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METROPOLITAN (1990)
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Exiting from a concert and apparently hailing a cab, Tom Townsend (Edward Clements), poor only son of a debutante divorcee, is by chance swept up into the Sally Fowler Rat Pack, the most In of In Crowds, as they debutante-party their Christmas holiday fortnight in a snowy Manhattan.
Long after her death and the slow drift of her books into college-English obscurity, Jane Austen has experience a revival as a scenarist, for her novels make such exquisite fodder for social comedies updated (Clueless 1995), faithful (Emma 1996), and anachronistically mixed (Pride and Prejudice 2005) -- or, in Metropolitan, as thematically inspired. Adapted from Mansfield Park texturally and conceptually rather than literally, the novel follows the fragile and apprehensive coming into uncharted adulthood of characters Taylor Nichols, Dylan Hundley, Isabel Gillies, Will Kempe, and Ellia Thompson. Oh, wait -- those are the actors' names, virtually all of whom were unknown before and after Metropolitan, amateurs drawn as they were from the social milieu of author and first-time director Whit Stillman, who has channeled his own life into art.
Townsend scrapes along in a West Side apartment even as he graduates from private school and slides seamlessly into a (Yale?) scholarship, without even a proper coat ("it has a liner," he doughtily chirps even as he shivers down Fifth Avenue with the SFRP) and a rented tuxedo that he is perpetually late to return. He simultaneously affects to despise deb parties (with a Fourierist objection 'on principle') and yet falls in with them as comfort food, leading to his upbraiding by the SFRP's uncrowned intellectual king, sardonic Nick Smith (Chris Eigeman, The Last Days of Disco), who comments:
I mean there's something a tiny bit arrogant about people going around feeling sorry for other people they consider 'less fortunate.' Are the 'more fortunate' really so terrific? Do you want some much richer guy going around saying, 'Poor Tom Townsend, doesn't even have a winter coat -- I can't go to any more parties'?"
And Nick, whose endless wisecracks conceal his essentially responsible nature, goes on to press Tom with his escorting duty:
I'm not sure you realize it, but they’re at a very vulnerable point in their lives. All this is much more emotional and difficult for them than it is for us. They're on display. They've got to call guys up to invite them as escorts. And preppie girls mature socially much later than others do; for many of them this is the first serious social life they've had. If you just disappear now, they're going to take that as a personal rejection. I'm not entirely joking here.
Nick's self-mocking quality suffuses Metropolitan to our delight. When challenged as "completely impossible and out of control, a snob, sexist, totally obnoxious, tiresome, and lately, you've just gotten weird," he responds, "I'm not tiresome!" That same selective defense is displayed by Tom, late in the film when as indigent knight errant he and Charlie Black (Taylor Nichols, Barcelona) have taken a cab from Manhattan to Southampton to rescue Audrey Rouget (Carolyn Farina, discovered by Stillman behind a perfume counter in the West 50's) from the clutches of wastrel rake Rick Von Sloneker. After failing to penetrate Audrey's demure reserve, Von Sloneker shouts, "Get outta here and take this flat-chested, goody-goody, pain in the neck," to which Tom righteously yelps, "she is not a goody-goody!" With Von Sloneker gone Audrey asks him, with shy hurt, "Do you really think I'm flat-chested?"
The anti-Trotsky to Nick Smith's anti-Lenin is Charlie, obsessed with developing an ethos, purpose, and nomenclature for what he dubs the UHB -- the Urban Haute Bourgeoisie, which he earnestly explains is a more appropriate term than 'preppie' or 'WASP.' Ubb's, as Charlie later decides they should be pronounced, are in his view condemned by privilege to a life of indolent inutility, a moral doom of vacuity that is punctured by a mid-thirties UHB they encounter in a bar, who accepts the term's validity and the risk:
The acid test is whether you take any pleasure in responding to the question, 'what do you do?' I can't bear it.
but with perfect infinite weariness gently contradicts Charlie:
You'll have to accept it. Not everyone from our background is doomed to failure.
Even as these characters are adrift in that empty personal and ethical intellectual space between childhood and adulthood -- adults are as absent as in Peanuts -- they also have a touching faith in moral precepts, whether in Nick's passionate defense of the boys' duties, Charlie's early insistence that Tom is a cad, or Tom's quixotic quest to protect Audrey's (unthreatened, as we discover) virtue. Yet throughout, they are genuinely witty, and the quotable lines glitter unendingly.
Many are the movies we saw once, long ago, and were enraptured, but few are those whose sparkle remains fresh when seen a second time. Metropolitan is a keeper, a film to watch once for its surprises, and a second time to savor its jests, quips, and unintentional absurdities.