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Shopgirl (2005)

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From Time Out London

Steve Martin’s fingerprints are rather too present on this bittersweet fable. He’s done an astute adaptation of his own novella, but Martin the producer should have known better than to have himself supply the pointed voiceover, since it unhelpfully confuses the omniscient narrator with Martin’s co-starring role as the gallant yet reserved dot-com millionaire involved with Claire Danes’s department store sales assistant. Is the multi-hyphenate really so desperate for recognition? This story of a very wealthy older man confronting the cost of his unwillingness to commit to the young woman who’s fallen for him displays a ‘sensitivity’ verging on narcissism, rather distracting attention from the movie’s evident quality elsewhere.

Danes, for instance, delivers an awards-calibre turn as the girl on the glove counter trying to hold on to her sanity and self-respect in the uncaring landscape of bustling but lonely LA, where a laundromat encounter with slacker font-designer Jason Schwartzman prompts a stuttering liaison beset by his awkward immaturity. No wonder Martin’s gentlemanly smoothie seems a much better option (his character’s far more developed too), but the latter’s idea of setting firm parameters to the relationship is only too easily misinterpreted by her yearning vulnerability. And so we watch this tragic collision unfold, as Tucker’s heightened direction and the velvet rhapsodising of Barrington Pheloung’s score provide a luxuriant setting not unlike a ’50s studio melodrama, affording us the distance to reflect on its portrait of precarious longing and emotional cowardice. An undercurrent of wry, resigned humour sets off the jewelled performances, offering much to enjoy, but it’s Martin’s movie, for better and, sometimes, for worse.

Author: TJ

Time Out London Issue 1848: January 18-25 2006

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