A few nights ago I saw Ghost World, the new film adapted from Daniel Clowes' comic book stories of the same name. It's directed by Terry Zwigoff, from a screenplay co-written by Zwigoff and Clowes, so the original creator was involved. Ghost World is Zwigoff's first non-documentary feature.
I'd read the Clowes comics about a year ago, and remembered that the stories covered the lives of two teenage girls, but didn't remember any of the details. So, prior to seeing the film adaptation, I reread the collected Ghost World comics stories.
While watching the film, I was struck, particularly in the first third or so, with how faithfully the characters and situations portrayed in the comic had been brought to life on screen. The casting and look of the film are so close to what Clowes depicted in his comic, and the scenes in the early part of the film reproduce the same sequences from the comics so well, that I actually found it sort of distracting! I'd recommend not re-reading the comic before seeing the film. Read it afterwards instead.
Even so, the adaptation is not slavish to the original, and in fact makes very smart and observant deviations that maintain the spirit of the original while opening up the narrative to something more cohesive than the series of loosely-connected vignettes of the comic book.
The main deviation was to take some of the characteristics of the boy, Josh, who both girls have partial crushes on, and combine them with some characteristics of a minor character from the comic (Bob Skeets), in order to create a new character, Seymour, superbly played by Steve Buscemi, who throughout the film looks like a dead ringer for the subject of Zwigoff's previous movie, Crumb. Like Ghost World, Crumb was a comics-related film, in this case a terrific documentary about the great underground comics artist Robert Crumb, whose daughter Sophie Crumb supplied much of the art supposedly drawn by Thora Birch's character, Enid, in Ghost World. Got that?
So the film is smartly adapted from the comic by its creator and a director who is no stranger to comics. The result is a very good movie with memorable characters and a smart, yet bittersweet tone.
Steve Buscemi gives the performance of his career as Seymour. It's the kind of role that requires a great sensitivity to the characterization to avoid turning him into a simplisticly rendered, one-dimensional nerd. Buscemi not only avoids this trap, but he brings so much painful, awkward kindheartedness and intelligence to his portrayal of a shy, 40-something obsessive collector of old 78 RPM records with no social skills, that his blossoming and unlikely friendship with Enid comes across not as creepy and perverted, but as something that is actually very sweet, even believable. They make a connection, each recognizing the outsider status of the other and find themselves drawn to it.
Thora Birch as Enid, and Scarlett Johansson as Rebecca are both good as the two best-friend outsiders who are simultaneously glad to be out of high school (after graduation, they pause outside their school and give it the finger) and worried about how they will maintain their outsider status now that the known, socially predictable high school environment is gone from their lives.
I don't want to give too much else away. The film has some flaws -- a couple of the minor characters are a bit too cartoony, veering into sit-com-level slapstick; and the ending is the worst case of a director not realizing he'd already acheived the perfect ending since Terry Gilliam mistakenly allowed his producer to convince him to keep the story going past the point where Bruce Willis witnesses the shooting in the airport in Twelve Monkeys. Ghost World should have ended with Norman's last scene (you'll know what I mean after you see the film). I just do the mental edit and pretend that it did. And there is a sub-plot about an art show that doesn't really go anywhere. These flaws, though, are easily outweighed by the strength of the Birch and Buscemi characters, and especially by their marvelous and nuanced performances. Buscemi's character in particular, but Birch's too to a lesser extent, are characters we haven't seen on screen before, or at least, not very often. Catch them now before Ghost World disappears from your local movie screens.
Recommended.