by Cole Smithey

High Fidelity

John Cusack is a wily devil. It isn’t enough that he’s been drinking from the fountain of youth since the last time he worked with British director Stephen Frears on The Grifters in 1990, with Annette Bening and Anjelica Huston, but the 34-year-old man/boy actor has cornered a cool piece of the film market with a confident brand of spry urban ingenuity. Ironically, his many past roles, from Say Anything to Being John Malkovich, seem to have all been leading to his humorous and fully-realized portrayal of a self-defeating hopeless romantic record collector named Rob Gordon, in Frears’s screen version of the Nick Hornby novel High Fidelity. Cusack seamlessly glides between fourth-wall breaking docu-style exposition, flash back sequences, and in-the-moment experiences to expose manifold layers of unflinching male romantic mentality.

"Some things you never get used to, even though you’re feeling like another man."

That quote, taken from Elvis Costello’s song "High Fidelity" from his 1980 album Get Happy, underscores the kind of post-modern angst that Rob suffers through in his relationships with women. Is the singer speaking to a soon-to-be ex-lover about wanting someone new, or is he testing his own subjective experience after the break-up has already occurred. Rob views his past relationships much like his favorite songs, through a filter of "top five" lists that his recent romantic failure with Laura (Iben Hjejle - [pronounced EE-ben YAY-lay] Mifune) doesn’t rate against in his list of "Top Five Most Memorable Break-Ups." Each past affair had its own charms (as is revealed in soul-searching flashbacks), but always within a recurring motif of self-perceived rejection that Rob seeks to undo by revisiting a few of his past girlfriends and questioning them about their reasons for giving him the boot — although, as it turns out, he did his share of rejecting too.

While Rob might seem, on first take, like a case of narcissistic arrested-development, he’s actually an above average guy with a job that falls within (even if it’s at the bottom) his top five choices of employment. He’s one of those rare human animals who really cares enough about his intimate relations to go the distance in attempting to not repeat past mistakes. If his methods seem silly at first, by midway in the movie, the audience is allowed to come around to seeing beneath Rob’s childish facade. The movie’s finest gift is that it lets the audience to embrace the whole of Rob’s idiosyncratic character and uncover, with him, the germ of love that so desperately longs to breed.

Rob owns and manages a semi-failing record store in Chicago that specializes in vinyl records with the help of geeky discophiles Barry (Jack Black - Dead Man Walking) and Dick (Todd Louiso - Apollo 13). These guys are walking encyclopedias of musical knowledge and are only too happy to bully customers and each other with their mastery of all musical minutiae. Frears sets a new watermark in mise en scene with his exacting attention to the cluttered record store’s details, which include visual treats like album covers of bands like "The Damned" and posters from bands like "The Silos." When Dick impresses Anaugh (Sara Gilbert - "Roseanne") with his musical prowess by playing "Suspect Device" by Stiff Little Fingers, it’s an near-religious moment of punk bliss. The soundtrack weighs in a bit heavy in favor of The Velvet Underground, but there are lots of other pop music treasures form artists like John Wesley Harding, Al Green, and Aretha Franklin that keep the movie percolating at a nice warm temperature.

Rob believes that it’s not what a person is like that’s important, but what they like, that reveals their real personality. He’s of a very specialized breed of male, born in 1963, who always seem to be ducking the bullets that caught up with John F. Kennedy. Although John Cusack is a couple of years behind the womb of ’63, he has an uncanny grasp of that breed’s convulsive and obsessive attitudes toward sex, life, and especially romance. Between Cusack’s work on co-writing the script for High Fidelity, and his priceless performance as Rob, lies the rock ’n’ roll heart and soul of a guy for whom audiences deserve to stand in line.

Writer/director/actor Stanley Tucci (The Imposters, Prizzi’s Honor) has a heart of gold for starving artists that he’s more than willing to wear on his sleeve. Tucci’s film treatment about the bond between writer Joseph Mitchell (staff writer for The New Yorker from the early ’40s through the mid-sixties) and bohemian writer/mental case Joe Gould (Ian Holm - The Sweet Hereafter), is an overlong period piece that follows the men’s odd friendship — which led to two famous New Yorker articles, "Professor Seagull," and "Joe Gould’s Secret". However sincere and era-accurate, Joe Gould’s Secret is, it lacks a clear dramatic arc and, most importantly, places too much importance on disclosing Gould’s "secret." The story resolves in a bathetic revelation that audiences will see coming from a mile away.

As much as Mitchell, or any one of the other writers said to be inspired by Mr. Gould’s literary presence (including Ezra Pound and e.e. Cummings), believed the lurking talent of Joe Gould to be, the ill-dressed little man was in fact a mentally unstable loser wandering the streets of New York hawking an idea about his pet project, an "Oral History of Our Time." His rap included his being a "graduate of Harvard, magna cum difficultate, class of 1911," and about how he had measured the heads of 1,500 Indians in zero degree weather. For a drink he would deliver a lecture, argue a point, or take off his shoes and imitate a seagull, or recite a poem. Gould would cause a public stir and then recite a poem like "My Religion":

Admittedly there is a dose of hurlyburly comedy and satire in the poem, but it pales against any couplet taken from, say, a Ramones song. Gould was a challenging if charming con man, who got people to contribute to his self titled support fund on the premise that they were financing his life’s work of writing an oral history of our time by jotting down, in composition books, snippets of overheard conversations that he considered meaningful. It’s a hugely flawed premise to begin with. What was the last time you overheard a conversation in public that was anything other than insipid and grating.

During the same years that the unpublished Gould was wallowing around in Manhattan gutters pretending to explode literary foundation, William S. Burroughs had developed a "cut-up" method of writing that he shuffled into shape and got published even as he wallowed around with a nasty heroin addiction. As the antagonist in Tucci’s film, Joe Gould is a nutso poser and a doomed loser.

If men are judged by the company they keep, then Joseph Mitchell was not a very good judge of character, and was definitely too melancholy for his own good. By the end of Joe Gould’s Secret, you sense that Mitchell’s association with Gould robbed him of a spark for life that could never be returned. It’s a bit depressing and engages the audience on a similar level of emotional distancing. Tucci examines a graceful period in ’40s New York life with a keen eye for detail and nuance. His performance as Mitchell is smoothly understated with a pitch perfect Virginia accent. It was a time in New York when a self-confessed misfit like Joe Gould could get by on the assistance of people/patrons he hounded for financial support with talk of an arcane history of modern time from the horses’s mouth.

The compositions of Gould’s that Mitchell reads aloud shed light on Joe Gould as an accomplished essayist, but because the audience is never given an aural taste of the oral histories themselves (supposedly an opus of more than nine million words), the film’s pivotal theme proves remote and groundless. These are different times and there aren’t too many poets studying rules of verse anymore, but audiences will roll their eyes over this movie. Ian Holm gives a fastidious performance as a scraggly poet who was still studying the rules of Urban Survival 101 long after class was out.