Michael Cera vs. The World

YET ANOTHER SCOTT PILGRIM REVIEW WITH A "[BLANK] vs. the [BLANK]" SNOWCLONE

Panel from Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim.

IIt’s a universal truth that the movie is always worse than the comic on which it was based, and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World—the latest and greatest Michael Cera vehicle—is no exception. Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Oni Press cult hit Scott Pilgrim is superior by far. Fortunately, however, O’Malley’s comic is terrific enough that SPVTW still manages to be a decent, if sometimes facile, film.

I know, I know. Any self-respecting, young-ish cultural critic is supposed to have long ago turned against Michael Cera and, by extension, any film in which he appears. Maybe it was Juno; maybe it was the rumors (unsubstantiated though they may be) that his holding out for more money is the cause of death of the Arrested Development movie. I think Gawker, however, put it best: Cera has “reveal[ed] the hipster machinery a little too openly for any self-respecting hipster to admit to be fooled by.” And as the swarm of fixie-riding, grandma glasses-wearing, Brooklyn-worshiping twenty-somethings go, so goes the nation. And so, SPVTW has shared the same cruel fate as the very-watchable Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist, the nearly unwatchable Paper Heart, and the simply unwatched Youth in Revolt; viz., no one went and saw the poor thing.

But if there’s a movie to showcase Cera’s, let’s say unique, talents, it’s SPVTW. Sure, Cera is the Coldplay of actors: His songs sound exactly the same, but the song he plays over and over again isn’t that bad. And in the case of SPVTW, the eponymous character is a half-assholic, half-hapless twenty-something whose main redeeming trait is a sort of detached, if winning, awkwardness. I think someone’s playing Cera’s song.

Even better: One of the distinguishing—indeed, noteworthy—traits of SPVTW (and the comic by the same name) is that the arc of the protagonist moves not from awkward-but-hapless to awkward-but-brave, but rather awkward-but-assholic to awkward-but-less-assholic. Let me put it another way: Michael Cera is no Zach Braff, and SPVTW is no Garden State.

Even better-er: The main female protagonist of the film, Ramona Flowers (sadly, the only mis-casting in an otherwise perfectly-cast movie), is no Natalie Portman. Of course, compared to the comic, the Flowers of the film is little more than a hollow shell of her comic book counterpart, but compared with other Manic Pixie Dream Girls, Flowers is frackin’ Shakespearean.

It’s worth pointing out that, unlike the comic, the movie doesn’t past the Bechdel Test—a test made famous by Alison Bechdel’s comic Dykes to Watch Out For. (For the uninitiated, the Bechdel Test is this: One should only see a movie that has (1) at least two women in it (2) who talk to each other (3) about something other than a man.) The female characters suffered the most from the inevitable cuts to and Hollywoodization of the comic, which is a travesty considering O’Malley’s nuanced depictions. Indeed, SPVTW’s failure to pass the Bechdel Test is representative of the main problem with the film: O’Malley’s comic spanned over 1,200 pages and three years, while SPVTW sliced that down to an hour and change and three weeks.

But despite the sometimes-brutal cuts and basterdizations, SPVTW still managed to shine. It helps that the dialogue is largely taken verbatim from the comic and that Beck wrote half of the music. Plus, if the movie had a face, it would kiss the casting director on the lips.

The real triumph of SPVTW is that it manages to take the tropes and trappings of hipsterdom and fill that nihilism with earnestness. Indeed, the final boss (Jason Schwartzman at his best—excepting Rushmore) gets his ass kicked after proclaiming his allegiance to cutting-edge taste, declaring, “I’m hip; I’m what’s happening; I’m what’s blowing up now.” That’s right, the movie’s penultimate scene is Michael Cera beating up the biggest hipster ever.

Self-aware without being self-conscious, refreshingly fun but not vapid, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is worth seeing on the silver screen—even if, as a character in the movie admits, the comic’s much better.