FILMOGRAPHY
Metropolitan (1990)
Barcelona (1994)
The Last Days of Disco (1998)
Damsels in Distress (2011)
Love & Friendship (2016)
FILMOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY
Whit Stillman, born in 1952 in upstate New York, began by riding a wave started by Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch, Hal Hartley, and many others with a loose trilogy of films, Metropolitan, Barcelona, and The Last Days of Disco. The films took place in insular worlds, involving self-obsessed characters whose musings rendered the pictures largely a series of protracted pseudo-philosophic/sociologic dialogues, but with a kind of winking irony that undercut any possibility of earnestness. Much of the comedy came from how their modest hypocrisies implicated them. The unmistakable influence of both Woody Allen and many “comedy of manners” forebears informed the trilogy, which was mostly meager. As a dramatist, Stillman was no Allen. As a filmmaker, his aesthetic was quotidian enough to render his films oddities given the insane financial risks involved. After 12 years away he returned with the much funnier Damsels in Distress, and a Jane Austen adaptation– his best film– that was both unlikely and inevitable, Love & Friendship.
WORKS
Self-produced on a minimal budget, Metropolitan (1990) is a strange satire of upper-class Manhattan adolescents that takes place during “Debutante Ball” season, actual social events modelled on a nausea-inducing tradition founded by British aristocrats wherein teenage women are “introduced” to “polite” society. Stillman culls from his own life, but he doesn’t show those peculiarly lavish events. Rather, the film takes place afterward, in living rooms, doubling for drawing rooms, and his cast consists of a group of teenagers who fashion themselves as U.H.B.s, or “Urban Haute Bourgeoisie”. They sit around and spew vapidity cloaked in the elegance of the burgeoning-literate. They discuss modes of socialism, and make circular quips like, “It’s a tiny bit arrogant of people to go around worrying about those less fortunate.” Even the film’s purported protagonist, Tom (Edward Clements), has the audacity to explain to a fan of Jane Austen why Austen is in fact a terrible novelist, and why its not necessary to read her to understand this and so it’s perfectly okay that he hasn’t read a word of her writing, but rather takes his queues from critics. He probably has an idol of Pauline Kael on his desk. It can be funny and acerbic and identifiable, even though to most Americans these children likely seem like Martians. It seems Stillman’s project is to show the burgeoning adventures of those self-infatuated, hypocritical, and uncertain young people that eventuate in ever-hypocritical, ever-uncertain adults and, after life gets through with them, contain whatever self-worth remains. He does this somewhat lovingly. The added acerbic sting betrays a certain class disdain. The film seems close to home. But Stillman, who funded the film himself, does not exhibit he knows how to do much other than stage conventionally. The film is one of those 90s oddities where what’s on screen demands so little from the cinema that came before it that its existence as a film is puzzling. (w: Whit Stillman, c: John Thomas)
Barcelona (1994) is another oddity, and sillier, in a way that rings often of a Hal Hartley film. Two American cousins fret around mid-80s Barcelona, WASP composites even less believable and identifiable than those in Metropolitan. The plot is effervescent. Fred (Chris Eigemann), cousin of Ted (Taylor Nichols), is scouting Barcelona for his Navy Fleet ahead of an upcoming shore leave. Or so he claims, as the movie hints repeatedly that he is both a liar and a thief. Ted is a salesman for an auto company based out of Detroit. He waxes in earnest on his profession in a kind of Norman Vincent Peale-ease. He is puzzled by women, and uneasy in his calling. Some of this is relayed in an elided editing style where we’re served very funny snippets of what we imagine as yawn-inducing conversational marathons. In moments like these, the filmmaking has a nice energy. But both characters stretch verisimilitude to the breaking point and the female characters are not developed. The satirical charge of Metropolitan extended largely from the endless ironies and hypocrisies of its moneyed youth, and particularly from how good they were at implicating themselves. Fred and Ted are well-acted inasmuch as they render Stillman’s quirky dialogue with real verve, but they are overextended in their quirks and idiosyncrasies. They end up just shy of caricature. Their endless quips, which betray a knowing irony in the writing, are often so clever that it seems that part of Stillman’s meager alchemy is to blend satire, sincerity, disdain, and sitcom into such a brew that it is near novel. (w: Whit Stillman, c: John Thomas)
Another pointless, meandering affair, The Last Days of Disco (1998) features two women fretting around New York during the “early 80s” in a milieu that has to qualify for a short list of potential ‘nadirs of human civilization’. Everything, from the vacuous chitchat to the drugs and booze to the loveless sex and conceptions of loveless sex and the casual response to casual betrayal and casual verbal violence and casual filth all the way to the music– that infernal music— culminates in a feeling of overwhelming waste. I’m writing of the time, not the movie. The movie hasn’t much to it. Alice (Chloe Sevigny) and Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale) are “friends” who frequent a local disco. The days of disco are (mercifully) dying and Chris Eigeman’s Des navigates the death throes, juggling interpersonal allegiances while getting laid, involvements he then truncates by pretending to be gay. His verbal style for some reason still so well handles Stillman’s serpentine quips, that he’s funny not from what he says, but how he says it. Alice early on meets Tom (Robert Sean Leonard) and they go to his apartment. Following Charlotte’s advice to call things “sexy” as a means of seduction, she declares the subject of his knick-knack collection– Disney’s “Scrooge McDuck”– to be sexy, after which he infects her with gonorrhea and herpes. The manipulative Charlotte paints this as a good development in her prospects with men. Tom later chastises her for using such disingenuousness to woo him, and then only reluctantly admits that he infected her. This is the mode of the movie. Loyalties are made and broken. Legal dramas unravel the disco, but to shrugs. All of it photographed and staged as though camera and editing afforded little imagination. It’s surprising the film got made and considerably less surprising that it failed with audiences. (w: Whit Stillman, c: John Thomas)
Damsels in Distress (2011) is a funnier movie. That its world is even more insular– so insular in fact that no such place could possibly exist– would seem a bad thing, but its not. Stillman’s movies are artistic experiments in unlikely collisions. Why not compare the moral and intellectual degradation of the modern liberal arts campus with the fall of the Roman Empire through the lens of Jane Austen? The picture starts off slowly and oddly, but eventually reveals a rhythm, approximating something close to sketch comedy. Most of the appeal– nearly all of it honestly– stems from the way Greta Gerwig successfully restates Stillman’s dialogue into a creature both refreshingly honest, strange, and wryly funny, rather like the most endearing Todd Solondz character possible. (w: Whit Stillman, c: Doug Emmett)
The Jane Austen adaptation Love & Friendship (2016) is gorgeous. Designed to the letter (quite literally) the film has an aesthetic and cinematic confidence not yet seen in Stillman’s work. Adapted from the unfinished novella, “Lady Susan,” and imbued in its completion with more causticity, the movie is brisk in a way his prior film’s never managed, though with the same run-time. Kate Beckinsale stars as the fortune-seeker Lady Susan Vernon. Her performance, like the woman, never falters, so that one wonders where they normally hide her. Her costume, which she wears like armor, was designed by Eimer Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh, a practitioner of such considerable gifts that scenes play beautifully even flatly lit and stoically framed and cut. In its emotional breeziness and swift narrative shorthand, the picture owes a lot to Stanley Kubrick. Stillman seems to have used Barry Lyndon as a guide, and Kubrick’s use of music generally to help him along. Impressive unknowns and charming character actors fill out the rest of the cast, including British TV actor Tom Bennett, with a gift for wincing comedy. (w: Whit Stillman, Richard Van Oosterhout)
films and filmmakers 