Shopgirl Review
by Ryan Ellis (flickershows AT hotmail DOT com)November 16th, 2005
Shopgirl (2005)
reviewed by Ryan Ellis
November 11, 2005
After Claire Danes' heart-smashing performance more than 10 years ago in 'Little Women', I always went into her movies ready to defend her against all critics. She was simply perfect as sickly Beth March, so I expected her to keep being marvelous. Unfortunately, with the notable exception of her portrayal of Leonardo DiCaprio's doomed young lover in Baz Luhrmann's flashy 'Romeo + Juliet', she hasn't really lit up the big screen with great acting. It wasn't entirely her fault that being cast about 5 minutes before shooting began in 'Terminator 3' made it LOOK LIKE she'd been cast about 5 minutes before the first day of shooting. Still, she didn't make any kind of mark in that film or in many others. She's only in her mid-20s, but the talent shown by the teenaged Danes seemed to be in hibernation.
I'm back in her corner after seeing Anand Tucker's passable 'Shopgirl'. She's sweet, vulnerable, and lovable as Mirabelle, a sales clerk at an expensive L.A. clothing store. Mirabelle is lonely and looking for true love. Apparently she'll even settle for true sex. Jeremy (Schwartzman) is the young goof she meets at a laundromat and Ray (Martin) is the rich older guy she starts dating some time later. At first, nutty Jer proves to be a poor lover and a selfish twit. On an improbable road trip with a rock band, he wises up and wants to learn more about women. Whether or not he does it for Mirabelle isn't clear, but he---like Nicholson in 'As Good As It Gets'---wants to be a better man. Ray, however, is sauve. He uses his considerable bankroll to buy his way into a romance with Mirabelle, whether either of them realize that's what's happening or not.
Martin doesn't play for laughs at all and he has some good moments of tight-lipped seriousness, but he might be too gloomy for his own good. He wrote the script, so he must have known what this character was all about, yet he never seems to know why he's with this much-younger woman. A lot has been made about the vast age difference between the two actors. Sure, Martin was already a white-haired "wild & crazy guy" hosting Saturday Night Live before Danes was even born, but that's no reason to cry foul. Let's not pretend these young woman/older man romances don't exist...especially in Los Angeles. And while Mirabelle seems to care more about Ray the man than about Ray the gift-buyer, there's a subtle "he's buying her love" undercurrent too. If only what he wanted from her WAS love. He never makes clear what he wants. And that's the problem.
Ray is divorced and he'd rather not get married again. He's after young tail without a serious commitment. That doesn't stop our heroine from falling hard for him, even after he breaks her heart more than once. If this sort of "why does she keep going back to him" dynamic irks you as much as---or more than---the age difference, you'll have a hard time sympathizing with Mirabelle. I know several women who do the same thing with their own boyfriends, though, so Martin and Tucker are perceptive enough to pick up on this and layer the film with it. As we know, people often have trouble seeing the reality of their situation when they're in love. They're too swept away to see that maybe their better half isn't necessarily worthy of being half of them at all.
The love triangle in 'Shopgir'l is reminiscent of Woody Allen's 'Manhattan'. The older man even comes to some of the same conclusions much too late. And as with Muriel Hemingway in 'Manhattan', you're mostly rooting for the young girl and to hell with everyone else. After all, Hemingway and Danes both play characters lovely and nice enough to just ditch ALL these guys and start fresh. Surely Muriel and Claire can do better than Woody Allen and Steve Martin? Maybe that's one of the problems with these insular movies in which the outside world hardly seems to exist. There's a city full of people out there, yet the beautiful women don't realize they can probably do better than any of these creeps.
Speaking of creeps, Schwartzman plays annoying about as well as anyone working today, but he comes off rather well this time. [Martin wrote him the funniest lines, that's for sure.] I could see this pairing of MIrabelle and Jeremy maybe lasting for a while. Or maybe they'll break up 15 minutes after the movie is over. In any case, Danes' character was the best of all three of them and she has wised up when the film ends. No one knows that better than Steve Martin, both the writer and the co-star. 'Shopgirl' is nothing to sing about, but the lovely leading lady is simply smashing. This movie belongs to her and neither the oddball quirks of Jason Schwartzman nor the repressed dourness of Steve Martin can trip her up. Claire Danes won me over again...and that's excellent news. It's been about 10 years since she was able to do that.
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