Call me the Roger Ebert of the Instagram generation.
The Spectacular Now is a high school romance story featuring two leads who, at least at the start of the film, could not be more different from one another.
Gasp! Who could have expected that?
In one corner, we have Sutter, played by Miles Teller, who is a charismatic, lackadaisical party animal who drinks on the job and doesn’t do his homework.
In the other corner is Aimee, played by Shailene Woodley, who is sweet, shy, and loves to read.
I wonder what’ll happen next…
Even I, who had never before watched a high school romance, could recognize that The Spectacular Now’s premise is cliched as hell. It’s literally the same relational archetype that appears in 90% of all anime produced in recent years: popular guy meets nerdy girl.
But somewhat strangely, the scenes that left the biggest impression on me were precisely those that were generic and formulaic. Sutter and Aimee have an undeniable chemistry on the screen, and their dialogue feels completely unscripted and natural. Unlike most other films set in high school, the two leads actually look like high schoolers, talk like high schoolers, and act like high schoolers. There are nervous laughs and awkward silences, drunken whispers and bad decisions. Throughout it all, the dynamic between Teller and Woodley never feels forced, contrived, or manufactured: some scenes made me feel as though I was observing a real-life interaction between two high schoolers. In my view, the movie was at its best when Sutter and Aimee were interacting with one another. It’s the kind of interaction every romance director attempts to recreate. Ponsoldt is one of the few to succeed at it.
But The Spectacular Now wanted to be more than a simple romance movie, and I think the film’s “more-ness” served as both a strength and a weakness.
Sutter is not a straightforward character. One the one hand, he is, at heart, a good guy who helps out his friends and cares for the people in his life. On the other hand, he is an irresponsible, borderline alcoholic who cannot commit to anyone and is nearly failing out of school. Aimee is attracted to Sutter’s positive qualities, but his many shortcomings threaten to hurt her deeply.
So far, so good. Never a bad idea to throw some ambiguity into a relationship and see where it goes.
But the film increasingly moves in the direction of “Why is Sutter so damaged and damaging?” at the expense of further exploring his relationship with Aimee, which, as I said, was the strongest aspect of the movie. By the end, there’s a lot of “Nobody loves me!” from Sutter, while Aimee remains unflaggingly supportive but somewhat invisible. A couple of the scenes at the end — I have in mind one in particular — are actually cringeworthy.
Yes, Sutter is arguably a tortured soul. But if that was what the movie was about, commit to it fully, not halfheartedly.
In the end, that’s what the movie felt like to me: a little halfhearted. It was a half-hearted romance: the chemistry between Sutter and Aimee was great, but the film didn’t delve into the relationship enough to arrive at anything that felt truly substantial — to be honest, I still don’t know what the two leads liked about each other — and fizzled out into an ending scene that was truly, unabashedly cliche. And it was a half-hearted character study of a lost and dissatisfied seventeen-year old whose moments of breakdown and despair felt acutely out of place because he’d just been spending the last 75 minutes joking around with his new girlfriend.
That being said, I imagine people will have wildly divergent opinions on this movie. So I can’t recommend it, but I can’t condemn it either. If you like the romance genre, it may be worth checking out.
For me, it’s a 3 out of 5.