Obsessive Behavior

[TAKE NOTE! I write the following review from the point of view of someone who read and loved the comics before seeing the film. This is my perspective, and it’s the only one I have, so of course it colors my impressions of the film very heavily. But you don’t need to worry: If you’ve only read the comics and don’t want to know how the film differs, I won’t spoil anything specific. The reverse is also true, for those who saw the film but haven’t read the comics. The stories really are very different, especially in the end! Enjoy the review.]

There’s a point during Scott Pilgrim vs. the World when the title character “levels up.” In the world of Scott Pilgrim, this is an expression of the protagonist’s moral development, as you might find in any well-told story. Sometimes this is signified by a moment of epiphany: perhaps a sharp intake of breath, a swell of music, a long, slow shot of the protagonist’s furrowed brow, a symbolic gesture performed involving a cherished object, or something of the like. In this case, it just happens to manifest as the literalization of a video game metaphor. Scott’s vital stats (Heart, guts, will, etc) go up. Either you accept this in the spirit in which it is offered, or you reject it as an idiotic conceit, the death of cinema, and a symptom of all that is wrong with today’s youth.

If the latter, stop reading this review right now, because I can assure you that there is no chance you will want to watch this movie. I bid you farewell. But ask yourself: why exactly can you accept it when the protagonist of a musical spontaneously bursts into a choreographed song and dance routine complete with an accompanying orchestra, but not when the protagonist of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World levels up? Feh. Be gone with you!

Still with me? Anyhow. This level-up actually happens twice in the story: the first time, Scott gains The Power of Love, and the second he gets The Power of… well, I won’t spoil it. That’s because this scene, more than any other, is emblematic of the difference between the film and the six graphic novels it loosely adapts. In the comics, Scott’s second “level up” moment gives him one power, and in the film, it’s quite another, each of which is relevant to the vastly different situations of the stories’ respective climaxes.

I think it signifies a deliberate statement by director Edgar Wright to viewers who cherished the comics. Wright acknowledges that he hasn’t captured the journey of the comics’ protagonist, because he is interested in taking his Scott on a different journey altogether. There’s no question that Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is, as an adaptation of the story in Bryan Lee O’Malley’s comics, a pretty shallow distillation. This is not a criticism, it’s a statement of fact. When you take six graphic novels and cram them into a two-hour movie, large chunks of the source are going to be left out. The reason the film works (which it does, and very well) is because it’s not afraid to be its own entity with a different purpose and tone from the work that inspired it.

At the start of the film, as in the comic, we are introduced to Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera), a young slacker living in Toronto. He plays in a garage rock band called Sex Bob-Omb, and enjoys an immature and utterly chaste “relationship” with a high schooler named Knives Chau (Ellen Wong), who idolizes him and his band far beyond their respective merits. Scott’s world is shaken up when he meets the American delivery girl Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), the who is the girl of his dreams (literally: she enters his dreams, which is where he first encounters her). Scott begins to pursue a relationship with Ramona, but soon discovers that as a result of their involvement he will be attacked by the League of Evil Exes, consisting of seven of Ramona’s vindictive past lovers.

And naturally, he must face them in battles to the death, which resemble arcade-style fighting games with comic-inspired visuals. The loser bursts into a shower of Canadian coins, of course.

The appeal of O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim comics is how well he uses these absurd confrontations as the scaffolding for a surprisingly complex and nuanced story about the love and life of a group of Canadian twentysomethings (pictured at left: the complex relationships of some of the book’s most important characters, circa volume three, and you can click for a slightly larger and more legible version). At the center of all of this is Scott’s journey from immaturity to full adulthood. In Wright’s film, on the other hand, these absurd confrontations with the evil exes are the story. Attempting to replicate the entire storyline of the graphic novels in a two hour movie with six fight scenes (two are twins, who fight together) would have been a cinematic disaster. Instead, he compresses and simplifies, which results in a film that’s incredibly faced-paced, funny, and exciting. So while the film’s detractors are correct in accusing it of having little substance, they’re incorrect in asserting that this constitutes an artistic failure. Even with some rather thin characterization and a hollow emotional core, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is a hell of a lot of fun. The blend of retro video games and grunge-infused indie rock is an aesthetic triumph, and the movie’s enormous cast doesn’t contain a single performance that’s anything less than stellar.

The look and feel of the film are certainly not like any other film I’ve ever seen. I’ll admit it’s not as groundbreaking as some of its admirers have claimed: in fact, it’s not too far out of line with Wright’s own past work. Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz both deconstruct established genres and reconstruct them into something which is at the same time a parody and an exemplar of that genre, and also entirely new and fresh (and hilarious). Shaun of the Dead was a parody of zombie movies, but it was also itself a really solid zombie movie, as well as a fantastic romantic comedy. But Scott Pilgrim vs. the World does this with a level of aesthetic richness unachieved by either of those films (or any similar examples that I can think of) and gathers influences far greater in number and diversity. The most obvious are from comic books and video games, the former contributing a lot of the film’s unique visual elements and the latter lending the film its structure and many of its best visual jokes. 

But just as important (yet not as remarked-upon by the mainstream film press) is the swath of musical influences that are brought to bear on the movie. You don’t bring in Nigel Godrich to oversee the music for your film unless you mean business. Godrich’s score excels, both in fast-paced action scenes (employing garage-fuzz and retro-chiptune sounds in equal measure, among others) and more contemplative, melancholy moments (Which sounds like Jon Brion in an underwater echo chamber). It’s just as dense and highly polished as you’d expect from any Godrich-produced record. The enlistment of Beck, Broken Social Scene, and Metric to bring the film’s fictional bands to life is pure magic, particularly Beck’s grungy, unpolished garage rock which stands in for Scott’s band Sex Bob-Omb. This contrasts nicely with the use of the Metric tune “Black Sheep,” which was apparently deemed too slick for their uber-slick 2009 Fantasies. Here the song is given to Envy Adams, Scott’s “evil” ex-girlfriend, and it fits her like a glove—and why wouldn’t it? Envy was originally inspired by Metric frontwoman Emily Haines. The film’s non-diegetic music is just as impressive and diverse, ranging from huge names like The Rolling Stones to obscure Canadian girl band Plumtree (whose song “Scott Pilgrim” actually inspired the title of the comic). In a film as thoroughly preoccupied with music as this, even the slightest musical misstep would make the whole film seem disingenuous and heinously so. It’s greatly to the film’s credit, then, that Godrich and Wright (working in collaboration with O’Malley) get pretty much everything perfect, and it makes both the soundtrack album and the score album must-owns.

Of course, all the slick direction and music in the world wouldn’t save the film if it wasn’t well-cast, but that’s not a problem either. It’s apparent that moviegoers are suffering from Cera fatigue, and critics have accused his overly sensitive milquetoast persona of being the bane of this film, but this reviewer disagrees. Here Cera demonstrates that given the right film, he can rise to the challenge and serve as an engaging (if unusual) leading man. Perhaps the reason it works so well is because rather than Cera’s typical “Lovable Nerd” role, Wright deploys his version of Scott as a deconstruction of that stereotype. Scott turns out not to be the “nice guy” that Ramona initially thinks of him as, but rather a flawed hero with an immature and inconsiderate streak. It dovetails nicely with Winstead’s Ramona, who deconstructs the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” stereotype (it helps that her hairstyles resemble that of Kate Winslet’s Clementine in 2004’s “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” another deconstruction of the same stereotype). It could be said that the script does Ramona a bit of a disservice, making her frustratingly passive throughout the film, but Winstead’s charm and pathos round out the character where the script fails to do so. It would be difficult to argue that Cera and Winstead have particularly good chemistry, but I think this serves the film’s deconstructive purposes and highlights the flaws in their budding relationship. Although the movie gives primacy to the swath of unhappy ex-lovers in Ramona’s wake, it makes it clear that Scott’s track record is little better. In a sense, they’re more similar than one might expect at the film’s beginning. 

As for the film’s supporting cast, the worst that can be said is how tragic it is that each of them can’t get more screen time. The most egregiously slighted are Kim Pine (Allison Pill), Scott’s former girlfriend from high school who now plays in his band, and Envy Adams (Brie Larson) Scott’s former girlfriend from college who used to play in his band, until making it big and leaving him behind. While Kim is an important character in the comics, Pill’s role is reduced to a source of scowling sarcastic one-liners. But she slings these with such aplomb that one can’t help but wish we could learn more about her and watch Pill delve into her storyline from the comics. Similarly, Brie Larson’s brief on-screen presence gives only a surface impression of O’Malley’s version of Envy. But as no film can be perfect, the fact that the supporting cast is so good that it leaves you desperately wanting more is a good problem to have.

The film also has its share of standout performers who actually are given their due. Chief among these are Ellen Wong as Scott’s underage girlfriend Knives, and Kieran Culkin as his snarky gay roommate Wallace Wells. Wong’s performance shifts so effortlessly from humor to pathos on a dime that it’s impossible not to love her. And yes, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, it lacks the complexity of her character from the comics, but the film certainly does right by her nonetheless. Her importance is actually stressed more in the film than the comics, and she is given a key role in the film’s climax while she is sidelined in the final graphic novel. Wong is such a presence in the film that she probably deserves to be billed as one of the stars. As for Wallace Wells… well, he was never particularly complex in the comics, so you’ll hear no complaints about his diminishment from me. Culkin steals nearly every scene he’s in, and is one of the funniest things about the movie. If there’s any justice in Hollywood, then both Culkin and Wong will be noticed for their stellar performances in this film despite its lackluster performance at the box office (and their near absence from the film’s promotional material).

The film is chock full of other admirable performances: Anna Kendrick (best known from Twilight) is hilarious as Scott’s gossipy sister Stacy. Mark Webber, despite his lack of musical experience, rocks out as Scott’s nervous bandmate Stephen Stills (yes, that is the character’s name, and there’s another character named “Young” Neil). Aubrey Plaza (who can be seen on NBC’s “Parks and Recreation”) is a riot as the bitchy, profane Julie Powers. And then, of course, there’s a veritable slew of Ramona’s evil exes.

But at the risk of sacrilege, I wonder whether the film might have benefited by cutting back on the the number of evil exes. Yes, the complete unknown Satya Bhabha brings glorious melodrama to the first fight scene (which is a bizarre combination of an arcade-style fighting game and a bollywood musical number), and Mae Whitman is quite funny as Ramona’s former girlfriend, a lesbian half-ninja. But Chris Evans’s character and Brandon Routh’s character, while both well-played, seem redundant, when taken one after the other: the former is a famous douchey film star, and the latter is a famous douchey rock star. Not to mention the fact that the film’s “final boss” is a famous douchey record producer (played well by Jason Schwartzman, but perhaps not quite charismatic enough). And the Katayanagi twins (Shota and Keita Saito) are almost non-presences in the movie; their scene (a battle of the bands) is easily the film’s low point. I know, “Four evil exes” doesn’t sound as cool, but the film could have gotten by with that many, and had more time to devote to the rest of the cast. Even O’Malley himself admitted in an interview once that, after the first few battles, the “evil exes” concept begins to seem less compelling. Perhaps the film should have learned from that.

But my complaints about the film, ultimately, are only minor gripes, motivated by intense fan love. I miss the complexity of the books, but trading that complexity away for cinematic energy is appropriate. The film makes it seem perfectly justified by compressing the time scale of the story: while the comics unfold over the course of more than a year, the film seems to take place in a span of days, or at most weeks. So the film’s lack of depth seems appropriate to the early days of a relationship, when it’s all very surface-level. It brings me back to my initial point: that Scott Pilgrim vs. the World isn’t even really attempting to capture the story of the comics, instead only using the basic gist of the premise to build its own story. In the process, much of what I love most about the comics is excised, but then again, the comic lacks much of what I love most about the film: the fantastic performances, the cinematic energy, and the rich visual and aural aesthetic. In the end, I’m left with two very different takes on Scott Pilgrim, neither a pale shadow of the other, each with its own peculiar magnificence.

Is that, in general, how an adaptation should be? Man, I don’t know. Probably not. But that’s how it was done for Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and it worked pretty damn well.