The Spectacular Now is good, but it should be so much better. At only 95 minutes long it spends most of its running time on the same idea only to finally target some major dramatic beats in the final 20 minutes or so. Suddenly everything is rushed and seemingly major developments suddenly feel insignificant. Miles Teller and Shailene Woodley are fantastic as a pair of lost souls that find and lift one another up, but once the end rolls around it seems director James Ponsoldt believes we’ve reached some profound place in these characters’ lives when in fact I started to care less and less.
Teller plays Sutter Keely, a high school senior whose wit and charm make him the life of the party. He’s hit a bit of a roadblock, however, ashis longtime girlfriend just broke up with him due to a misunderstanding, leaving him in a mild funk, but nothing his incessant drinking can’t cure along with his “live in the now” motto. Yet, this perpetual state of “now” also means he’s not only ignoring painful memories from the past, but he’s putting zero effort into his future. Cue Aimee Finicky (Shailene Woodley).
After a night of heavy drinking Aimee comes across Sutter passed out in someone’s front lawn. She agrees to help him find his car and an unlikely friendship begins. Aimee is a bit of a wallflower, in-the-background kind of girl. Not exactly the girl you’d expect a hard-partying “cool” kid to start hanging out with and dating. Even more importantly, the likelihood he’ll break her heart is almost a certainty. Given Woodley’s kindhearted performance and innocent laugh you can’t help but immediately put a guard up for her.
Ponsoldt’s direction and the screenplay by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber based on Tim Tharp‘s novel make good use of Aimee’s naivety, giving reason for many of her decisions, but at the same time this reliance opens the door for plot strands left unexplored or abandoned entirely.
Ponsoldt’s last film, Smashed, starring May Elizabeth Winstead (who co-stars here as Sutter’s sister), explored alcoholism as well. Only in that film it wasn’t just an aside or character trait, it was dealt with and resolved to the best of the narrative’s ability by the film’s end. Here it never feels as if it’s all that important except when the story needs some sort of dramatic device to pull us in emotionally. In fact, it’s used more as a comedic beat as Sutter first offers Aimee a swig from his flask to which she recoils and says, “How can you drink that stuff?” only to later buy her her own flask to which she responds with excitement and can be seen pulling from for the rest of the film.
I had a hard time figuring out if The Spectacular Now was attempting to live in reality or some sort of heightened reality where moments in life were sped up and slowed down depending on how the audience was meant to respond emotionally. One specific scene at the beginning of the third act will cause the audience to gasp in disbelief. It’s a moment that’s almost discarded as quickly as it happens, proving not only was it unnecessarily manipulative, but unnecessary from a narrative standpoint as the same results could have been reached without such drastic consequences and far more realistically if that was the goal.
For as many areas of insecurity as Ponsoldt and his screenwriters build throughout the first hour or so of this film, they seem to only casually deal with them in the final act and only in the most generic of circumstances. Any honesty and goodwill the film may have gained to that point is called into question because the story abandons any level of reality in an effort to tidy things up before the credits roll.
As much as this sounds like I’m harping on the movie, it’s more a frustration as what they had was so good until it all slowly falls apart into cloying dramatic beats. Teller and Woodley are so good in this film that it’s frustrating to see those efforts wasted.
The Spectacular Now has this strange quality of being both entertaining and tedious at the same time. 50 minutes into the film I was looking at my watch and astonished to see we were only an hour in as I knew the film was only 95 minutes long. The story had reached a point where it either needed to end or it would need another hour to resolve everything it had developed to that point. The resolution is given no such time to blossom as the first hour seems intent on entertaining the audience with only cautionary moments of real life consequences until the final act stands up and holds up a STOP sign to suggest any fun we may have been having has its own consequences.
Some may argue the film itself mirrors its protagonist and I can’t argue with this interpretation, though I have a hard time accepting it altogether as I can’t say I believe that was Ponsoldt’s intention. I’d say the same thing could be argued when it comes to Sofia Coppola‘s The Bling Ring from earlier this year, but at that point it begins to feel like more of an excuse than an explanation.
