In Praise Of Whit Stillman’s ‘Metropolitan’ And The Not-So-Doomed Bourgeois

When Whit Stillman’s debut film Metropolitan was released 25 years ago today, preppies, yuppies, and WASPs were becoming less and less fascinating. The Reagan era was over; the gritty ‘90s were just beginning. Just as the independent film boom was kick-starting (it is perhaps strange to consider Stillman and Soderbergh contemporaries, as the latter kept up his early career momentum as his films became more mainstream), the cinematic obsession with the rich and privileged was fading. Throughout the previous decade, preppies were the villains at summer camp, at college, and on the golf course. Oliver Stone’s Wall Street proved that greed was good, but also deadly, and John Hughes’ Pretty in Pink made a case for class segregation if only to prevent the girls from the wrong side of the tracks from having their hearts broken by the country club set. Metropolitan, then, was an attempt to humanize the upper class, particularly its youngest cohort, and it was easy to view Stillman’s comedy of manners as a satire of the upper-crust teenagers who honestly believed their kind to be ill-fated.

Yet Metropolitan is a curious film in that it doesn’t vilify its sometimes snobbish, privileged group of teenagers. In fact, it’s the downtrodden Upper West Sider named Tom Townsend (who, as a Princeton student and Manhattan native, is probably still more well-off than most of us) that’s the true antagonist of the film despite being, for all intents and purposes, the lead character. It’s Tom that moves seamlessly among the Upper East Side society parties that are full of people he seems to despise, who go against the socialist theories of Charles Fourier he respects and espouses. And it’s easy to be fooled by the dandy and slick-tongued Nick Smith (played by the perfectly smarmy Chris Eigeman, a Stillman regular), who seems to be the natural enemy of the people in that he unapologetically loves the seemingly closed-off, conservative, and moneyed world in which his was formed.

Metropolitan can be, for some liberal viewers like myself, concerning. How can I possibly have such a fondness for a film that depicts a class of people who, on the surface, seem so unrelatable? It’s a testament to Stillman’s writing: I came for the pithy one-liners and the sweet teenage romance and stayed for the sharp and clever story of, as the film’s poster states, “doomed bourgeois in love.”

The beauty of Metropolitan is that it features incredibly relatable characters — for people who are in need of them to enjoy a film — that transcend class boundaries. Stillman’s films generally follow characters in the middle of a life transition; here, most of the partygoers are in their first or second years of college, an age at which no one is truly fully formed. And it’s also an age that’s prime for an identity crisis, as Taylor Nichols’ lovably nerdy Charlie realizes. He’s in the middle of an existential turmoil, convinced that he and his fellow “Urban Haute Bourgeoisie” (or “UHBs,” his more positive spin on the class typically referred to as “yuppies”) are primed to fail in the wake of the lower-class’ rise. Even when he meets an older UHB toward the end of the film, who attests to the UHB’s resounding success in society (both in Manhattan and beyond), Charlie is certain that the pendulum is about to swing back. (Certainly most twenty-somethings have considered their generation to be a cursed one; it does, after all, offer a convenient excuse for one’s own lack of ambition).

At Metropolitan‘s center is the lovely Audrey Roget, who is a timid wallflower who falls, naturally, for a boy who doesn’t share her affections. In Tom Townsend, who is as pompous as any other young man in her immediate social circle, she finds an outsider, someone who shares her interest in literature (even if he prefers to read criticism instead of any novels, as he can’t quite formulate his own literary opinions for himself). But he’s, of course, too distracted by the much more glamorous Serena Slocum to pay much attention to her beyond as a partner in polite conversation. Audrey feels as much out of place as he does, perhaps too meek and quiet to participate in the more raucous debauchery of strip poker and taking Mescaline. But she does reject his disdain for the upper class because, despite her luck and privilege and recognition of both, it’s the only world she has ever known. (The character appears briefly in Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco, spotted dancing at The Club and referred to as having a high-powered job in publishing. One wishes there were another film devoted to her rise to greatness.)

Metropolitan, at times, feels like an anthropological study into how the other half (or, more aptly, the one-percent) lives. But it’s also a lesson in empathy, to ditch the bad-faith assumptions about those who live lives different from our own, who come into this world with the silver spoons and fancy addresses and have yet to learn about the world outside their own little bubbles. Maybe the characters of Metropolitan do not change drastically after the movie’s end credits. They probably aren’t doomed in any way, and likely don’t grow up to become Marxists who are concerned with the struggles of working class. But within the confines of the film’s brief running time, they’re just like any other group of 19- and 20-year-olds: concerned with themselves and those closest to them, focused on the ways in which their immediate world is evolving, and desperate to figure out where they fit in.

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Photos: Everett Collection