When I first started this blog back in January I knew there would inevitably be a moment, perhaps lasting a week or two, where I just wouldn’t be able to write anything. Over the months I managed to watch close to a movie a day, so there were always movies to review and ideas for the essays that usually prove the toughest to write. For eight solid months I had no issue sitting down at this beaten up Macbook and cranking out 500-2000 words on a film I enjoyed. But as they tend to say, nothing lasts forever.
For the past two weeks my movie watching habits, and connected to it, my writing habits, have slowed to an absolute crawl because of a new job. I’ve written while having jobs before. Years ago I managed to maintain a daily blog while working retail and barely missed a beat, but the new job has not only had the time demand but it’s also taken a bit out of me mentally.
Let me explain.
For the first time in about 27 years, I’m back in my hometown on a daily basis working in the school system that I managed to escape from with my eventual graduation. I now spend my days working with students across four schools, encompassing all age groups, working with them and their families to help stem the tide of truancy that became prevalent with the spread of COVID. I didn’t expect it to be an easy job, and it certainly isn’t, but I didn’t expect it to mess with my mind as much as it has as well.
For years, I avoided “coming home.” I’d visit my mother on the holidays and that was about it. When my son was born I’d bring him around for more of the same. I lived far enough away that I felt distance, but I was still within an hours drive of the house I grew up in. And while I was away, I was able to ignore any of the news that I didn’t want to hear dealing with the people and the lives I moved away from. Hell, with the emergence of MySpace and Facebook I could keep in touch with all the friends from back home that I wanted to without ever having to see that “Enjoy the Spirit of a Friendly Town” again. And I was okay with that.
I avoided the high school reunions, which was probably a good thing because the movies taught me that high school reunions were good for only a handful of reasons, mostly either showing all the people you grew up with what a big successful deal you had become (to rub their nose in it) or to reconnect with the loved one you wish had never gotten away. So maybe if I’d become a world class assassin like Martin Blank (John Cusack) in Grosse Point Blank, perhaps I would’ve shown up to my 10th year, or 15th year reunion. Hell I only showed up at the 20 year reunion out of sheer curiosity and only on the reassurance that one of my best friends, whom I hadn’t seen in years, would be there. In the movies these class reunions usually fill up high school gymnasiums and have at least a hundred people there. Well, when you graduate less than fifty, chances are around ten are going to show up (which is pretty much what happened).
The reunion felt more like Ted Demme’s film Beautiful Girls, which honestly, is what I should’ve expected.
Willie Conway didn’t exactly want to return to his hometown. Played by a ruffled Timothy Hutton, Willie has been living life away from home, working in piano bars and barely making a living. While his talent for the keys likely shone large in the blue collar town he grew up in, in the city he was just another guy never getting his break. He might have a successful girlfriend who loves him, but Willie isn’t sure it’s enough, or even what he wants. So like many of us who are confronted with an uncomfortable choice, he chose to run back home where he would be greeted with open arms by those who loved him years ago.
Luckily for him, those he called friends are all still there. He’s got his best friend Mo Morris, played by the reliable staple of 90’s films, Noah Emmerich. While Willie went to the city , Mo stayed behind, married his sweetheart, and started a family. “He’s like a…person that doesn’t know any better. He doesn’t desire new experiences, new women, nothing. So he’s perfectly content.” After years apart he’s more than happy to see his old friend, share his content life with him, and catch up like time hasn’t passed. We’ve all got that friend and it’s comforting as all hell because he/she doesn’t want to challenge us, or prove anything to us, because being friends is good enough for them.
Then you’ve friends like Tommy “Birdman” Rowland. Played with his usual cocksure charm, Matt Dillon turns Tommy into that guy who of course still answers to the nickname he had while he was winning games at quarterback. And while he didn’t marry his high school cheerleading captain girlfriend, he has no problem sleeping with her now that she’s married to someone else. Sure, he’s got a devoted, beautiful girlfriend Sharon (Mira Sorvino) who plans a birthday party with all his friends, knowing that Darien (Lauren Holly), the one he won’t let get away, is more than likely to show up as well. Tommy is the living embodiment of Bruce Springsteen’s song “Glory Days” but he doesn’t care because he’s got a successful landscaping business and a sidekick/hypeman (Max Perlich) whose always there to remind him that he’s still the Birdman.
In most films these characters would be enough to remind us of our days gone by. Maybe Tommy wasn’t your friend. Maybe he taunted you with the threats of wedgies and swirlies and lockers that proved to be just big enough to fit your post-puberty but still not developed body into. Maybe Mo came to your rescue? Maybe you happened to be friends with Willie, and his cool guy laconic charm was enough for you to skate by with the “in” crowd for a while, but after high school, don’t most of us want to move on from this?
I sure as hell did. As evidenced in blogs past, I couldn’t wait to get away from my hometown and move away to the big city. Only I didn’t make it as long as Willie did, so when I first saw Beautiful Girls in 1996, I felt stung by it. I hadn’t retreated all the way home, but close enough for my ego to take the hit. At barely twenty years old I was already feeling disillusioned by what life, and my own choices, had handed me and I was far too proud at the time to let anyone know about it. I didn’t want to feel like a failure so I did my best to not talk to anyone who might have voted me as the “most likely to succeed” in those damn high school superlatives.
As much as I hate to admit it, I probably identified more with Michael Rapaport’s character than was comfortable for me to admit at the time.
Oh yeah, I hadn’t even mentioned him yet.
Michael Rapaport’s Paul Kirkwood is the heart and soul of this movie, but he’s also a complete idiot. For the majority of the film, he’s lamenting the end of a seven year long relationship to Jan (a sadly underused Martha Plimpton). She’s decided after years of not being proposed to, to leave him for a “forty year old meat cutter,” which Paul finds ridiculous. He cannot bring himself to fathom how she could leave him, who lives in Tommy’s house and does plow jobs for Tommy, for a simple meat cutter, so he decides that the best course of action is to plow her car into the garage after each snowstorm, which every New Englander can tell you, is a pretty passive aggressive “go fuck yourself.” In all his wisdom, he knows that he can do better than Jan because he deserves a supermodel, so much that he adorns the walls of his room with torn out pages from the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue and even names his dog after Elle McPhearson, who if I’m to be completely honest, was my favorite supermodel growing up. (Her being on the cover of the SI Swimsuit issue, which was the closest thing I could get to porn, when I hit puberty might’ve had something to do with that.)
“A beautiful girl can make you dizzy, like you’ve been drinking Jack and Coke all morning. She can make you feel high, full of the single greatest commodity known to man: promise. The promise of a better day. The promise of a greater hop. The promise of a new tomorrow. This particular ore can be found in the gait of a beautiful girl. In her smile, in her soul, and the way she makes every rotten little thing about life seem like it’s going to be okay.”
And for a brief moment, he thinks that’s all within his reach because for one night, the most beautiful woman to ever walk into his life agrees to have a drink with him.
Uma Thurman is so damn beautiful for a moment you might actually find yourself believing Paul’s bullshit. Her character, Andera, is in town visiting her cousin “Stinky,” (and yes, I’m sure the writer Scott Roesenberg paired those two up for a reason) and as he would say, girls who look like her are born with boyfriends. And as beautiful as her appearance is, both Demme and Rosenberg use every opportunity to show what a beautiful person she is. She enjoys walking home in the dark because, well, it’s an opportunity to walk home in the dark. When asked out by literally every guy in the movie she lets them know she’s in a relationship and is happy about it. She’s more than willing to talk Willie through his anxiety about his girlfriend Tracy (Annabeth Gish) and is quick to remind him that somewhere out there, some guy is jealous that Willie gets to be her boyfriend. She even let’s Paul, who got her to a bar on the promise/lie that they’d be hanging out with everyone, use her to make Jan jealous. Only when he kisses her does she let him know that he’s acting like a damn fool and that she was trying to help him. Of all the characters in the film, it’s Andera, and perhaps Rosie O’Donnell’s hard truth telling Gina that have their act together. For Andera, it’s the joy of going back to Chicago, drinking an ice cold martini, and enjoying the music of Van Morrison. For Gina, it’s the realization that skinny girls have no asses and small boobs while big girls have big asses and big boobs. God is fair.
But poor Paul, he can’t bring himself to realize any of this. He attempts to win back Jan, not by listening to her, by trying to understand her, but by embarrassing her at work with a proposal and a champagne colored diamond. He’s spent his entire life chasing an unrealistic ideal that he mistakenly equates beauty with love, not realizing that he had love all along. In perhaps the most cathartic scene of the entire movie, and perhaps the only proper use of KISS’s song “Beth,” Paul plows the snow away from Jan’s garage, all while crying his eyes out. She likely still won’t take him back, but at least he’s finally acting like an adult.
Thankfully, that’s where the film leaves most of its idiot men. Tommy, after getting the shit kicked out of him by Darien’s husband (and his friends) finds himself in the hospital. And despite everything he’s put her through, it’s still Sharon that comes to see him. Willie comes to realize just how lucky he is to have Tracy in his life. And Mo, well Mo had his act together all along. He knows how much his wife and family means to him, so much that it stops him from enacting revenge after Tommy’s beat down.
Earlier in the film Mo had a drunken conversation with Willie, after Willie’s odd flirtation with a thirteen year old Natalie Portman, and it’s there that his truth rings through.
“So what are you saying? That this is my way of postponing the inevitable. This is my way of saying I don’t want to grow old?”
“No. I think this is your way of saying you don’t want to grow up.”
“I just want something beautiful.”
“We all want something beautiful Willie.”
I didn’t have all the answers when I first saw this film, and knowing that scared the hell out of me. In high school I was the guy who knew the answers, who had something to say about everything, who was filled with that magical word reserved for beautiful girls: promise. And I felt like such a failure for not having been on the right path after a mere two years away. Had I spoken to my friends about it perhaps one of them would’ve given me some Mo-like advice. They could’ve told me that I was still only twenty and avoiding my home town as much as possible wasn’t going to solve any of my problems. Only time and effort could do that, and perhaps love.
It wasn’t until I knew love that I managed to come back. Love for an old friend and his family that he’d created in the house he grew up in, love for my own son who had gone off to create a life of his own, and love for the beautiful girl who came into my life just when I needed her most. It allowed me to finally accept myself, with all my victories and fuck ups, promise both fulfilled and forgotten.
It was love that allowed me to realize that I could go home again.
