Books, Arts & Manners: Enduring the Indies

WE TEND to look to the independents for a relief from the majors, but, in film, the minor leaguers have their own ways of letting us down. Two of them are currently garnering good reviews even as they flounder with their admittedly off-beat material, which, to my view, sticks more in the craw than in the consciousness.

In 1990, Whit Stillman made a bit of a stir with Metropolitan, a comedy about the trivial traumas of debutantes and their escorts on the Park Avenue—Southampton axis. It seemed refreshing to have a young filmmaker who was unabashedly chronicling the tribulations of well-heeled WASPs rather than the aches and rages of various other minorities. Yet Metropolitan looked rather more impoverished than its subject matter warranted, and its invention was, at best, spotty. But Mr. Stillman was clearly his own man, possessed of a somewhat uneven but amiably idiosyncratic sense of humor.

JS

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John Simon

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WE TEND to look to the independents for a relief from the majors, but, in film, the minor leaguers have their own ways of letting us down. Two of them are currently garnering good reviews even as they flounder with their admittedly off-beat material, which, to my view, sticks more in the craw than in the consciousness.

In 1990, Whit Stillman made a bit of a stir with Metropolitan, a comedy about the trivial traumas of debutantes and their escorts on the Park Avenue—Southampton axis. It seemed refreshing to have a young filmmaker who was unabashedly chronicling the tribulations of well-heeled WASPs rather than the aches and rages of various other minorities. Yet Metropolitan looked rather more impoverished than its subject matter warranted, and its invention was, at best, spotty. But Mr. Stillman was clearly his own man, possessed of a somewhat uneven but amiably idiosyncratic sense of humor.