If one of the pleasures of moviegoing is seeing strange new things on the screen, another pleasure, and probably a deeper one, is experiencing moments of recognition–-times when we can say, yes, that’s exactly right, that’s exactly the way it would have happened. About Last Night . . . is a movie filled with moments like that. It has an eye and an ear for the way we live now, and it has a heart, too, and a sense of humor.
It is a love story. A young man and a young woman meet, and fall in love, and over the course of a year they try to work out what that means to them. It sounds like a simple story, and yet About Last Night . . . is one of the rarest of recent American movies, because it deals fearlessly with real people, instead of with special effects.
If there’s anyone more afraid of a serious relationship than your average customer in a singles bar, it’s a Hollywood producer. American movies will cheerfully spend millions of dollars on explosions and chases to avoid those moments when people are talking seriously and honestly to one another. After all, writing good dialogue takes some intelligence.
And intelligence is what sparkles all through About Last Night . . .—intelligence and a good, bawdy comic sensibility. The movie stars Rob Lowe as a salesman for a Chicago grocery wholesaler, and Demi Moore as an art director for a Michigan Avenue advertising agency. They meet at a softball game in Grant Park. Their romance blossoms in the singles bars of Rush Street, with a kindly bartender as father figure. At first they are attracted mostly by biological reasons (they belong to a generation that believes it’s kind of embarrassing to sleep with someone for the first time after you know them too well). Then they get to like each other. Then it is maybe even love, although everyone tap-dances around that word. Commitment, in their world, is the moment when Lowe offers Moore the use of a drawer in his apartment. Her response to that offer is one of the movie’s high points.
Meanwhile, there is counterpoint, too. Lowe’s best friend is his partner at work, played by James Belushi. Moore’s best friend is Elizabeth Perkins, her roommate and fellow warrior on the singles scene. While Lowe and Moore start getting really serious about each other, Belushi and Perkins grow possessive—and also develop a spontaneous dislike for one another.
The story is kind of predictable in About Last Night . . ., if you have ever been young and kept your eyes open. There are only a limited number of basic romantic scenarios for young people in the city, and this movie sees through all of them. What’s important is the way the characters look and sound, the way they talk, the way they reveal themselves, the way they grow by taking chances. Time after time, there are shocks of recognition, as the movie shows how well it understands what’s going on.
Lowe and Moore, members of Hollywood’s “Brat Pack,” are survivors of 1985’s awful movie about yuppie singles, St. Elmo’s Fire. This is the movie St. Elmo’s Fire should have been. The 1985 movie made them look stupid and shallow. About Last Night . . . gives them the best acting opportunities either one has ever had, and they make the most of them. Moore is especially impressive. There isn’t a romantic note she isn’t required to play in this movie, and she plays them all flawlessly.
Belushi and Perkins are good, too, making us realize how often the movies pretend that lovers live in a vacuum. When a big new relationship comes into your life, it requires an adjustment of all the other relationships, and a certain amount of discomfort and pain. Belushi and Perkins provide those levels for the story, and a lot of its loudest laughs, too.
The movie is based on Sexual Perversity in Chicago, a play by David Mamet. The screenplay by Tim Kazurinsky and Denise DeClue smooths out Mamet’s more episodic structure, and adds three-dimensional realism. It’s a wonderful writing job, and Edward Zwick, directing a feature for the first time, shows a sure touch. His narrative spans an entire year, and the interest never lags.
Why is it that love stories are so rare from Hollywood these days? Have we lost faith in romance? Is love possible only with robots and cute little furry things from the special-effects department? Have people stopped talking? About Last Night . . . is a warmhearted and intelligent love story, and one of 1986’s best movies.
All the Real Girls
R, 108 m., 2003
Paul Schneider (Paul), Zooey Deschanel (Noel), Shea Whigham (Tip), Danny McBride (Bust-Ass), Maurice Compte (Bo), Heather McComb (Mary-Margaret), Benjamin Mouton (Leland), Patricia Clarkson (Elvira). Directed by David Gordon Green and produced by Jean Doumanian and Lisa Muskat. Screenplay by Green.
We like to be in love because it allows us to feel idealistic about ourselves. The other person ennobles, inspires, redeems. Our lover deserves the most wonderful person alive, and that person is ourselves. Paul (Paul Schneider), the hero of All the Real Girls, has spent his young manhood having sex with any girl who would have sex with him and some who were still making up their minds, but when he meets Noel he doesn’t want to rush things. He wants to wait, because this time is special.
Noel (Zooey Deschanel), who has spent the last several years in a girls’ boarding school, is crazy in love with him and is a virgin. She is eighteen, an age when all the hormones in our bodies form ranks and hurl themselves against the ramparts of our inhibitions. That they can discuss these matters with romantic idealism does not entirely work as a substitute.
All the Real Girls, David Gordon Green’s second film, is too subtle and perceptive, and knows too much about human nature, to treat their lack of sexual synchronicity as if it supplies a plot. Another kind of movie would be entirely about whether they have sex. But Green, who feels tenderly for his vulnerable characters, cares less about sex than about feelings and wild, youthful idealism. He comes from North Carolina, the state where young Thomas Wolfe once prowled the midnight campus, so in love with life that he uttered wild goat cries at the moon.
Most movies about young love trivialize and cheapen it. Their cynical makers have not felt true love in many years, and mock it, perhaps out of jealousy. They find something funny in a twenty-year-old who still doesn’t realize he is doomed to grow up to be as jaded as they are. Green is twenty-seven, old enough to be jaded, but he has the soul of a romantic poet. Wordsworth, after all, was thirty-six when he published
The rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the rose;
How many guys that age would have that kind of nerve today? Green knows there are nights when lovers want simply to wrap their arms around each other and celebrate their glorious destinies.
He centers these feelings on characters who live in the same kind of rusty, overgrown southern mill town he used for his great first film, George Washington (2000). His characters grew up together. They look today on the faces of their first contemporaries. Paul’s best friend, Tip (Shea Whigham), has been his best friend almost from birth. That he is Noel’s brother is a complication, since Tip knows all about Paul’s other girls. And more than a complication, because your best friend’s sister embodies a history that includes your entire puberty, and may be the first person you noticed had turned into a girl.
Green likes to listen to his characters talk. They don’t have much to do. Some of them work at the few remaining mill jobs, and we learn some details about their lives (an hourly sprinkler system washes the fibers out of the air). They stand around and sit around and idly discuss the mysteries of life, which often come down to whether someone did something, or what they were thinking of when they did it, or if they are ever going to do it. I had relatives who lived in towns like these, and I know that when you go to the salad bar it includes butterscotch pudding.