2014年09月04日——New Yorker——Young Love.doc

Young Love If I Stay and The Last of Robin Hood BY ANTHONY LANE TABLE OF CONTENTS Chlo Grace Moretz and Jamie Blackley star in R J Cutler s new movie CREDITILLUSTRATION BY MICHAEL GILLETTE Young adult fiction what a peculiar product it is sold and consumed as avidly as the misery memoir and the self help book and borrowing sneakily from both One can see the gap in the market What are literate kids meant to do with themselves or with their itchy brains as they wander the no man s land between Narnia and Philip Roth The ideal protagonist of the genre is at once victimized and possessed of decisive power someone like Mia the heroine of Gayle Forman s If I Stay which has clung grimly to the Times best seller list on and off for twenty weeks And the ideal subject is death or as we should probably call it the big sleepover Movie studios exquisitely tuned to the economics of the sniffle are on the case The Fault in Our Stars adapted from John Green s book and starring Shailene Woodley as a cancer patient is still in cinemas and its global box office takings two hundred and eighty million dollars to date are in the pink of health Now in its wake comes the film of If I Stay written by Shauna Cross and directed by R J Cutler barely giving teen age weepers a chance to throw their tissues on the floor and grab a fresh box of Goobers Even if they haven t read the novel they will know the mortal twist thanks to the trailer and to the fact that no twist can survive the blizzard of life online Early on there is a car crash on a wintry road involving Mia Chlo Grace Moretz her father Denny Joshua Leonard her mother Kat Mireille Enos and her younger brother Teddy Jakob Davies Mia spends the rest of the movie hovering on the border between this world and the next watching her wounded body being taken from the wreck to the hospital and reflecting in voice over on her existence hitherto She is at best a demi ghost and as a nurse bending down close informs her Here s the secret baby If you live if you die it s all up to you Say what Surely it s up to the skill of Mia s doctors too and her physical resilience What sounds to me like lousy nursing is however the ber mantra of young adult narrative everything is a choice your boyfriend your college application your breakfast your playlist the color of your scrunchie and your ontological status No reference must be made to principles beyond your reach because those do not apply you will be tested and validated according to your own lights and Mia s predicament though terrible should therefore be seen not as a tragedy but as the very last word in self help If Macbeth had been her age we would have none of that nonsense about strutting and fretting and candles and idiots On the contrary life is a tale told by a highly intelligent young woman with great career prospects and excellent hair and it signifies what she damn well likes On balance Mia has plenty to live for She is a cellist with a sticker reading I Yo Yo Ma on the inside of her locker door at school And oh my God there was this one day when a hot boy watched her rehearsing alone A friend told her all about it Adam Wilde saw me geeking out Adam Wilde saw you blissing out and he s totally into it That exchange cunningly wrought is designed to soothe any nerd nerves that viewers may be experiencing It is hereby decreed that geeking and blissing shall be as one and thank heaven for that because Adam Jamie Blackley is a rock god not just to his schoolmates but increasingly to fans beyond He is the lead singer in a band called Willamette Stone and no one has the heart to hint that it may be anything but riotously good least of all Mia who bops along awkwardly at his concerts even dressing up in a blond wig and leopard skin for a Halloween gig but who would prefer to be at home practicing Beethoven or Loodvig as she refers to him The love that soars between Mia and Adam is as fine as rare and altogether as dull as you could wish for with flickers of creepiness when she auditions for Juilliard he helpfully papers her bedroom ceiling with an exact photographic replica of the roof of the concert hall where she will perform and the result looks exactly like the lair of a serial killer as broken into by wide eyed cops in a grimy thriller Then at the end seated next to the motionless Mia he suddenly produces a guitar from nowhere like a magician with a bunny and starts to sing just off key enough to make her immortal spirit wince You can picture her thoughts Forget this staying crap If he doesn t shut up I m off The saddest thing about If I Stay is that it affords Moretz so little opportunity to be non sad She can be funny witness her spat with Alec Baldwin on 30 Rock but recent roles in Let Me In and Carrie have ironed out the smiles and there is no way that Mia s earnestness was ever going to be jeopardized by jokes Yet a gag does run through Cutler s film and it s a doozy the oldsters are more engaging as characters than their junior kin For instance Stacy Keach who is on a roll after his formidable turn in Nebraska is in solid form as Mia s grandfather chewing through his cheesy lines with ease More galling still we learn that Kat and Denny Mia s not entirely uncool parents used to be rockers themselves like Adam before they gave up musical mayhem to raise the kids That sort of sacrifice whether done with a full heart or through gritted teeth is always worth exploring although it will naturally be anathema to the target audience If there s one thing that young adults abhor it s adults who want to stay young and even worse succeed Well tough Another movie another teen ager in peril Beverly Aadland Dakota Fanning was fifteen when she met Errol Flynn Kevin Kline in 1957 He didn t know how old she was or at any rate he chose not to think about it and the best scene in The Last of Robin Hood comes when having seduced her he asks to meet Florence Susan Sarandon her indomitable mother He fixes Florence a vodka on the rocks his back turned to her and casually inquires into Beverly s age She s fifteen Errol Florence says and for a couple of seconds he freezes tongs in hand There is a kind of vertigo in his stillness beautifully registered by Kline Flynn knows at once that he has committed statutory rape and that his career already on the skids is now racing toward the abyss The moment thaws he drops the ice in the tumbler the life of crime goes on Is there enough in the saga of Flynn and Aadland to furnish a whole film Only just The Last of Robin Hood written and directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland is often pallid and thin with a scant sense of urgency we are at the farthest possible remove from The Adventures of Robin Hood 1938 the jewel in Flynn s rickety crown which proved that cinema can be powered by purest joie de vivre By the late fifties his light was failing badly and you could argue that the new movie clearly made on a tight budget honors that diminution but laziness creeps in too and continuity buffs will grimace as Flynn s walking stick wielded in a mock duel with Beverly becomes an umbrella in the next shot As for The Roots of Heaven 1958 which he made in Africa with Trevor Howard and Orson Welles under the guidance of John Huston there s a posy of blushing violets did it have to be conjured up by a trio of native Africans drumming at dusk On the other hand we have Sarandon and Kline whose combined expertise is such that Flynn a connoisseur of the apparently effortless would have raised an admiring glass After he died in 1959 Florence served sixty days in jail for contributing to the delinquency of a minor but we don t need to be told that she had pimped her child to a star we see it in the eagerness with which when interviewed on tape about the story she lunges into her side of it as the reels begin to turn As for Kline with his lupine