Movie Review: HIGH FIDELITY
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HIGH FIDELITY
Reviewed 5/4/2000
John Cusack is getting a doughy double chin. This is a major career crisis if you have built your reputation on playing wry thoughtful morose lonely good-hearted (WTMLGH) teenagers. Now, Cusack does this winningly and well, starting with 16 CANDLES, through SAY ANYTHING, GROSSE POINTE BLANK, and even BEING JOHN MALKOVICH. (Of course, getting to play opposite Ione Skye, Minnie Driver, Cameron Diaz and Catherine Zeta-Jones is a fringe benefit to make one cling to the WTMLGH oeuvre.)

In HIGH FIDELITY, Cusack is an arrested-development single guy who has reached teen-angst apotheosis: he owns and more or less operates a record store staffed by an absorbed balding neurotic and a hostile supercilious abusive (Jack Black). (In effect, Cusack has made the journey from being Anthony Michael Hall's 16 Candles sidekick to the leader of the grunge pack.) But the conceit runs a little thin because the movie's main structure is Cusack talking to the camera, and he just looks too old, too adult, too wise, too well balanced to make interesting or endearing the other self whom we see behaving like a self-defeating teenager. I mean, grow up; sooner or later, everybody does.

As the movie opens, Cusack has just broken up with his girlfriend Laura (Iben Hjejle, who looks like Robin Wright's younger sister and does a commendable job), a parting that does not even make his top five breakups. "If you really wanted to mess me up," he shouts down from his apartment window, "you should have got to me sooner!" He then chronicles, via flashback, each of the other five breakups, a frame that then becomes the movie's structural center as, one by one, he calls up these old girlfriends asking for forensic diagnoses.

Looked at objectively, then, the movie is dull, at least for anyone who does not immediately see him or herself in Cusack's character, but for us grownups, there are cute cameos sprinkled throughout: Tim Robbins as pompous oleaginous gray-pony-tailed Ian ("Conflict resolution is my job"). Lisa Bonet as a self-absorbed singer (now *there's* a stretch) whom Cusack first describes (before we meet her) as "a post-Partridge Family, pre-L A Law Susan Dey. Black". Cusack's older sister Joan, who plays a mutual friend who chews him out with an intimate vigor suggesting these two have been acting out with one another since they were 6 and 4, respectively. And there are funny rock group or album names like Kathleen Turner Overdrive, The Falling Wallendas (on a poster, watching for it), and I Sold My Mother's Wheelchair.

Finally, you couldn't help up noticing how the movie is constructed for conversion to television. Though R, it has no nudity (except one shot of Jack Black's crack -- gack), so nothing will need to be snipped; instead the R derives exclusively from the 14 Words You Can't Say On Television (as George Carlin once dubbed them). Maybe the MPAA should subdivided R into VR and NR for Verbal or Nude R-dom.

After nearly two hours, the movie does finish sweet, although getting there seemed an eternity. And Catherine Zeta-Jones is breathtaking.

ã Copyright 2002 David Alexander Smith