Director: Cameron Crowe
Cast: Patrick Fugit, Billy Crudup, Kate Hudson, Frances McDormand
Have I Seen It Before?: Yes.
Did I like it?: I remember liking it well enough, but for whatever reason it didn’t enter that pantheon of great movies for me at the time. Now, as I watch it again twenty years after the fact, I can’t quite grasp why it didn’t more thoroughly burrow its way into my brain.
Which is odd, because that most profound experience occurs for me as the film unfolds. I see myself reflected in the characters. One might think its solipsistic to reach for those—perhaps tenuous—connections, but if we don’t reach to see yourselves in the characters projected for you on the screen, we’re doomed to be subjected seven or eight more Transformers movies, or the written-by-committee blockbusters that Disney and the other studios are churning out with disappointing regularity. We’ve relegated Crowe to not direct that much anymore, after the admitted misstep of Aloha (2015), but if he could reach into the recesses of his deeper felt inclinations to make more movies like this, it may be past time to let him out of director jail.
On first blush, I shouldn’t feel so connected to the film. The main character and I are almost pointed opposites in many ways. We are separated by thirty years. William Miller (Fugit) is doomed to appear younger than he actually he is for all of his days, while I appeared to be in my mid-thirties since the age of ten. Miller’s soul is filled with every inch of popular music, whereas I couldn’t be bothered with anything musical (itself a likely act of rebellion against my musically inclined family), but instead steeped myself in movie so early, it’s entirely possible my real life didn’t begin until after my family got a DVD player and I was first introduced to the wild world of audio commentaries.
So why do I feel seen by the film, as much as I myself am seeing it? There’s the scene early on where Miller and Lester Bangs (Philip Seymour Hoffman, so perfectly cast that I thought the role had to be written for him, until I realized he was one of the few characters who really existed) talk about writing just for the sake of it, with no aim in sight (see these reviews) and talk about their typewriters like people in other movies might talk about cars and motorcycles. It’s a small scene, but such a specific choice that tickles the wrinkles in my brain that I would have gone anywhere the film wanted to take me after that moment.