Metropolitan (1990)

1 year ago

Metropolitan (1990)

Metropolitan, or How I Learned to Stop Kvetching and Love Christmas

by Ben Mauk

Falling for the shiksa girl is a cliché at least as old as Goodbye, Columbus, but you should have seen Christina, the newt-nosed, willowy blonde in my sixth-grade algebra class. Christina—her very name the bacon cheeseburger of trafe signifiers—had the requisite blue eyes and lilting, decidedly non-Brooklyn accent of her similarly thin-hipped gentile peers.

Christina differed, though, in having a mother who didn’t mind arranging for her academically struggling daughter homework dates with that myopic, dandruff-plagued but harmlessly bookish Jew whose mother she’d met at a PTA meeting. That Christina so readily agreed to what for her must have been socially suicidal “dates” without making audible retching noises in my presence was a mitzvah about which even Portnoy could not complain.

But it wasn’t just Christina for whom I fell. (And so that you’re not holding your breath, I did not overcome religious and social differences to sweep the young girl off her feet, unless by swept off her feet you’re alluding to the Looney Tunes-like cloud of dust she left as she sprinted out of my house at 6:00—our dates’ prearranged end-time.) It was her whole goy family.

Their last name was, if not “Jones,” then something like it. I knew from the few times we’d met at her place that the Joneses had a liquor cabinet, that her father drove a convertible. If these don’t sound exotic to you, consider the three fingers’ worth of chardonnay at dinner and reliable, used station wagons that were my parents’ indulgences. My family got ulcers, asthma, and into arguments about how late was too late to leave for Friday night services at the synagogue. Hers had bona fide alcoholism on both sides. Hers had divorce. Contested inheritances. Original sin.

This fascination with what for most readers must be a totally familiar Other—preppy Christian childhoods, Cheeverian marital strife— gets especially keen for me beginning about a week after Thanksgiving, when the local LiteFM station switches to 104Santa and the nativity scene/inflatable snowman aisle opens at Wal-Mart. Christmas is a holiday celebrated by Jews around the world as a symbolic reminder of thousands of years of exile. It is a time to eat potato pancakes and rekindle the twin candles of shame and pride in being somehow both bizarrely different and yet depressingly familiar.

It is also when I watch a ton of Christmas movies.

Metropolitan has the particular appeal of being both a Christmas movie and a near-anthropological depiction of a uniquely gentile way of life. The preppy class that is the film’s subject gets treated with voyeuristic care, its foreign preoccupations thrillingly detailed. I’d never heard of the south Hamptons, and here the term was, charged with exotic meaning! I didn’t even know what a detachable collar was, but have since learned that as a fashion item it is “symbolically important”!

Tom, the film’s hero and audience stand-in, is not Jewish. But he is an outsider, home from college on winter break and passing as bourgeois in a social world where nobody has to take public transportation. Unlike the third-generation millionaires who adopt him as one of their own, Tom can barely afford cab fare. His parents are divorced. He lives on the grubby Upper West Side (gasp). He is even forced to rent the tuxedo he wears to the first of the season’s many debutante balls, which, by the way, he opposes “on principle” for their propagation of outmoded social customs. (Tom is a self-avowed fan of the French social theorist Joseph Fourier, so you know ten minutes in that he’s a WASP with academic sting.)

The other first thing you notice is the vibe of Peanuts Take Manhattan. Metropolitan exists in a world populated solely by children and, moreover, by children who act comically adult-like. Parents are rarely mentioned, and even more rarely in-scene. (“I don’t think I’ve met anyone’s parents,” Tom notes.) The Yalies and Columbians who fill out this world, who for our purposes are the sole residents within walking distance of Central Park, have most likely never had their mothers arrange algebra dates.

They are also almost all virgins, and possess cheerfully Victorian ideas about sex that would seem outdated even among children. (The movie’s final stretch concerns two boys’ race to Long Island to stop a college-aged girl from willingly losing her virginity.)

But then they betray adult cleverness with pinky-raised observations such as “ladies and gentlemen, a West sider’s among us,” or else they discuss seriously the male escort shortage at social functions. They are—except for Nick, the cynic—desperately earnest, intent on adopting the mannerisms of their station. At one point the bookworm Audrey bids Tom farewell with a sincere and frowning “Good luck with your Fourierism!”

Most often this literary name-dropping is just that—Metropolitan has been called an “unashamedly literary film,” but the references to Fourier, Austen and Tolstoy pepper the dialogue in only the most superficial ways, usually for the sake of granting the characters intellectual currency—but the film at least acknowledges, in a lightly comic way, the history of class and gender issues as addressed by those writers. (Especially Austen—who is mentioned so often you half-expect her to pop in for an on-screen cameo.)

Whit Stillman, who wrote and directed Metropolitan, owes a stylistic as well as ideological debt to Austen’s parlor dramas. His characters’ banter is stiltedly mannered and rhetorically formal. Conversations—most of which take place in living rooms—move elegantly from schoolyard gossip to whether the “urban haute bourgeoisie” is necessarily doomed. UHB, or “uhb” (sounds like “club”), is the pack’s invented term, a way of identifying the tribe.

Ah, now we’re in familiar territory: New York tribes, comfortable among their own writers, social critics, and even vocabulary. It’s all a little like Woody Allen’s New Yorkers in Manhattan or Annie Hall—or rather, a mirror image of it. Allen’s characters, while no less mannered in speech, are all id, bursting with sexual accusations and sociological bon mots. Stillman’s Upper East Siders are reserved superegos. They consider soberly, as a group, what would be good for the preppy class, or how a girl might avoid being “ruined” by lascivious members of the titled aristocracy. They eschew sarcasm. No one is neurotic.

(In one decidedly non-Allen exchange, Nick is accused of too-often railing against the titled aristocracy. “What about the untitled aristocracy?” one of the girls asks him. “Well I couldn’t very well despise them, could I?” he says. “That would be self-hatred.” In Allen’s world, self-hatred is an epistemological necessity. You can imagine my brain attempting to process Nick’s self-assured, uhbian worldview.)

With their lightly ironic affections for stultifying intelligence and old money, Metropolitan’s spiritual heirs seem to be Wes Anderson’s Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums. All three films express, through rose-tinted peepholes into boarding schools and drawing rooms, an awkward love for the oft-reviled upper class. These UHBs are the people who usually appear in Hollywood products only when there’s an eclectic apartment building of bohemians to raze, or when a heroine needs a rich fiancée to dump in act three for the working-class leading man.

Remember that cinema has long been for Americans the most fiercely egalitarian night out. Symphonies, ballet, theater, museum exhibitions: however unfairly, these are widely considered the provenance of the crisply tuxedoed and modestly gowned. At the Bijou, however, tickets are cheap, seats are unassigned, and the floors are as sticky for the sneaker as for the Italian loafer. In the dark of the cineplex, the Park Avenue heiress might fight for armrest space with the Washington Heights hairdresser. Audrey might split a tub of popcorn with Portnoy.

All of which makes Metropolitan’s subject matter a little risky. What moviegoer is going to sympathize with a virginal bunch of spoiled, self-entitled kids who at movie’s end receive no comeuppance whatsoever? (Not even at the hands of some ragtag band of ne’er-do-wells from the bankruptcy-threatened summer camp across the lake?) One can imagine viewers failing to connect even with Tom, who as the film’s poorest character nevertheless had a trust fund before his parents’ divorce forced him to move with his mother to the unfashionable Upper West Side, where he suffers the indignity of having to rent his tuxedo.

But Stillman keeps the audience on his side the same way Allen and Anderson do: by treating the drama as slight and largely incidental to the fun, and by finding humor in the characters’ earnestness. In one impassioned speech, Nick implores Tom to consider the feelings of the newly socialized preppy girls before refusing to attend more parties. He concludes, with deadly seriousness, “I’m not entirely joking!” Tom’s relative poverty—and later, a mild love triangle—create some low-heat conflict, but it’s never a mystery how this comedy of manners ends.

And in the end, nothing much happens in Metropolitan, the same way nothing much happens in Manhattan (and how Seinfeld is “about nothing”). It is of a class of New York stories, content to gape at the ways in which the city’s comfortable denizens live, love, drink and shop. Similarly, Christmas movies celebrate the cozy and familiar rituals of the world’s most popular holiday. Stillman exoticizes his surroundings by introducing an outsider, Tom, someone with whom a suburban Jewish boy—still faintly bruised by rejection at the hands of a sandy-haired sixth-grade gentile, and perhaps eating Chinese food alone this December 25^th while watching Christmas movie marathons—can relate. For those of us looking in, it may be enough.