Review: The Spectacular Now

Miles Teller plays boozy high school senior Sutter, a party animal with seemingly no direction in life and an absentee father whom his well-meaning mother (Jennifer Jason Leigh) won’t tell him anything about. He stupidly seems to avoid any thought towards the future, content to drink, hang out, and live in the now. That sees him lose a girlfriend (Brie Larson), but there’s clearly something damaged inside of Sutter that may explain why he is the way he is. After a night of hard partying, he wakes up on the lawn of a neighbour. He gets to talking to this neighbour, nice, comic book geek Aimee (Shailene Woodley), who goes to the same school as Sutter but obviously runs with a different social crowd. A relationship develops between the two (After their hangover-inspired ‘meet cute’. Yep. That’s romantic), though Sutter tells his peers that he’s just bringing the girl out of her shell. It’s obviously something deeper for Aimee (a virgin who has never had a boyfriend), but the question remains: Is Sutter really just trying to show Aimee a good time, or does he have romantic feelings for her? Well, he still can’t quite stop talking to his ex at every opportunity, so there’s that.

 

Kyle Chandler plays Sutter’s MIA father, whom the boy decides to look up one day, and drags Aimee along with him. The experience has him learning a thing or two not just about why his parents’ marriage failed, but also about himself. Andre Royo plays a teacher who tries to get Sutter to stop being such a sarcastic dick and actually apply himself.

 

Although I haven’t read it, the Tim Tharp novel that this 2013 film is based on, is probably pretty good. Unfortunately, one major piece of miscasting helps ruin this film adaptation from director James Ponsoldt (“Smashed”) and screenwriters Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber (“500 Days of Summer”). Because of the casting of the inherently douchy Miles Teller in the lead role of Sutter, and the way in which he plays the character, I found myself deeply disliking Sutter, and entirely mistrusting his intentions towards the character of Aimee (played by Shailene Woodley). If Sutter was meant to have good-hearted intentions towards this girl, I didn’t believe it. He spends the first portion of the film acting like an aimless, borderline alcoholic douchebag who thinks he’s charming when he’s anything but charming. Call him a mixture of John Cusack in “High Fidelity” and Vince Vaughn in just about anything. An irritating mix, this guy’s the worst kind of aimless douchebag: The aimless douchebag who could actually stop being an aimless douchebag if he really wanted to. I didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do when I was in high school, let alone my final year. But I wasn’t an aimless, ambivalent douchebag like Teller’s Sutter. I was merely focussed on stuff that ultimately ended up not mattering so much in the grand scheme of life. Sutter seems focussed on…hell, I don’t even know, and he’s extremely irritating because of it. I understand that the character of Sutter is clearly a troubled one who worries he may be turning out like his estranged dad, but because it seems so unlikely to begin with that someone like Sutter would be interested in someone like Aimee, he comes across as creepy and cruel. I mean, this is a kid who, when he realises he’s becoming just like his dad, his reaction is to try and become even more like him so that he can hate himself. There’s only so much of that I can take, especially when conveyed by the charmless Teller. Surely he needs at least some likeable qualities. At one point, his mother says that Sutter has the biggest heart of anyone she knows, and all I could think was that she needed to get to know a few more people, because her son is an aimless louse. And that falls mostly on Teller, who simply isn’t able to earn our sympathy one bit. I can understand why someone would be into Aimee but I just don’t understand why this particular guy seems into her. If it’s because she’s the exact opposite of his ex, then not enough is made of that. If he’s leading her on, then he’s even worse. I don’t care what good intentions you have in wanting to boost someone’s self-esteem, you can’t let them think you’re romantically interested in them whilst they are very clearly falling in love with you. That is cruel, and at some point he is clearly made aware of it. By the time one figures that he might actually have developed genuine feelings for this girl, it’s too late to care. Casting a more inherently likeable actor in the role might’ve helped with this confusion (Nicholas Hoult or Logan Lerman would’ve been perfect), but even then it’d be an uphill battle. The character’s intentions are just never made clear enough. I feel like there’s some scenes missing with his rather sad ex, that help explain just what was going on between those two. It’s a bit vague in the finished film, and the scenes we do get between Teller and his ex just make it seem like Sutter wants to get back with his ex, and has no romantic interest in Aimee whatsoever.

 

The hatred I had for the main character was further exacerbated by the fact that Aimee is such a sweet and likeable girl, who deserved so much better than this creepy douchebag. I’ve taken a genuine disliking to Shailene Woodley’s performances/characters over the years (less so than Kristen Stewart, however, who is just awful), and especially disliked her performance as loathsomely self-absorbed Amy Jurgens on “The Secret Life of the American Teenager”. As this Aimee, however, she’s immediately very likeable, and the only relatable human being in this whole damn film. I still think Woodley always looks like she’s been sneezing off-camera, though. Anyone else sense that? Anyway, you’ll find her character relatable, you’ll have known girls like Aimee (I certainly have), and because Woodley holds up her end so well, it makes you like Aimee and absolutely HATE Sutter even more than you already do.

 

Someone should’ve looked at the finished film and realised that there was a major problem at its centre. Unfortunately, the film has other problems as well. I admire the film for trying to tackle more serious issues than the average teen film, but the whole thing plays like it’s trying to find its way to a point, and only starts to find that point towards the end. The director obviously thought his ending was cool, but all it left me doing was shrugging my shoulders and saying ‘Well?…I’m waiting...’ It never seemed to come to a real ending. The film starts off in one direction, wanders around drunkenly in all other directions, and only reaches its true purpose in the last ten minutes, before just conking out at the final scene. That’s seriously clunky filmmaking. I will say, though, that now I want to read the novel to see if it’s as clunky and if the main character is so unlikeable, I can’t imagine that being the case (I hear the ending is much clearer, and pretty downbeat. That sounds about spot-on to me).

 

I also appreciated the contributions of Kyle Chandler and the absolutely stunningly…well, perfect Mary Elizabeth Winstead. This is immediately Chandler’s best-ever work. It’s like he’s known this character all of his life. He’s so good that you barely even notice that he’s playing the biggest cliché in movies: The deadbeat dad. Chandler makes him authentic instead of caricatured and unconvincing. He and Woodley are the best, and among the only good things here. As for Winstead…sigh. On the surface, her character is meant to feel somewhat superior to and separate from her family. However, in her scenes with Teller, Winstead’s character is shown to obviously care about her brother. She may be a little removed from his life, but there’s none of that usual, bratty brother-sister crap going on here, and I really appreciated that. Did I mention that she’s beautiful? More beautiful than usual, even. Is she getting more beautiful with age or what? Honestly, I might’ve spaced out and missed some of her dialogue because I was so awestruck by the woman’s beauty. She’s going to do something great one day, I believe. Anyway, enough of me being a creepy stalker…

 

No, I didn’t get this film at all, and the crucial miscasting of Miles Teller in the lead is a truly fatal blow the film never recovers from. It also only contains one surprising moment in the entire film, and that’s about 70 minutes in. A couple of quite good performances and one belated surprise aren’t enough to rescue this miscalculated, poorly scripted coming-of-age film. Proof that being a ‘realistic’ and ‘serious’ teen film, doesn’t always equate to being a ‘good’ teen film.

 

Rating: C-