This review originally appeared during the Toronto Film Festival. Nick and Norah opens nationwide tomorrow.
From its animated notebook-scrawl opening credits to a final scene in which two people finally, effortlessly unburden themselves of a MacGuffin and just decide to be together, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (based on the young adult novel by Rachel Cohn and David Leviathan) seems to have been packaged in the hopes that the lightning that made Juno an unignorable commodity a cultural phenomena will strike twice. Nick and Norah isn’t quite the assault to the teen romance genre that Juno was, and that’s both good and bad. Michael Cera’s Nick, Kat Denning’s Norah, and their assorted pals drift fluidly between irony-as-defense and taking both themselves, and the idea of love, very seriously. The result is a film that’s much more of a traditional teen romance, but also a more honest one.
Nick and Norah are two baby hipsters from New Jersey, strangers unwittingly linked by Tris, the shallow and slightly skanky ex-girlfriend who Nick inexplicably misses and whose frenemy games Norah listlessly tolerates. The three are thrown together at Arlene’s Grocery in the Lower East Side, where The Jerk-Offs, the otherwise all-queer band for which Nick plays bass (the singer does a hilariously deadpan Iggy Pop impersonation whilst fronting signature song, “(I Want To) Screw That Man”) opens for Bishop Allen. A number of plot contrivances send the title pair on an all night tour of Manhattan, ostensibly in search of a secret show by their favorite band and Norah’s lost, grotesquely drunk friend. But the kids are really on the lam, trying to outrun both Tris, who has decided in a fit of mean girl jealousy that she wants Nick back, and the night itself, Norah’s last before she has to make a major decision about her future.
Thought they may be, at least theoretically, aimed at the same audience, Nick and Norah and Cera’s last hit run the teenage outsider experience through very different filters. If Juno operated on a comic book level of gimmickry, with every line delivered as though it ended with an exclamation point and set dressing to match, Nick and Norah is an understated, comparatively arthouse-paced fairy tale, in which credible New York moments and teenage types are played a pitch shift or two closer to perfection than is reasonably plausible. The dreamy, grainy cinematography, full of halcyonic moments bathed in street lamp tints, makes everyone look both slightly sleazy and cherubic, as if they’re wearing blush and a lot of cherry Chapstick. The film’s general attitude towards mating is similarly a balance between precosity and innocence. The two main gay characters go cruising for a third to join them in their shaggin’ wagon, in which they drive around (ironically?) listening to death metal and serving as wise sages who coach the clueless straights in the ways of love and sex. Traditional heterosexuality is positioned as being sort of scary and gross, but sex itself is playful, sweet, and totally centered on the female orgasm. In some ways, it’s an empowerment fantasy for a very specific type of preteen girl, the type who will grow up to long for conventional romance even as they’re slightly too cynical for it.
The title and lead character names, of course, recall The Thin Man series of screwball romantic comedies about married, boozy detectives Nick and Nora Charles. If the allusion was intentional on the part of the novel’s authors, the material as translated here doesn’t make the most of the screwball tradition. Nick and Norah engage in a very different kind of banter, and in fact if there’s a single reason to see the film, it’s Cera and Dennings’ chemistry, which stems less from verbal play than from the counterpoint of her sulky, Cleopatra-eyed scowl to his bemused, wide-eyed smirk. These kids don’t seem to be colliding for the sake of generating sparks as often as they accidentally misinterpret or even deliberately antagonize the other. Thus, instead of a movie-long slow-but-steady build towards consummation, Nick and Norah’s courtship proceeds in fits and starts, with both boy and girl alternately getting up the courage to push things a little further, before shyly retreating after a misunderstanding or misplaced bravado leads to disappointment. This will probably ring more true for the average middle-class suburban high school kid than the tales of absurdly proactive boys and preternaturally poised girls that seem to fill most filmed media; this doesn’t mean that they won’t pretend to be above it. At the hybrid press screening/target audience sneak peek here in Toronto, a cadre of college-aged girls could be heard giggling from a back row during Nick and Norah’s most intimate and earnest moments. In the middle of one particularly tender scene, one of said girls loudly squealed, “It’s so corny!”
Nick and Norah may very well be a teen romantic comedy that plays not directly to teens, but to their two bracketing demographics. Its relative tameness may appeal most to tween girls who aspire to sleepless city nights (and who imagine “hooking up” as a long kiss followed by an ellipsis), while a certain segment of the post-collegiate class should relate (even if begrudgingly) to the completely sincere belief that the only things that truly matter in a mate are physical attraction and iPod compatibility.
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SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth