Igby Goes Down

[miseenscene]

Just watched this last night. I liked it, but didn't love it. It seemed stilted and top-heavy, like the dialogue was too witty and wordy and unnatural, better left on the page than coming out of mouths. But visually it worked, set the tone of high society and the gradual crumble and sucking-in of its denizens. No great performances except maybe Kieran Culkin as Igby; everyone else had good moments but wasn't written strongly enough to have much depth. Susan Sarandon tried to give life to a caricature but I get the feeling there wasn't much to be done there...

In all, it seems like if one has read The Catcher in the Rye, on need not see this film.

Incidentally, on the DVD extra features the director, Burr Steers, said that this was his first screenplay, the one in which he learned about structure when he went back to rewrite it. And the cast all became attached because of such a well-written script. I wonder if the dialogue didn't look better on the page to them afterward as well.

[tabuno]

I was fascinated by this movie, its examination of a world far from the normal, the rare air of high society. The dialogue captured that rich-class, Bohemian wit and dry sarcastic, cynicism well. The plot was rich, the style was consistently covert without turning into the stereotype, melodramatic drool that usual comes out of coming of age movies.

[miseenscene]

True, we're spared the drool. But the dialogue didn't have a natural cadence to it. Most of the lines seem like things folks wish they'd be witty enough to say, but unfortunately none of the actors enlisted to deliver them were able to convince me that they were actually thinking those thoughts up on their own, rather than trying desperately to remember which five-dollar word was next in the sentence. I'm all for rich dialogue, which is missing in most films these days, but not at the expense of credibilty.

Oliver: There's not much between us, is there?

Igby: Just an ever-thinning supply of blood.

Great line on the page. Coming from Culkin, I couldn't help but wince at the timing of the delivery. One of many instances.

[oscar jubis]

Very well said. You helped me understand why I ultimately left it out of my year list.

[tabuno]

What is natural cadence. Listening to most people in the real world, I don't think I ever hear natural, true delivery from any fictional movie - the lines just all seem to be done so dramatically well. The words that come off the screen from any movie except for documentaries and many of them have been edited from thousands of feet of film or repeated in interviews that I guess I really don't know what real dialogue is. Shakespeare has always seemed to me a strange language effort to believe in, any depiction of anything before 1800 in real English is bewilderingly fictional I guess, caveman and people from foreign countries who speak perfect English seem odd, even aliens in sci fi movies, I've often wondered or perhaps even the sound a space ship makes in space. Most of my favorite television series have such rich lines that I don't anybody could in reality deliver such fun, delightful humor but I don't trash the series because of it. I can really imagine what people expect and how one can judge such a phenomenon as speech in the movies unless the person is holding a script and talking in a monotone voice, even then sometimes it's real.

[miseenscene]

There are dozens of ways of delivering dialogue. Pacino's pretty good at delivering it in a way that no human being naturally would, full of artificial pauses and random emphasis on stray words and syllables, yet it works. Everyone's got their own style. Ryan Phillipe may not be a monotone, but he's about one infelction away from it at any time. Again, that's his style and it works. The delivery by Culkin, Danes and Peet in this film was wooden. The wit of the lines doesn't work for me when it sounds like it's being read, and mistimed at that. It may work for you.

Incidentally, suggesting that one can't judge dialogue delivery in a film, and that even reading it straight out may still sound natural, kind of defeats the purpose of discussing films, eh? After all, if we can't judge the dialogue delivery, by extension we may not be able to judge the acting, and by implication the direction, either. Acting styles have diverged vastly from Shakespeare's day, yet I still feel confident that I can tell the difference between something authentic and something struggled through.

For difficult dialogue delivered in a way that works, check out Whit Stillman's Metropolitan or Barcelona (but not so much The Last Days of Disco). Chris Eigeman and Taylor Nichols do wonders with some wordy, obtuse dialogue and manage to make it sound brilliant and natural at the same time -- as though they're thinking it up on the spot, rather than reciting it. Granted, their personalities suit the material (cagy and manic, respectively), which is why perhaps Culkin, Danes and Peet were miscast, or should have had their lines rewritten to suit their natural delivery.

[Chris Knipp]

I grew up basicallly in an eastern preppie world and this movie has a lot of meaning for me. Burr Steers knows whereof he speaks. I have the distinct impression that a lot of people just don't get it, or know how real it is. A very smart, well thought out movie about a world the writer/filmmaker is extremely aware of. I am sorry that so many people don't respond.

Of course Catcher in the Rye is the mother of all oversensitive rebellious preppie stories, but that doesn't mean this is any kind of copy. Steers is talking about his own experience, filtered through a cinematic screen. He knows this world better than Salinger did. Igby Goes Down is free of the sentimentality and romanticism of Salinger.

People who attempt verbal wit of this kind, and some do, may sound to some as if they are "reading lines." Yes: they are reading the lines they just made up in their head. That's the way wit works. It's calculated. Ever see a Restoration comedy? Such dialogue does not seek to be "natural." But that doesn't mean people don't talk that way.

Nonetheless misenscene has an interesting discussion, and delivery of dialogue is something worth talking about.

We can't all be "just folks."

I wrote an admiring review http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0280760/usercomments-26 which gives some background and presents my case.

Jeff Goldblum gives one of his best performances here. Kieren Culkin is fine. It's hardly fair to say Ryan Philippe is the only one who has the rhythms down; he's a little too artificial, though he certainly is well enough cast. Claire Danes, Amanda Peet, Bill Pullman, Susan Sarendon -- all good. The "woodenness" is in the ear of the beholder. But if you don't get it, you don't get it.

I'm glad Whit Stillman's films were mentioned, but I woudn't use them to beat up Burr Steers with. Stillman's milieu and dialogue are very similar, and excellently portrayed.