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Movie: The Only Living Boy in New York
Director: Marc Webb
Starring: Callum Turner, Jeff Bridges, Kiersey Clemens, Kate Beckinsale, Pierce Brosnan, Cynthia Nixon
Available on: Amazon Video and iTunes
One of the great myths that American fiction has allowed itself to indulge in, for decades upon decades, is that of the brilliant young man. The collegiate (or immediately post-collegiate) young buck who has a bead on the world and lofty ambitions, only those ambitions conflict with the equally lofty life that is being proscribed for them. They seek out the corners of their urban landscapes that no one but they can appreciate. They still smoke and everything bores them, and this boredom gets called ennui and is thus poetic. They also seem to fall ass-backwards into women (always women, they’re always straight) and end up having to make some variation on the madonna/whore decision. Every now and again, they get slapped down by life, but it’s only so they can find their true path to success with another woman who’s conveniently available to them. These brilliant young men are not at all in fashion in 2017, when we finally seem to be discovering value in qualities/experiences/accomplishments that go beyond what someone who didn’t pay close enough attention to The Graduate would’ve been drawn to. And yet we still get our fair share of movies and TV shows that try to keep the archetype alive.
The latest is The Only Living Boy in New York, which follows the post-graduate dickhead-ery of Thomas, played by the incredibly appealing and promising young actor Callum Turner (Tramps), who nonetheless isn’t able to keep his character from being a smug little self-styled man about town. It’s never entirely clear how much the film itself is willing to call Thomas out for anything other that post-collegiate career indecisiveness and being unable to deny his attraction to his father’s mistress, Johanna (Kate Beckinsale). With the film unwilling to linger on any kind of perspective on Thomas, the audience is left to just simmer in resentment for this kid and his unearned Hamlet routine. Thomas and Johanna’s seduction scene is a maddening collection of negging remarks that get them both wildly attracted to each other, utterly killing any interest you might have in the relationship. Similarly, Thomas’s professional conflicts all seem to boil down to unrealized aspirations to be a writer that were squashed by some unkind words from his dad (Pierce Brosnan). Somewhere around the periphery of this carnival of navel-gazing wander Kiersey Clemens as Thomas’s friend/maybe-more Mimi and Jeff Bridges as a quasi-mentor, quasi-narrator who has all sorts of wisdom to impart about writing and women. It is a real challenge to find one conversation in this movie where you don’t come to hate both participants before it’s over.
The film is the latest from Roadside Attraction/Amazon Studios and director Marc Webb. Webb’s career is a fascinating and curious one, debuting with the divisive but inarguably impactful 500 Days of Summer and them moving directly on to the highly contentious Amazing Spider-Man films. Gifted, with Chris Evans, avoided any of the divisiveness of Webb’s earlier movies but also avoided most of the attention. Webb’s a director whose name draws sneers in certain circles (he really ran afoul of the geek community with those Spider-Man movies) but who undeniably has it in him to put forward something with some vision.
Even more fascinating and curious is the career of screenwriter Allan Loeb, whose filmography is pockmarked by flops that nevertheless feel singular and even more interestingly varied. Loeb has done failed Oscar bait (Things We Lost in the Fire), failed sci-fi (The Space Between Us), and the only Ron Howard movie that feels like a true turkey (The Dilemma). Even his successes — the gambling drama 21; the Wall Street sequel; the Adam Sandler-verse film Just Go With It — feel like half-measures that never seem to have any sticking power. Perhaps his most enduring film may well prove to be last year’s Collateral Beauty, if only because the film is SO incredibly bizarre and bad that it will not soon be forgotten. But Loeb’s story, which weaves through stints as both a stock trader and a gambling addict, revolves most strongly around his script for The Only Living Boy in New York. Loeb write it shortly after graduating college and moving to New York in 2004, and it found a place on the Black List of the best unproduced scripts in Hollywood, and there it stayed for a decade. Webb became attached to it, and it almost got made with Miles Teller in the lead role, and if you want to know anything about how difficult it is to like this movie’s main character, just know that it almost got made with Miles Teller in the lead role.
This is a frustrating movie with a nevertheless sterling cast. Cynthia Nixon gets only a few short scenes to make an impression as Thomas’s mother, and she does a fine job. And Kate Beckinsale, while saddled with a maddening and probably insulting character, proves just how desperately we need to keep getting her good roles, because there are some great performances in her just waiting to emerge. That just wasn’t going to happen with The Only Living Boy in New York, a movie that strains for The Graduate but only gets to keep the Paul Simon echoes.
