.
First, though, another map.
You have to fumble around with a couple different interstates — I-76, then I-80, then finally I-79 — but that took me from the Pittsburgh area to Cleveland, a great American city that I’d really only visited once before, for the brief amount of time it took to watch a Cleveland Indians game. (More on the Cleveland Indians later.) This time I was at least going to spend some time mucking around downtown, to see if Drew Carey was indeed correct when he stated that “Cleveland rocks.”
As a matter of fact, I can confirm Mr. Carey’s contentions. Not only did I consume some good food and check out the shores of Lake Erie, but I did indeed go to the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame, which is kind of like the world’s largest Hard Rock Cafe. By the time I’d left, I’d seen more guitars than The Who, Kiss and Nirvana destroyed on stage during their whole careers — combined.
Upon returning to my car, I reacquainted myself with the actual music on my ipod (take a break, podcasts), and cranked it loud.
A more placid version of Ohio is on display in my Ohio movie, the sophomore directing effort of How I Met Your Mother actor Josh Radnor. Liberal Arts (2012, global ranking #9079) was shot on the campus of Kenyon College, which was one of the colleges I visited when I was seeking out liberal arts colleges myself back in the early 1990s. (Did I actually apply? Funny, I can’t even remember.) It’s also the alma mater of Paul Newman, who once told people he used to drink a case of beer a day in college. Hence was born the concept of a “Newman Day,” where you’re supposed to try to drink 24 beers in 24 hours. A friend of mine in college got as close as any human being has ever gotten, I think, when he drank 20, and then faceplanted on our common room floor.
Anyway, I digress. Liberal Arts! That’s what we were talking about.
What it’s about
Jesse Fischer (Josh Radnor) is a 35-year-old admissions officer in New York City, who hasn’t fully gotten over his glory days back in college in Ohio. When one of his favorite professors (Richard Jenkins) rings up him and says he’s retiring, and asks if Jesse would like to attend the retirement festivities, Jesse jumps at the opportunity to exchange his New York blues for the rich intellectual atmosphere of his beautiful college campus, if only for one weekend. However, Jesse unexpectedly makes a deeper reconnection with his old stomping grounds when he meets a current sophomore, Zibby (Elizabeth Olsen), who’s the daughter of his professor’s friends. He and Zibby hit it off immediately, and even though they don’t become romantically involved right away, they do agree to start exchanging letters, as a means of embracing an old-world form of communication that has long been forgotten. As the letters grow in frequency and intensity, Zibby asks Jesse if he wants to return to campus for a visit. Since Jesse has also struck up a friendship with a brilliant misfit (John Magaro), he reluctantly agrees — trying not to think of the 16-year difference in their ages.
How it uses the state
Liberal Arts starts in New York City, and Josh Radnor looks like any other New Yorker as he carries his laundry to the laundromat. Except, not quite — he’s got four red letters proudly reading OHIO on his gray t-shirt. The action quickly moves to the rolling plains of that great state as it sets up shop on the campus of Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, where both Radnor and Allison Janney (who also appears in the film) attended college. Ohio is yet another state on this trip that we’ve seen set up in opposition to New York — it’s physically and intellectually beautiful, whereas New York is the place where a guy stole that bag of laundry Radnor’s character brought to the laundromat.
What it’s up against
Before we get to my thoughts on the film, let’s duel it against five other Ohio movies I’ve already seen, shall we? As you know if you’ve ever added a film to Flickchart using the “By Title” feature, the new movie goes up first against the movie in the exact middle of your rankings. The outcome of that duel determines whether it faces the film at the 75th percentile or the 25th percentile, and so on, until it reaches its exact right place. With five movies, that means at least two and as many as three duels. Here are the films Liberal Arts will battle:
1) Major League (1989, David S. Ward). My Flickchart: #274/3562. Global: #806. This movie might be just as big an underdog hit as the hapless professional baseball players in the story. Who could have ever figured that the B-list likes of Tom Berenger, Rene Russo, Charlie Sheen, Wesley Snipes, Corbin Bernson, Dennis Haysbert and James Gammon would come together to make one of the best baseball movies of all time? That’s a matter of opinion, of course, but this guy’s opinion is that Major League is a winning combination of a perfect cast, a script that’s as tight as a steel drum, a number of great jokes, and a genuinely inspiring David and Goliath story. The story involves a team of marginal pro baseball players, specifically assembled to accrue a win-loss record bad enough for their greedy owner to move them out of Cleveland — and how they fight to prevent that from happening. If you didn’t have a soft spot for the Cleveland Indians before Major League, you will after — even if you think Sheen became a little too much of a “Wild Thing” (that’s his character’s nickname) in real life.
2) American Splendor (2003, Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini). My Flickchart: #1053/3562. Global: #1091. Paul Giamatti as Harvey Pekar is the very definition of a “poor shlub” — but he’s a very watchable poor shlub. Giamatti does great work as the real-life Cleveland native who writes a series of autobiographical comic books that celebrate his mundane, often bitterly frustrating existence. As grubby as they come, the stories depicted here do make the city of Cleveland its own vibrant character, even if that vibrancy isn’t the slightest bit shiny. Hope Davis provides excellent support as Pekar’s wife Joyce Brabner, and the narrative approach taken by the directors, who are veteran documentarians, makes the film that much more interesting to absorb. Not only is this an adaptation of Pekar’s American Splendor comic book series, as well as a biography of Pekar, but the actual Pekar and Brabner (who share story credit with the directors) also make an appearance to comment on the self-reflexive nature of the project.
3) The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio (2005, Jane Anderson). My Flickchart: #1410/3562. Global: #10283. This quiet little film has a lot of heart and guts. It’s the story of an unhappy 1950s housewife who becomes the family breadwinner when her drunkard husband can’t keep a job. Her method of winning the bread? Writing jingles that win advertising contests — something she’s really, really good at. Julianne Moore gives a performance of determined, understated grace — which is a big help, since Woody Harrelson chews the scenery as the drunkard husband. She also has a touching relationship with her daughter Tuff, the sixth of her ten (!) children, whose memoirs provided the basis for this true story. After Far From Heaven, The Prize Winner proved that Moore had a lock on bringing new dimension to the housewife who yearns for something more.
4) The Watch (2012, Akiva Schaffer). My Flickchart: #1888/3562. Global: #9123. It’s either very timely or very insensitive of me to include The Watch, the film whose title was changed from Neighborhood Watch after the killing of Trayvon Martin, in the immediate aftermath of George Zimmerman being acquitted of Martin’s murder. The world needs laughter, though, and to my great surprise, The Watch actually provided some. In this comedy from Andy Samberg collaborator Akiva Schaffer, four friends defend their Glenview, Ohio neighborhood from an external threat that happens to be … aliens. One of the most disappointing trailers of 2012 ended up being one of my funniest films in an overall weak year for comedy … which still is not quite enough to make the top half of my Flickchart. Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn and Jonah Hill do a satisfying version of what they usually do, and Richard Ayoade shows us what he can do — for the first time, for those of us who didn’t watch The IT Crowd.
5) The Oh in Ohio (2006, Billy Kent). My Flickchart: #3386/3562. Global: #22008. An indie comedy in which Parker Posey plays a Cleveland woman trying to rediscover her elusive orgasm should seem like a perfect way to get some laughs, some heart, and a wee bit of titillation. Then how did writer-director Billy Kent get this one so wrong? For one, it’s a lot more mean-spirited than you’d think, especially the aggressively angry subplot about a teacher (Paul Rudd) who ends up hooking up with one of his students (Mischa Barton). In a misguided attempt to let Rudd’s character off the hook for patently unethical and just plain icky behavior, Kent gives Barton an almost predatory sense of self-possession, entirely removing the possibility of her being a victim. The plot involving Posey plays out in unsatisfying fashion as well, not only because she is an incredibly unlikely romantic partner for Danny DeVito, but because her central pursuit peters out rather than building toward a big comic payoff. Talk about an anticlimax.
First duel: Liberal Arts vs. The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio. Defiance doesn’t quite win this prize. Liberal Arts wins.
Second duel: Liberal Arts vs. American Splendor. A verdant college campus can’t beat the dirt of Cleveland. American Splendor wins.
Liberal Arts finishes third out of the six movies.
My thoughts
I know all about what it’s like to pine for the glory days of college. Shortly after attending the graduation of the class two years behind me, upon which I determined that I no longer had any meaningful connection to the student body, I entered into a funk about the loss of my youth — the kind where you focus on the experiences you never had, instead of those you had. What came along at just the right time, a day or two later, was a VHS rental of Noah Baumbach‘s Kicking and Screaming — a movie in which recently graduated seniors skulk around for an extra year in the town where they went to college, trying to live a facsimile of their college lives.
Liberal Arts doesn’t have the incisiveness of a Baumbach movie, but it does tap into some truths about the anxiety of separating from that comfortable intellectual cocoon — even if its protagonist is 35 years old, and should have long since extricated himself. That being a lot closer to the age I am now gave the movie some additional resonance for me. In fact, Liberal Arts is filled with characters who don’t quite connect with their current age: the two college students who fancy themselves older and more mature than their classmates, the admissions officer who wishes he was still their age, the middle-aged professor who has fully ditched her youthful idealism, and the retiring professor who realizes too late that he’s not ready to go. At its core, Liberal Arts is about the eminently human phenomenon of feeling disconnected from yourself.
However, it’s also kind of less than that. As many insightful moments as it has, Liberal Arts can also get bogged down in its own ideas, and sometimes plays as simply false. One such falsity: Even though I really liked John Magaro in this movie, far more than I liked him in Not Fade Away back in New Jersey, it feels really shoehorned in to have Radnor’s character meet and strike up a relationship with the depressed misfit. I think Radnor’s point is to make it so Jesse is not drawn back to college life just because he’s crushing on a 19-year-old, which is the same reason he has regular interactions with a wise-beyond-his-years hippie played by Zac Efron. It just feels a bit forced. Then there’s the lengthy tangent where Jesse and Zibby argue over the merits of a book that is obviously supposed to be Twilight, which involves Jesse spending an entire day reading the book. He’s trying to make a point about intellectual snobbery, but he strangely reaches an opposite conclusion, and wastes a lot of screen time doing it.
One certified strength is Elizabeth Olsen as Zibby. She continues to prove that Martha Marcy May Marlene was no fluke. Here is an Olsen who can act, and she’s never anything less than 100% believable.
Up next
If I know anything about Michigan, it’s that they make two things there: music, and cars. It’s the second one I’ll be looking at as I watch the 1988 film Tucker: The Man and His Dream next week. Did you know Francis Ford Coppola directed this? I didn’t.