Review: How to become invisible

Geoff Carter

Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2001 | 10:12 a.m.

Starring: Thora Birch, Scarlett Johansson and Steve Buscemi

Director: Terry Zwigoff

Screenplay: Daniel Clowes and Terry Zwigoff

Rated: R for strong language and some sexual content

Grade: Three and a half stars

"Ghost World" is the best kind of ill fit. It's a baby-T on Jayne Mansfield; it's short-legged jeans on Elvis. Terry Zwigoff's adaptation of Daniel Clowes' comic is so awkward, so abrasive, so ill at ease with itself that it's all but turned the corner and vanished before you realize how attractive it was.

Enid (Thora Birch) and Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson) have just graduated from high school, cheerful nihilistic even as banality closes in - their valedictorian is a wheelchair-bound addict that found purpose after a drunk-driving accident (we see her sucking down the contents of a flask at the post-graduation party - so much for temperance), and the "Happy Graduation" banner over the auditorium bears endorsements by Dunkin' Donuts and Burger King. Enid and Rebecca's world is flat, mediocre, co-opted -- and it's going to get worse before it gets better.

At once a statement on the decline of society, a bleak look at romance and a satirical jab at the "subculture" (available at Hot Topic, in every mall in America), "Ghost World" pulls no punches, and certainly not the jab that's directed at its protagonists. Enid and Rebecca are callous, self-centered semi-intellectuals with machinery for hearts; the screenplay knows this, and takes a naked glee in throwing a Doc Maarten into their works, destroying the order of their sad and narrow lives.

One post-graduation day, Enid and Rebecca meet Seymour (Steve Buscemi), a lonely, cranky record collector and victim of one of their more vicious practical jokes. After an initial period of distrust - Buscemi trying to figure out why Enid has such an interest in him, Enid trying to figure out how this poor loser got under her skin. It polarizes Rebecca against both of them; she just wants to "dress like a rich yuppie," get an apartment with Enid and fill it with Crate and Barrel merchandise.

Enid has other ideas. She torpedoes her movie theater job on the first day ("After a few minutes of this movie, you'll wish you had ten beers," she tells a customer), submits an old racist advertising poster as a "found art object" to the art class she needs to take to graduate, and gets it in her head that Seymour needs a date, someone who "shares his interests."

"I don't want to meet someone who shares my interests," he complains. "I hate my interests." Nevertheless, Seymour finds an unexpected companion while dating another woman, and in doing so sends both his and Enid's lives into utter disorder.

Mixed in with all this human drama is a beleaguered convenient-store clerk (Brad Renfro) that seems to be Enid and Rebecca's only friend; a mulleted, numchuk-wielding whacko (Dave Sheridan) who provides several of the films biggest laughs; a ditzy art teacher (Illeana Douglas) who wants her charges to move up to that "higher level of art" that's embodied by idiotic symbolism, like placing a tampon in a tea cup. (Clowes has some fun with Enid's gift for cartooning.) No wonder Enid and Rebecca are full of disdain; the world is so slight, it barely exists in their eyes.

A movie like this, if made by a major Hollywood studio, is usually saddled with a storybook ending; Zwigoff and Clowes offer the characters a redemption that's so slight that you really have to look hard to discern it. And even as you do, the film has turned and vanished, leaving your conscience provoked and your soul, not surprisingly, haunted.