The film distributor A24 has, in the recent past, become a seal of quality. I took notice of their brand after they released Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy, and Locke (that movie where Tom Hardy drives for 80 minutes.) The world took notice when Moonlight won Best Picture at the Oscars. An A24 film has resided on every top-10-of-the-year list I’ve made since 2013. This year has been a fairly decent year for the company, and probably my favorite A24 year so far. Hereditary and First Reformed will likely duke it out to be my favorite of the year, Eighth Grade has become a runaway success, and they’re still basking in the glory of last year’s Oscar nominations for The Disaster Artist, Lady Bird, and The Florida Project. When you factor in such cult hits as A Ghost Story, The Killing Of A Sacred Deer, It Comes At Night, and Good Time, you might say 2017 was the year of A24.
Their output is about as perfect, from my perspective, as a distributor’s output can possibly be. A24 is not without flaw, but when they release a fuck-up of epic proportions like Van Sant’s Sea of Trees, they have reasons for doing so. Van Sant is (controversially) a revered auteur, so of course it’s a sound business practice for a company like this to align themselves with his work, even if that work is utterly atrocious.
Welcome to A24’s first major, unforgivable fuck-up, How To Talk To Girls At Parties.
This film is based on a short story by Neil Gaiman, the man responsible for the hit novel American Gods, and the comic book series The Sandman. The source material here is about 18 pages long. There isn’t even close to 18 pages-worth of story in the film adaptation, and that’s rather shocking.
Explaining what this film is can be quite difficult, because while it’s certainly not a complex film, it’s a very confusing one due to its sheer incompetence. If I was prompted to describe it verbally on-the-spot, I’d probably say, “It’s a movie about these kids, and they find aliens, and one kid falls in love with an alien played by Elle Fanning, and…”, trailing off into silence. I had to go back and re-watch several sections of the film just to make sure I understood what was going on, because I spent most of the run-time wondering if I had perhaps fallen asleep during a major plot point.
Alex Sharp, who looks like every nice-guy indie-young-adult-film lead that the world quickly forgot about, plays a character named Enn, who hangs out with his fellow burn-out punks on a regular basis. They spend the first several sequences of the film bitching about how they can’t get laid, because nothing says “punk” like entitled incel behavior.
Elle Fanning, who has taken on some really daring and risky movies of late, has finally discovered the dark side of volunteering for every indie film that comes along. She plays Zan, an alien who comes to earth because her culture requires some kind of lame rite-of-passage ritual. I suppose that means she’s an “alien teenager.” The film tries to draw parallels between her experiences and #teenproblems but fails miserably.
The real victim here is Nicole Kidman, who really thought she was playing the British version of Aunty Entity (Tina Turner in Mad Max 3: Beyond Thunderdome.) From the trailer, that’s really the vibe I got from her, but her character is underutilized and flat. She’s the manager of some local punk club, and acts as something of a figurehead to the punks. Kidman turns that accent up to 11, and as a result, her dialog is excruciatingly difficult to understand. Her place in the film is to shout really boring dialog while channeling the lamest iteration of David Bowie in Labyrinth imaginable.
Enn and Zan meet and fall in love. By “fall in love”, I mean that Zan allows Enn to enter her, and spends the rest of the movie talking about their sexual experiences openly. This is supposed to be a fish-out-of-water story for Elle Fanning’s character, so she takes every opportunity to groan-inducingly remind the audience that she’s naïve to human ways. She’s somewhere between Chauncey Gardner and Kenneth Branagh-era Thor. None of the humor derived from this aspect of her character landed for me.
Of course, the aliens are really here for nefarious reasons, and when a war breaks out between the aliens and the Kidman-led “punks”, Enn and Zan try to bring about peace. It’s a pretty basic plot, but it’s so scattered and confusing that it almost feels complex through no intention of its own.
The trailer for this film looks like an exercise in style over substance, which isn’t always a terrible thing. It looks bright and colorful, and like the kind of film that would at least be enjoyable even if it wasn’t a great movie. Well, the aliens wear colorful costumes. Whoever edited that trailer was an absolute genius, because they took every scene involving a colorful alien outfit and sliced them all together to look like an ecstasy-fueled dream. The most baffling aspect of How To Talk To Girls At Parties is just how drab the entire film looks when compared to that trailer.
Nicole Kidman’s performance and her tangential relationship to the plot is about the only thing keeping the film from being the worst thing I’ve seen this year. It’s really, really funny to watch Kidman do her punk Tina Turner impression.
Unfortunately, she doesn’t really do anything other than get really pissed off at a few aliens, eventually leading her to guide a small rebellion of punks toward an unremarkable battle against the aliens.
I think there was supposed to be some social commentary here, but it gets buried in the muck. At first, I thought it could be a class metaphor, but I’m not sure anymore. The dichotomy between Elle Fanning and Nicole Kidman feels like it’s supposed to represent something, but I couldn’t tell you what. It’s a pretty drab thematic blunder.
The film sits at 47% on Rotten Tomatoes, which makes me wonder if 47% of critics saw the trailer and Neil Gaiman’s name, but didn’t bother to watch the film.
How To Talk To Girls At Parties is a massive disappointment.
For shame, A24.
For shame!
2/10