I saw Beautiful Girls a few years after it came out and only recently decided to compare my take on the story with some professional critical opinions. Reading these reviews, I find that they all missed an important aspect of the movie: the movie is an anti-romance.
In case you have not seen it and this is your first review, here is a brief summary of the plot. Piano player Willie C (Timothy Hutton) goes back to his hometown in snowy Maine for a high school reunion. There he meets with his high school buddies Tommy (Matt Dillon), Mo (Noah Emmerich), and Paul (Michael Rapaport). Willie, Tommy and Paul are trying to figure out their relationships while Mo, acting as their foil, is the happily married man with kids. Willie falls in love with Marty (Natalie Portman), the cute 13-year old girl next door, and has to decide between staying with his almost fiancé Tracy (Annabeth Gish) or waiting for Marty to grow up. Tommy is in a relationship with Sharon (Mira Sorvino) while sleeping with his married high school flame Darian (Lauren Holly). Finally, Paul just lost his seven-year relationship with Jan (Martha Plimpton) because his obsession with supermodels has prevented him from committing. Really, all three of them have commitment problems, but Paul’s is the most obvious and the only one that does not get cured at the end of the film. Uma Thurman plays a small part as Andera, a sage of wisdom on women, and Rosie O’Donnell plays Gina, essentially her boisterous, annoying self in a less effective version of Thurman’s Andera.
Most romance movies, and stories in general, are about exactly that: romance, love. This does not necessarily mean that they will end happily, but the basic theme is one of love. Either the characters are in love, or fall in love, or they have a love that cannot be, or was never meant to be, or, as in the recent 500 Days of Summer, were never in love to begin with but are still searching for it. What I find interesting about Beautiful Girls is how much it is not about love. The word is rarely spoken of in the movie because it does not apply. No one is really in love, and in many respects, no one believes that it exists. They use words like commitment and they talk about their feelings often enough, but not about idealistic love or crazy, suicidal love.
Willie C has an important conversation with Andera about “the big fade”, or marriage, and how passion dies eventually in the relationship. The conversation is a more general version of his problem with Tracy and Marty. Tracy represents the fade and Marty represents another passionate affair, but neither represent love. Marty may represent the possibility of love, but Willie recognizes that it is only a possibility and probably not a reality. Andera’s answer is a simple plea for commitment in the form of rejecting his offer and trying to show him that what he has is good enough.
But the real question that the movie leads a person to ask is whether good enough is good at all? Sure, the characters seem happy at the end, but one cannot help but feel that it is momentary, that nothing really has changed. As they say about the town, “nothing changes but the seasons”.
Tommy is another good representation of this point. Tommy eventually decides to leave the affair with the married Darian and stick with his girlfriend Sharon, but why? Because marriage is a sacrament? That certainly did not stop Lancelot and Guinevere. The real reason is because neither girl is really better than the other. The only reason given that he should choose Sharon is because Darian is married and Sharon has shown her love and devotion to him. So what? I am not defending his actions, or Darian’s, nor am I attacking the sweetness of Sharon, but I am attacking the notion that Tommy is doing something positive by picking her. It is clear that something is missing in his relationship, same as in Willie’s, and he does not do anything about it.
Paul just represents the idiot that the movie was trying to represent him as. He loses and there really is nothing redeeming about him. He chose to wait too long, subconsciously knowing that he would never get a supermodel, and yet never proposing to the girl that stuck it out with him. His example is simple.
The girls are like Paul in their simplicity. Sharon sticks with Tommy seemingly out of love, although her character is never elaborated on. Neither is Tracy’s. Darian says she loves her husband, but does not care about hurting him by sleeping with another guy, a guy she most likely does not love. Andera explains how sweet and nice her boyfriend is, but he is not her fiancé and there is no indication that there is a mythical love there. Marty’s crush is just her first serious crush, and she seems to get over it quickly. Jan, just like Tommy and Willie, settles for a guy that she does not love.
And that is the true, horrible, depressing point to the whole movie. It is about settling. Not commitment, but realizing that you will not get what you want. It is not about realizing how imperfect we all are and thus finding love in someone with faults, since some of the characters, like Tracy and Sharon, have no faults. It is about realizing that love does not exist. It is about realizing that growing up means foregoing love, a greater happiness, and the risk of greater suffering, for like, and ease, and a mild form of contentment, if that at all. As Willie C says the night before Tracy comes: “I got no feeling about that. I got a feeling of overwhelming ambivalence. But I would rather dread her arrival than not give a shit.”
And yet, he chooses to stay with the girl that gives him this feeling of ambivalence. Nowhere in the script is there a hint that his feelings have changed. Just that he has decided that what he has is good enough. Thus, I call this movie an anti-romance, because all of the events in the movie lead away from love, as do the characters. And thus, while I enjoy watching it, I find this movie to be one of the most depressing movies to watch.
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