Love & Friendship (2016)

A costume period piece based on an obscure Jane Austen literary property was not what I expected from Whit Stillman for his third movie in 20 years, but why not? His last, Damsels in Distress, is five years old now, and the one before that, The Last Days of Disco, came out in 1997. Both have outsize preoccupations with international dance crazes. Spoiler alert: There is no international dance craze in Love & Friendship. But Stillman remains, however, engaged in pitched battle with his New York Upper East Side betters—in fact, it may be more ferocious than ever, as he enters a time machine and travels back to sneer at their putative heirs, the foolish aristocracy of the early 19th century, when the French and American revolutions were even then casting creeping deep long shadows. Every review I've seen of Love & Friendship touts Kate Beckinsale's performance as Lady Susan Vernon, and she's good, but it was Tom Bennett as Sir James Martin who broke me down and closed the sale. His boyish good looks and stammering good-hearted dim bulb dignity are priceless. It's the same kind of stupidity we saw in Damsels in Distress with Thor, the fraternity brother whose shame is that he never learned the names of the colors. Here Sir James, similarly, is amazed at dinner by what is evidently the first encounter in his life with peas. I don't know Jane Austen's source piece, which is actually the unfinished novel Lady Susan, and not the very early novella Love and Freindship [sic]. It's hard to say how true the events of this movie are to her original story. It more often feels like pure Whit Stillman and not at all like Austen. But she contributes the general setting, language, and preoccupations of society and it also has the tang of one of her complicated narratives playing through, as the eligibles with their various virtues and motivations get busy sorting themselves out. That's where Lady Susan particularly comes in, as linchpin to the story, and that's where the accolades for Beckinsale naturally start. To be clear, this movie has an occasional tendency to steer into genteel BBC stand-there-and-drop-the-dialogue territory. There are dead patches. I happened to have someone sketchy sitting too close to me—he was drinking a beer at my usual Tuesday morning matinee, and he smelled a little. I noticed the dead patches in the movie because I became more aware of him then. But even as I verified my exit points visually the movie would pull me back into it. Lady Susan is a classic model of manipulating society villainess. She is brazen and comically powerful, able to get away with anything. Beckinsale is obviously having a ball but she's restrained. Stillman is having a ball too, but he's less restrained, and it ends up becoming infectious. It's on the level of 12-year-olds sitting in church helplessly laughing about the preacher's use of the word "duty / doody." For example, the endless standing portraits of the upperclassmen families. Or the way fancy font subtitles are used to poke fun at epistolary devices. And, of course, all the wheezing plot contrivances that propel it, the chance meetings and such. I can't wait to see it again under better circumstances, but I have a feeling it's going to be in and out of here pretty fast. Catch it when you can.

Damsels in Distress (2011)

USA, 99 minutes
Director/writer: Whit Stillman
Photography: Doug Emmett
Music: Mark Suozzo
Editor: Andrew Hafitz
Cast: Greta Gerwig, Carrie MacLemore, Megalyn Echikunwoke, Analeigh Tipton, Ryan Metcalf, Jermaine Crawford, Caitlin FitzGerald, Zach Woods, Hugo Becker, Adam Brody, Billy Magnussen, Aubrey Plaza, Nick Blaemire

Director and writer Whit Stillman's first movie in over 10 years is silly and shrewd from beginning to glorious end, with other agenda items signaled in various ways: The title bears a close resemblance to A Damsel in Distress, a Fred Astaire vehicle from 1937 that also featured George Burns, Gracie Allen, and Joan Fontaine. Our modern-day damsels are named Heather, Lily, Rose, and Violet, a gorgeous and guileless bouquet that strides the campus of the elite Seven Oaks University like giants, attempting very hard to sort things out. Their distress is on the order of too much student body odor, too many suicides, and not enough compassion for fraternity house members.

"We're trying to make a difference in people's lives," explains the ringleader Violet (Greta Gerwig) to new recruit Lily (Analeigh Tipton). "One way to do that is to stop them from killing themselves. Have you ever heard of the expression 'Prevention is nine-tenths of the cure'? Well, in the case of suicide, it's actually 10-tenths."

The Last Days of Disco (1998)

USA, 113 minutes
Director/writer: Whit Stillman
Photography: John Thomas
Music: Mark Suozzo
Editors: Andrew Hafitz, Jay Pires
Cast: Chloe Sevigny, Kate Beckinsale, Chris Eigeman, Matt Keeslar, Mackenzie Astin, Matthew Ross, Tara Subkoff, Burr Steers, David Thornton, Jaid Barrymore, Michael Weatherly, Robert Sean Leonard, Jennifer Beals

There are thing to complain about in The Last Days of Disco—it's hardly flawless. But I was compelled to revisit it after seeing screenwriter and director Whit Stillman's first movie since, 14 years on, Damsels in Distress, which came out earlier this year. Not only did I adore Damsels in Distress, but I also find that I like The Last Days of Disco a whole lot more in its glow. As a matter of fact, in many ways Damsels practically picks up where Last Days left off, certainly in terms of the never-ending search to find truth and meaning in popular dance crazes and the social upheavals attending them. Everything anyone might rightly find fault with does not prevent The Last Days of Disco from being perfectly insinuating and a complete winner start to finish, a broad farce playing our nominal superiors, namely New York City's Upper East Side ruling class, for witless buffoons.

I think I didn't comprehend before how funny Stillman is at sending up these people—or, more specifically, their children. Making privileged WASPs into vicious, plainly dumb caricatures may look easy but making it work is probably his best trick in a whole magic bag full of them, because he's kind of gentle about it and yet he shows no mercy. To a person, no one here is likeable (or, in fairness, entirely unlikeable either). There's a lot of skill to the way Stillman renders them as well-educated, well-mannered, well-spoken, well-dressed, and well-bred preening nincompoops, alternately strutting about like barnyard cocks or cringing to perceived authority. It may be class warfare, but it's deliriously pleasurable.