Scott Pilgrim vs. the World felt natural. Which is an odd thing to say about a romantic comedy punctuated by video-game-style fight scenes the way Grease is punctuated by John Travolta singing, I suppose, but then that’s just how in tune I am with what’s going on with this movie. Watching it simply reinforced that huge eureka moment I had when I first read Bryan Lee O’Malley’s comic and discovered how he’d incorporated the visual and structural language of videogames into a twentysomething slice-of-lifer. Fights, leveling up, people turning into coins when they get defeated, warp zones, 1-ups, ninja swords, sound effects, stats–this stuff has been part of the fabric of my mental life for so long that it’s difficult to describe how simultaneously familiar and thrilling it feels to see it in an everyday kinda context, right there among rock dudes and cute girls and tagalongs and witty slutty gay guys and awkward parties and scenesters and so on and so forth. Of course it should be there!
And it was naturally funny, too. I think one thing that gets lost in discussion of co-writer/director Edgar Wright’s genre send-ups is how much of the humor has little to do with riffing on Night of the Living Dead or Bad Boys or whatever the case may be and stems instead from the effortless interaction of characters who’ve gotten to know each other, play off each other’s insecurities, and draw out each other’s funniest stuff. In that sense Scott has a lot more to do with Shaun of the Dead than with Hot Fuzz in that it’s about a group of young, slightly directionless young people who’ve mostly been friends forever–there’s that same sense of people putting on their roles in the group like a pair of comfortable shoes and kicking around their affection for and annoyance with one another like a soccer ball. So for all the screwball pacing and dialogue it had a…laconic feel to it, I think I wanna say? Like, it was super-easy to slide into the group and laugh at Wallace’s knowingness and Scott’s blithe sleaziness and Julie’s GTFOness and Knives’s head-over-heels-ness and Young Neil’s wannabe-ness and Kim’s grumpiness and Stephen’s panicked ambitiousness Stacey’s annoyingly right-ness and so on and so forth, like we’d known these folks all our lives.
Heck, even the most potentially problematic character in this regard, literal dream girl Ramona, was played pretty much straight–Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s comparatively flat performance vs., well, everyone else in the movie could be seen as a mistake, but to me it was the perfect way to thwart any potential Manic Pixie Dream Girlisms. Indeed, that character comes across like a point-by-point refutation of the MPDG–dry rather than manic, she makes Scott’s life a disaster rather than an adventure, and the only whimsical thing about her, her hair, is treated like a sign of emotional problems and an intimidating obstacle to be overcome. Most importantly, the whole point of the movie is that her life existed in and of itself long before she entered Scott’s. She’s got a long, troubled history and a rich emotional life–she’s an agent, not an object. If anything, it’s Scott who’s Knives Chau’s Manic Pixie Dream Boy, transforming her life into a swoony spectacular with his carefree indie-rock lifestyle and heretofore unchallenged ability to ignore and deny anything troubling in his own past and emotional life. And of course we see just how far that gets everyone involved!
Narratively bold and inventively staged in all the ways that O’Malley’s comics are, and very very very funny, Scott Pilgrim was basically a killer little movie that could easily have felt forced and over-impressed with itself. If anything, it was a little slow at times, which is the last thing I thought I’d be saying. There was no sense that the movie was desperate to bring its material to you, you know? There it was, and you could come to it at your leisure. I wanna play it again!